The History of Rome (New York D. Appleton and Co., 1868) by Thomas Arnold
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Title:The history of Rome. By Thomas Arnold. Three volumes in one.

Author:Arnold, Thomas, 1795-1842.

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Print Source:The history of Rome. By Thomas Arnold. Three volumes in one.

Arnold, Thomas, 1795-1842.

Reprinted entire, from the last London ed.: 1 p. L., [v]-xvi, 670
p. 24 cm.

New York,

D. Appleton & compamy,

1868.

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HISTORY OF ROME. BY THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D., LiTE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN

HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFOIRD HEAD MASTER OF RUGBY SCHOOL, AND

MEMBER OF THE ARCHTEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF ROME. THREE VOLUMES IN ONE.

REPRINTED ENTIRE, FROM THE LAST LONDON EDITION. NEW-YORK: D. APPLETON &

COMPANY, 443 & 445 BROADWAY. 1868.

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PREFACE. IT attempting to write the History of Rome, I am not afraid of incur. ring the censure pronounced by Johnson upon Blackwell,* that he had chosen a subject long since exhausted; of which all men knew already as much as any one could tell them. Much more do I dread the reproach of having ventured, with most insufficient means, upon a work of the greatest difficulty; and thus by possibility deterring others from accomplishing a task which has never yet been fulfilled, and which they might fulfil more worthily. The great advances made within the last thirty years in historical knowledge have this most hopeful symptom, that they have taught us to appreciate the amount of our actual ignorance. As we have better understood what history ought to be, we are become ashamed of that scanty information which might once have passed for learning; and our discovery of the questions which need to be solved has so outrun our powers of solving them, that we stand humiliated rather than encouraged, and almost inclined to envy the condition of our fathers, whose maps, so to speak, appeared to them complete and satisfactory, because they never suspected the existence of a world beyond their range. Still, although the time will, I trust, arrive, when points now altogether obscure will receive their full illustration, and when this work must be superseded by a more perfect history, yet it may be possible in the mean while to render some service, if I shall be able to do any justice to my subject up to the extent of our present knowledge. And we, who are now in the vigor of life, possess at least one advantage which our children may not share equally.

We have lived in a period rich in historical lessons beyond all former example; we have witnessed one of the great seasons of movement in the life of mankind, in which the arts of peace and war, political parties and principles, philosophy and religion, in all their manifold forms and influences, have been developed with extraordinary force and freedom. Our own experience has thus thrown a bright light upon the remoter past: much which our fathers could not fully understand, from being accustomed only to * In hs review of Blackwell’s Memoirs of the Court of Augustus. orks, Vol. II. Svo. 1806.

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vi PREFACE. quieter times, and which again, from the same cause, may become obscure to our children, is to us perfectly familiar. This is an advantage common to all the present generation in every part of Europe; but it is not claiming too much to say, that the growth of the Roman commonwealth, the true character of its parties, the causes and tendency of its revolutions, and the spirit of its people and its laws, ought to be understood by none so well as by those who have grown up under the laws, who have been engaged in the parties, who are themselves citizens of our kingly commonwealth of England. Long before Niebuhr’s death I had formed the design of writing the History of Rome; not, it may well be believed, with’ the foolish notion of rivalling so great a man, but because it appeared to me that his work was not likely to become generally popular in England, and that its discoveries and remarkable wisdom might best be made known to English readers by putting them into a form more adapted to our common taste. It’should be remembered, that only the two first volumes of Kiebuhr’s History were published in his lifetime; and although careful readers might have anticipated his powers of narration even from these, yet they were actually, by the necessity of the case, more full of dissertations than of narrative; and for that reason it seemed desirable to remould them for the English -public, by assuming as proved many of those results which Niebuhr himself had been obliged to demonstrate step by step. But when Niebuhr died, and there was now no hope of seeing his great work completed in a manner worthy of its beginning, I was more desirous than ever of executing my original plan, of presenting in a more popular form what he had lived to finish, and of continuing it afterwards with such advantages as I had derived from a long study and an intense admiration of his example and model. It is my hope, then, if God spares my life* and health, to carry on this history to the revival of the western empire, in the year 800 of the Christian era, by the coronation of Charlemagne at Rome. This point appears to me its natural termination. We shall then have passed through the chaos which followed the destruction of the old western empire, and shall have seen its several elements, combined with others which in that great convulsion had been mixed with them, organized again into their new form. That new form exhibited a marked and recognized division between the so-called secular and spiritual powers, and thereby has maintained in Christian Europe the -unhappy distinction which necessarily prevailed in the heathen empire between the church and the state;- a distinction -now so deeply seated in our laws, our language, and our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of God’s providence seems capable, within any definite * Dr. Arnold died June 12th, 1842. He had completed the present volume, with the exception of adding a running commentary to the last part of it.

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PREFACE. Vii time, of eradicating it. The Greek empire, in its latter years, retained so little of the Roman character, and had so little influence upon what was truly the Roman world, that it seems needless, for the sake of a mere name, to protract the story for six hundred and fifty years fur ther, merely to bring it down to the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. For the whole of the period, from the origin down to the capture of Rome by the Gauls, in the middle of the fourth century before the Christian era, I have enjoyed Niebuhr’s guidance; I have everywhere availed myself of his materials as well as of his conclusions. No acknowledgment can be too ample for the benefits which I have derived from him: yet I have not followed him blindly, nor compiled my work from his.

It seemed to be a worthier tribute to his greatness, to endeavor to follow his example; to imitate, so far as I could, his manner of inquiry; to observe and pursue his hints; to try to practise his master-art of doubting rightly and believing rightly; and, as no man is infallible, to venture sometimes even to differ from his conclusions, if a compliance with his own principles of judgment seemed to require it. But I can truly say, that I never differ from him without a full consciousness of the probability that further inquiry might prove him to be right. The form and style in which I have given the legends and stories of the first three centuries of Rome may require some explanation. I wished to give these legends at once with the best effect, and at the same time with a perpetual mark, not to be mistaken by the most careless reader, that they were legends and not history. There seemed a reason, therefore, for adopting a more antiquated style, which, otherwise, of course would be justly liable to the charge of affectation. It might seem ludicrous to speak of impartiality in writing the history of remote times, did not those times really bear a nearer resemblance to our own than many imagine; or did not 1Mitford’s example sufficiently prove that the spirit of modern party may affect our view of ancient history. But many persons do not clearly see what should be the true impartiality of an historian. If there be no truths in moral and political science, little good can be derived from the study of either: if there be truths, it must be desirable that they should be discovered and embraced. Skepticism must ever be a misfortune or a defect: a misfortune, if there be no means of arriving at truth; a defect, if while there exist such means: we are unable or unwilling to use them. Believing that political science has its truths no less than moral, I cannot regard them with indifference, I cannot but wish them to be seen and embraced by others. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that these truths have been much disputed; that they have not, like moral truths, received

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Vill PREFACE that universal assent of good men which makes us shrink from submitting them to question. And, again, in human affairs, the contest has never been between pure truth and pure error. Neither, then, may we assume political conclusions as absolutely certain; nor are political truths ever wholly identical with the professions or practice of any party or individual. If, for the sake of recommending any principle, we disguise the errors or the crimes with which it has been in practice accompanied, and which, in the weakness of human nature, may perhaps be naturally connected with our reception of it, then we are guilty of most blamable partiality. And so it is no less, if, for the sake of decrying an erroneous principle, we depreciate the wisdom, and the good and noble feelings with which error also is frequently, and in some instances naturally, joined. This were to make our sense of political truth to overpower our sense of moral truth; a double error, inasmuch as it is at once the less certain, and, to those who enjoy a Christian’s hope, by far the less worthy. While, then, I cannot think that political science contains no truths, or that it is a matter of indifference whether they are believed or no, I have endeavored also to remember, that be they ever so certain, there are other truths no less sure; and that one truth must never be sacrificed to another. I have tried to be strictly impartial in my judgments of men and parties, without being indifferent to those principles which were involved more or less purely in their defeat or triumph. I have desired neither to be so possessed with the mixed character of all things human, as to doubt the existence of abstract truth; nor so to dote on any abstract truth, as to think that its presence in the human mind is incompatible with any evil, its absence incompatible with any good. In the first part of my History, I have followed the common chro nology without scruple; not as true, but as the most convenient.

Where the facts themselves are so uncertain, it must be a vain labor to try to fix their dates minutely. But when we arrive at a period of greater certainty as to the facts, then it will be proper to examine, as far as possible, into the chronology. Those readers who are acquainted with Niebuhr, or with the history written by Mr. Maldon, for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, may be surprised to find so little said upon the antiquities;of the different nations of Italy. The omission, however, was made deliberately: partly, because the subject does not appear to me to belong essentially to the early history of Rome, and still more, because the researches now carried on with so much spirit in Italy, hold out the hope that we may obtain, ere long, some more satisfactory knowledge than is at present attainable. Pelasgian inscriptions, written in a character clearly distinguishable from the Etruscan, have been discovered very recently, as I am informed, at Agylla or Csere. And the

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PREFACE. i study and comparison of the several Indo-Germanic languages is making such progress, that if any fortunate discovery comes in to aid it, we may hope to see the mystery of the Etruscan inscriptions at length unravelled. I was not sorry, therefore, to defer any detailed inquiry into the antiquities of the Italian nations, in the expectation that I might be able hereafter to enter upon the subject to greater advantage. Amongst the manifold accomplishments of Niebuhr’s mind, not the least extraordinary was his philological knowledge. His acquaintance with the manuscripts of the Greek and Roman writers was extensive and profound; his acuteness in detecting a corrupt reading, and his sagacity in correcting it, were worthy of the critical ability of Bentley. On no point have I been more humbled with a sense of my own inferiority, as feeling that my own professional pursuits ought, in this respect, to have placed me more nearly on a level with him. But it is far otherwise. I have had but little acquaintance with manuscripts, nor have I the means of consulting them extensively; and the common editions of the Latin writers in particular, do not intimate how much of their present text is grounded upon conjecture. I have seen references made to Festus, which, on examination, have been found to rest on no other authority than Scaliger’s conjectural piecing of the fragments of the original text. But, besides this, we often need a knowledge of the general character of a manuscript or manuscripts, in order to judge whether any remarkable variations in names or dates are really to be ascribed to the author’s having followed a different version of the story, or whether they are mere blunders of the copyist. For instance, the names of the consuls, as given at the beginning of each year in the present text of Diodorus, are in many instances so corrupt;.that one is tempted to doubt how far some apparent differences in his Fasti from those followed by Livy, are really his own or his copyist’s. There are some works which I have not been able to consult; and. there are points connected with the topography of Rome and its neighborhood, on which no existing work gives a satisfactory explanation. On these points I have been accustomed to consult my valued friend Bunsen, Niebuhr’s successor in his official situation as Prussian minister at Rome, and his worthy successor no less in the profoundness of his antiquarian, and philological, and historical knowledge. There has lately appeared in the second volume of Niebuhr’s life and letters, a letter written by him to a young student, containing various directions and suggestions with respect to his philological studies. Amongst other things, he says, ” I utterly disapprove of the common practice of adopting references, after verifying them, without naming the source whence they are taken; and, tedious as the double reference is, I never allow myself to dispense with it. When I cite a passage simply, I have found it out myself. He who does otherwise,

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x PREFACE. assumes the appearance of more extensive reading than belongs te him.” The perfect uprightness of Niebuhr’s practice in this point is well worthy of him, and is deserving of all imitation. But I should find it difficult in all cases to say whether I had first noticed a passage myself, or had been led to it -by a quotation in another writer. I have availed myself continually of Niebuhr’s references, and of those made by Freinsheim in his supplement of Livy; but it has happened, also, that passages referred to by them had been taken by myself directly from the original source, without recollecting, or, indeed, without knowing, that they had been quoted previously by others. Niebuhr’s reading was so vast, and his memory so retentive, that he may be presumed never to have overlooked any thing which could illustrate his subject: it is probable, therefore, that every quotation made in this volume may be found previously made by Niebuhr, unless it happen to relate to a matter which he has not written on. But yet, some quotations were made by me with so little consciousness of their existing in Niebuhr, that in one instance I searched his volume to see whether he had noticed a passage, because I did not remember to have observed any quotation of it by him, and yet I felt sure, as proved to be the case, that he had not overlooked it. I have only, therefore, to state that many passages have been quoted by me from Pliny, Valerius Maximus, Frontinus, and other writers, for the knowledge, or at least for the recollection of which, I was indebted either to Niebuhr or to Freinsheim, or to some other modern writer. And yet I can truly say, that not a single paragraph has been written on a meres’verifying of the references made by preceding writers, but that my own reading and comparison of the ancient authorities has been always the foundation of it. This is not said as laying claim to any remarkable degree of diligence or of learning, but simply to establish my right to call this history an original work, and not a mere compilation from INiebuhr or from others who have gone over the ground previously. But I shall be believed by all who are acquainted with Niebuhr’s third volume, when I say that the composition of this period in mine has been throughout a most irksome labor; inasmuch as I was but doing, with manifest inferiority in every point, what NWiebuhr had done in all points admirably. In the first part, although all the substance of it and much more, was to be found in Niebuhr, yet in its form I might hope to have some advantage, as putting his matter into a more popular shape. But his third volume is no less eloquent than wise; and is as superior in the power of its narrative as in the profoundness of its researches. And yet, this portion of the history was to be written as a necessary part of my own work. I was obliged, therefore, to go

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PREFACE. xi through with it as well as I could, feeling most keenly all the while the infinite difference-between Niebuhr’s history and mine. It may be thought by some that this volume is written at too great length.

But I am convinced, by a tolerably large experience, that most readers find it almost impossible to impress on their memory a mere abridgment of history: the number of names and events crowded into a small space is overwhelming to them, and the absence of details in the narrative makes it impossible to communicate to it much of interest; neither characters nor events can be developed with that particularity which is the best help to the memory, because it attracts and engages us, and impresses images on the mind as well as facts. At the same time I am well aware of the great difficulty of giving liveliness to a narrative which necessarily gets all its facts at second-hand. AM d a writer who has never been engaged in any public transactions, either of peace or war, must feel this especially.

One who is himself a statesman and orator, may relate the political contests even of remote ages with something of the spirit of a contemporary; for his own experience realizes to him, in great measure, the scenes and the characters which he is describing. And, in like manner, a soldier or a seaman can enter fully into the great deeds of ancient warfare; for, although in outward form ancient battles and sieges may differ from those of modern times, yet the genius of the general and the courage of the soldier, the call for so many of the highest qualities of our nature which 6onstitutes the enduring moral interest of war, are common alike to all times, and he who has fought under Wellington has been in spirit an eye-witness of the campaigns of Hannibal. But a writer whose whole experience has been confined to private life and to peace, has no link to connect him with the actors and great deeds of ancient history, except the feelings of our common humanity. He cannot realize civil contests or battles with the vividness of a statesman and a soldier; he can but enter into them as a man; and his general knowledge of human nature, his love of great and good actions, his sympathy with virtue, his abhorrence of vice, can alone assist him in making himself, as it were, a witness of what he attempts to describe. But these even by themselves will do much; and if an historian feels as a man and as a citizen, there is hope that, however humble his experience, he may inspire his readers with something of his own interest in the events of his history: he may hope, at least, that a full detail of these events, however feebly represented, will be worth far more than a mere brief summary of them, made the text for a long comment of his own. RTGIBY, May 28th, 1840.

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CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Early Legends of

Rome………………………………….. 1 CHAPTER II. The early History of Rome……………………………………………….. 8

CHAPTER III. Of the city of Rome, its territory, and its scenery……………………………… 12 CHAPTER IV. Stories of the later Kings………………………………………………… 15

CHAPTER V. The History of the later Kings of Rome, and of the greatness of the Monarchy…… 19 CHAPTER VI. Miscellaneous notices of the state of the Romans under their Kings…………………. CHAPTER VII. The Story of the Banishing of King Tarquinius and his House, and of their attempts to get themselves brought back
again…………………3……………………… 89 CHAPTER VIII.

Rome after the end of the Monarchy-the Dictatorship-the Tribunes of the Commons… 47 CHAPTER IX. Spurius Cassius-the League with the Latins and Hernicans-the Agrarian Law-A.U.c.

261-269………………………………………………… 57

CHAPTER X. Ascendency of the Aristocracy-the Fabii and their Seven Consulships-the Publilian Law-&.Uac.

269-283…………………………………………… 62 CHAPTER XI.

~Wars with the Equians and Volscians-Legends connected with these Wars-Stories of Coriolanus, and of Cincinnatus……………………. 68

CHAPTER XII. Wars with the Etruscans-Veii-Legend of the slaughter of the Fabii at the river

Cremera………………………………………………………….

79 CHAPTER XIII. Internal History-the Terentilian Law-Appointment of the ten High Commissioners to frame a Code of written Laws. A..c.

284-303………………………… 8S

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zriv CONTENTS. CHAPTER XIV. The first Decemvirs, and the Laws of the Twelve Tables………………………….. 96 CHAPTER XV. The second Decemvirate-Story of Virginia-Revolution of 305…………………….

114 CHAPTER XVI. Internal History-Constitution of the Year 306-Valerian Laws, and Trials of the Decemvirs-Reaction in favor of the Patricians -

Canuleian Law-Constitution of

812Counter-Revolution……………………………. 121 CHAPTER XVII.

Internal History from 312 to 350-the Censorship, and the limitation of it by Mamercus AEmilius-Sp. Moelius and C. Ahala-the Qunestorship laid open to tbe Commons-Six Tribunes of the Soldiers appointed, and pay issued to the Soldiers………………… 132 CHAPTER XVIII. Wars of the Romans from 300 to 363 the AEquians and Volscians-the Etruscans Siege and Capture of

Veii……………………………………………………. 143

CHAPTER XIX. Internal History from 350 to 36 -Plebeian Military Tribunes-Banishment of Camillus… 156 CHAPTER XX. State of foreign Nations at the period of the Gaulish invasion-Italy, Sardinia, Corsica…

161 CHAPTER XXI. Dionysius the Elder, Tyrant of Syracuse……………………………………… 168 CHAPTER XXII.

Carthage-Barbarians of Western Europe-East of Europe-Greece-Macedonia Illyria.. 182 CHAPTER XXIII. Miscellaneous-Physical History……………………………………………. 190 CHAPTER

XXIV. The Gauls invade Central Italy-Battle of the Alia-Burning of Rome-Ransom of the Capitol and of the City Retreat of the Gauls……………………………. 197 CHAPTER XXV. History, foreign and domestic, from the year 365 to 378 Rome after the retreat of the Gauls-its weaknass, and the great misery of the Commons-Popularity and death of M. Manlius-Wars with the neighboring Nations………………….. l…. 210 CHAPTER XXVI. Tihe Licinian Laws.-378-384……………………………………………… 222

CHAPTER XXVII. General History, domestic and foreign, from the admission of the Commons to the Consulship to the beginning of the first Samnite War-Evasion of the Licinian Laws-Wars with the Gauls, Tarquiniensians, and Volscians.:-A.u.c. 389-412, Livy: 38840T, Niebuhr…………………………………………… 284 CHAPTER

XXVIII. The first Samnite War-Sedition of the year 408-Genucian- Laws.

A..a. 407-409, Niebuhr: 410-412, Fasti Capit.: 412,414, Livy………………………… 247

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CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER XXIX. PAG The great Latin War-Battle under Mount Vesuvius-The Publilian Laws-Final settlement of Latium. a.ur.. 415-417: 410-412, Niebuhr………………………… 260 CHAPTER XXX. General History to the beginning of the second Samnite War-Privernum-Palopolis.A.U.c. 418-428: 413-423, Niebuhr……………………………………. 275 CHAPTER XXXI.

Second Samnite War L. Papirius Cursor-Affair of the Forks or Pass of Caudium-Battle of Lautulne-Q. Fabius, and the war with Etruria.-A.u.c.

428-450: 423-444,

Niebuhr……………,284…………………………….. CHAPTER

XXXII. Internal History from 428 to 454-Abolition of Personal Slavery for Debt-Dictatorship of C. Mwenius-Censorship of Appius Claudius Censorship of Q. Fabius and P. Decius -the Ogulnian

Law…………………………………………………….. 812

CHAPTER XXXIII. Foreign History from 460 to 464 (443 to 456, Niebuhr)-Conquest of the Equians Third Samnite War-Coalition of the Etruscans, Samnites, and Gauls Great battle of Sentinum, and death of P.

Decius-Final victory of Q. Fabius over the Samnites-C. Pontius is led in triumph, and put to death in cold blood……………………… 328

CHAPTER XXXIV. Internal History from the passing of the Ogulnian Law to the landing of Pyrrhus in Italy -Secession to the Janiculum Dictatorship of Q. Hortensius-Hortensian and Mlnian Laws-From A.u.c. 454 to 474………………………………………… 350 CHAPTER XXXV.

State of the East-Kingdoms of Alexander’s Successors-Sicily-Greece-Kingdom of Epirus, and early fortunes of

Pyrrhus…………………………………….. 362 CHAPTER XXXVI.

Rome and the Roman People at the beginning of the War with the Tarentines and with

Pyrrhus……………………………………………………………….

880 CHAPTER XXXVII. Foreign History from 464 to 479-Wars with the Etruscans, Gauls, and TarentinesFourth Samnite war-Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, in Italy Battles of Heraclea, -Asculum, and Beneventum…………………………………………………………

887 CHAPTER XXXVIII. General History from the departure of Pyrrhus from Italy to the beginning of the first Punic War-Final submission of Samnium Conquest of Tarentum-Picentian and Volsinian Wars-Rome acquires the sovereignty of all Italy-Detached events and anecdotes relating to this Period-479 to 489, A.u.c. 275 to 265, A.C……………… 408 CHAPTER

XXXIX. Constitution and power of

Carthage………………………………………4…. 18 CHAPTER XL.

First Punic War-the Romans invade Sicily-Submission of Hiero-the Romans create a Navy-Naval victories of Mylke and Ecnomus-Expedition of M.

Regulus to Africa; his successes, his arrogance in victpry, his defeat and captivity-War in Sicily-Siege of Lilyb eum and naval actions connected with it-Hamilcar ]Barca at Eircte and Eryx -Naval battle of the Egates Peace concluded.-A.u.c. 490 to 513 a.c. 264 to 241…. 424

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CONTENTS, CHAPTER XLI. PAGI State of Italy after the Roman concquest-Political relations of the inhabitants, and different tenures of land-Latin Colonies……4……..4…………………… 448 CHAPTER

XLII. General History from the first to the second Punic War-Illyrian War-Great Gaulish invasion-Muster of the forces of all Italy-Defeat of the Gauls-Roman invasions of Cisalpine Gaul-M. Marcellus and C.

Flaminius.-A.u.c. 513 to 535-A.c. 241 to 219…. 456 CHAPTER XLIII. Second Punic War-Hannibal-March of Hannibal from Spain to Italy-Passage of the Alps-Battles of the Trebia, and of Thrasymenus-Q. Fabius Maximus Dictator-Battle of Cannme-A.u.c. 535 to

538……………………………..4……. 470 CHAPTER XLIV. Progress of the war in Italy after the battle of Cannse-Revolt of Capua, and of the people of Southern Italy, to Hannibal-Great exertions of the Romans-Surprise of Tarentum -Siege of Capua-Hannibal marches on Rome-Reduction and punishment of Capua -A.U.C. 538 to 543…….50……………………………………………. 500

CHAPTER XLV. Progress of the war in Spain, Sicily, and Greece-Operations of the Scipios in SpainTheir defeat and death Macedon and Greece-Revolutions of Syracuse-Marcellus in Sicily-Siege of Syracuse-Archimedes-Sack of Syracuse, and reduction of SicilyMutines, the Numidian, in Sicily-A.u.c. 538 to 543………………………….. 512

CHAPTER XLVI. State of Italy-Distress of the people Twelve colonies refuse to support the warEighteen colonies offer all their resources to the Romans-Events of the war-Death of Marcellus-Fabius recovers Tarentum-March of Hasdrubal into Italy-He reaches the coast of the Adriatic-Great March of C. Nero from Apulia to oppose him-Battle of the Metaurus, and death of Hasdrubal-A.u.c. 543 to A.u.c.

547………………. 564 CHAPTER XLVII. P. Cornelius Scipio-His operations in Spain-Siege and capture of New Carthage-Battle of B’ecula-the Carthaginians evacuate the Spanish peninsula-Scipio returns to Rome, and is elected Consul .u.c. 543 to Av.U..

548………………………………86

SUPPLEMENT……………………………………………………………….

608 TABLE of CONSULS and MILITARY TRIBUNES from the beginning of the Commonwealth to the taking of Rome by the Gauls………………………………………….. 618

ADDNDA………………………………………………………………….

649

APPENDIz……………………………………………..6…………………

665

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HISTORY OF ROME. CHAPTER I, EARLY LEGENDS OF ROME. ” The old songs of every people, which bear the impress of their character wnd of which the beauties, whether few or many, must be genuine, because they arise only from feeling, have always been valued by men of masculine and comprehensive taste.” Sm J. MACKINTOSH, Hist. of England, vol. I. p. 86.

THE LEGEND OF JENEAS. WHEN the fatal horse was going to be brought within the walls of Troy,’ and when Laocoon had been devoured by the two serpents sent by the How nens went over *sea from Troy to the gods to punish him because he had tried to save his country land of the Latins. against the will of Fate, then /.Eneas and his father Anchises, with their wives,2 and many who followed their fortune, fled from the coming of the evil day. But they remembered to carry their gods with them,3 who were to receive their worship in a happier land. They were guided in their flight from the city4
by the god Hermes, and he built for them a ship to carry them over the sea. When they put to sea, the star of Venus,5 the moth’r of AEneas, stood over their heads, and it shone by day as well as by night, till they came to the shores of the land of the west. But when they landed, the star vanished and was seen no more; and by this sign, AEneas knew that he was come to that country, wherein fate had appointed him to dwell. The Trojans, when they had brought their gods on shore, began to sacrifice.G

But the victim, a milk-white sow just ready to farrow, broke from of the sigm which he the priest and his ministers, and fled away. AEneas followed her; “,..e.o e higld ild for an oracle had told him, that a four-footed beast should guide city. him to the spot where he was to build his city.

So the sow went forwards tilt she came to a certain hill, about two miles and a half from the shore where they had purposed to sacrifice, and there she laid down and farrowed, and her litter was of thirty young ones. But when I/Eneas saw that the place was sandy and barren,’ he doubted what he should do. Just at this time he heard a voice Arctinus,‘Ito, 7reptg quoted by Proclus, 4 Tabula Iliensis and Noevius, quoted by SerChrestomathia, p.

483. See Fynes Clinton, vius,.En. I. 170. Edit. Lion. 1826. Fasti Hellen.

Vol. I. p. 856. 5 Varro de Rebus divinis, II. quoted by Ser2 Naevius, Fragm. Bell. Pun. I. 15-20. vius, ZEn. 1. 381. s See the Tabnla Iliensis, taken from Stesi-8 Dionysius, I. 56. chorus. [Annali dell’ Instituto di Corrispond. 7 Q. Fabius, apud Servium, Virg. AEn. I Archeolog. 1829, p.

232.] v. 3. 1

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2 HISTORY OF ROME. LCHAP. 2 which said,-” The thirty young of the sow are thirty years; when thirty years are passed, thy children shall remove to a better land; meantime do thou obey the gods, and build thy city in the place where they bid thee to build.” So the Trojans built their city on the spot where the sow had farrowed. Now the land belonged to a people who were the children of the soil,8 and their Of his ars with the king was called Latinus. He received the strangers kindly, and people ofthe country. granted to them seven hundred jugera of land,9 seven jugera to each man, for that was a man’s portion. But soon the children of the soil and the strangers quarrelled; and the strangers plundered the lands round about them;10 and king Latinus called upon Turnus, the king of the Rutulians of Ardea, to help him against them. The quarrel became a war; and the strangers took the city of king Latinus, and Latinus was killed; and AtEneas took his daughter Lavinia and married her, and became king over the children of the soil; and they and the strangers became one pecple, and they were called by one name, Latins. But Turnus called to his aid Mezentius, king of the Etruscans of Coere.11 There How he disap.eared in was then another battle on the banks of the river Numicius, and waesworlsNhiNpped ausand Turnus was killed, and LEneas plunged into the river and was god. seen no more. However, his son Ascanius declared that he was not dead, but that the gods had taken him to be one of themselves;2
and his people built an altar to him on the banks of the Numicius, and worshipped him by the name of Jupiter Indiges, which means, “the God who was of that very land.“s3 THE LEGEND OF ASCANIUS. The war went on between Mezentius and Ascanius, the son of ~Eneas; and How Ascanius slew Mezentius pressed hard upon the Latins, till at last Ascanius met sthe zeituofd built him man to man, and slew him‘4 in single fight. At that time c bo Ascanius was very young, and there were only the first soft hairs of youth upon his cheeks; so he was called Iulus, or ” the soft-haired,” because, when he was only a youth, he had vanquished and slain his enemy, who was a grown man. At length the thirty years came to an end, which were foreshown by the litter of thirty young ones of the white sow. Ascanius then removed with his people to a high mountain, which looks over all the land on every side, and one side of it runs steep down into a lake: there he hewed out a place for his city on the side of the mountain, above the lake; and as the city was long and narrow, owing to the steepness of the hill, he called it Alba Longa, which is, the ” White Long City;” and he called it white, because of the sign of the white sow.‘5 THE LEGEND OF ROMULUS. Numitor‘6
was the eldest son of Procas, king of Alba Longa, and he had a How Romulus and younger brother called Amulius. When Procas died, Amulius Remus were born, and I d m suckled by a she wolf seized by force on the kingdom, and left to Numitor only his share pecker. of his father’s private inheritance. After this he caused Numitor’s only son to be slain, and made his daughter Silvia become one of the virgins who watched the ever-burning fire of the goddess Vesta. But the god Mamers, who is called also Mars, beheld the virgin and loved her, and it was found that she was going to become the mother of children. Then Amulius ordered that the children, when born, should be thrown into the river. It hap8 ” Aborigines. “-Cato, Origines, apud Ser-11 Cato, apud Servium, Ln. I. 267. vium, ZEn. I. v. 6.

12 Servius, Rn. IV. 620. En. XII. 794. i Cato, apud Servium, Len. XI. v.

316.-But 13 Livy, I. 2. it should be observed that the MSS. of Servius‘4

Cato, apud Servium, En. I. 267. give the number of jugera variously. 15

Servius, En. I. v. 270. 10 Cato, apud Servium, En. I. 267, et Ln. IV. 16

Livy, I. 3. Dionysius, I. 76, et seqq. Pli620 tarch, in Romulo

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CHAP. I.] EARLY LEGENDS. 3 pened that the river at that time had flooded the country; when, therefore, the two children in their basket were thrown into the river, the waters carried them as far as the foot of the Palatine Hill, and there the basket was upset, near the roots of a wild figtree, and the children thrown out upon the land. At this moment there came a she-wolf down to the water to drink, and when she saw the children, she carried them to her cave hard by, and gave them to suck; and whilst they were there, a woodpecker came backwards and forwards to the cave, and brought them food.‘7 At last one Faustulus, the king’s herdsman, saw the wolf suckling the children; and when he went up, the wolf left them and fled;18 so he took them home to his wife Larentia, and they were bred up along with her own sons on the Palatine Hill; and they were called Romulus and Remus.‘9 When Romulus and Remus grew up, the herdsmen of the Palatine Hill chanced to have a quarrel with the herdsmen of Numitor, who stalled their ow it was found out cattle on the hill Aventinus. Numitor’s herdsmen laid an ambush, who they were. and Remus fell into it, and was taken and carried off to Alba. But when the young man was brought before Numitor, he was struck with his noble air and bearing, and asked him who he was. And when Remus told him of his birth, and how he had been saved from death, together with his brother, Nlumitor marvelled, and thought whether this might not be his own daughter’s child. In the mean while, Faustulus and Romulus hastened to Alba to deliver Remus; and by the help of the young men of the Palatine Hill, who had been used to follow him and his brother, Romulus took the city, and Amulius was killed; and Numitor was made king, and owned Romulus and Remus to be born of his own blood. The two brothers did not wish to live at Alba, but loved rather the hill on the banks of the Tiber, where they had been brought up. So they said, H-ow they dispueted that they would build a city there; and they inquired of the gods name to the itt an of the sign of the vulby augury, to know which of them should give his name to the turee. city. They watched the heavens from morning till evening, and from evening till morning;20 and as the sun was rising, Remus saw six vultures.2’ This was told to Romulus; but as they were telling him, behold there appeared to him twelve vultures. Then it was disputed again, which had seen the truest sign of the god’s favor: but the most part gave their voices for Romulus. So he began to build his city on the Palatine Hill. This made Remus very angry; and when he saw the ditch and the rampart which were drawn round the space where the city was to be, he scornfully leapt over them,12 saying, ” Shall such defences as these keep your city?” As he did this, Celer, who had the charge of the building, struck Remus with the-spade which he held in his hand, and slew him; and they buried him on the hill Remuria, by the banks of the Tiber, on the spot where he had wished to build his city. But Romulus found that his people were too few in numbers; so he set apart a place of refuge,23
to which any man might flee, and be safe from How Romulus opened a place of refuge, and his pursuers. So many fled thither from the countries round how hie peopie carried off the women of the about; those who had shed blood, and fled from the vengeance neighboring people. of the avenger of blood; those who were driven out from their own homes by their enemies, and even men of low degree who had run away from their lords. Thus the city became full of people; but yet they wanted wives, and the nations round about would not give them their daughters in marriage. So Romulus gave out that he was going to keep a great festival, and there were to be sports and games to draw a multitude together.24 The neighbors came to see the show, with their wives and their daughters: there came the people of -7 Ovid, Fasti, III. 54. Servius,,En. I. v. 273. 2Livy, I. 7. ” Ennius, Annal. I. 78. 22 Ovid, Fasti, IV. 842. ”’ Gellius Noct. Attic. VI. c. 7, quoted from 23 The famous Asylum. See Livy, I. 8. [essurius Sabinus. 4

Livy, I. 9. 2 “Eannius, Annal. I. v. 106, 107.

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4 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. J Ceenina, and of Crustumerium, and of Antemna, and a great multitude of the Sabines. But while they were looking at the games, the people of Romulus rushed out upon them, and carried off the women to be their wives. Upon this the people of Caenina first made war upon the people of Romu. How forthiscause the lus:25 but they were beaten, and Romulus with his own hand them, and of the treason slew their king Acron. Next the people of Crustumerium, and of the fair Tarpeis. of Antemna, tried their fortune, but Romulus conquered both of them. Last of all came the Sabines with a great army, under Titus Tatius, their king.

There is a hill near to the Tiber, which was divided from the Palatine Hill by a low and swampy valley; and on this hill Romulus made a fortress, to keep off the enemy from his city. But when the fair Tarpeia, the daughter of the chief who had charge of the fortress, saw the Sabines draw near, and marked their bracelets and their collars of gold, she longed after these ornaments, and promised to betray the hill into their hands if they would give her those bright things which they wore upon their arms.?”

So she opened a gate, and let in the Sabines; and they, as they came in, threw upon her their bright shields which they bore on their arms, and crushed her to death. Thus the Sabines got the How, the god Janus fortress which was on the hill Saturnius; and they and the Rosaved the city from the sabi.ne.. ro ans joined battle in the valley between the hill and the city of Romulus.27 The Sabines began to get the better, and came up close to one of the gates of the city. The people of Romulus shut the gate, but it opened of its own accord; once and again they shut it, and once and again it opened. But as the Sabines were rushing in, behold, there burst forth from the Temple of Janus, which was near the gate, a mighty stream of water, and it swept away the Sabines, and saved the city. For this it was ordered that the Temple of Janus should stand ever open in time of war, that the god might be ever ready, as on this day, to go out and give his aid to the people of Romulus. After this they fought again in the valley; and the people of Romulus were How the women who beginninr to flee, when Romulus prayed to Jove, the stayer of had been carried off C to made pece bet.ween flight, that he might stay the people;” and so their flight was their fathers and their s husbands; ond how the stayed, and they turned again to the battle. And now the fight Romlans and the Sabines lived togethoer. was fiercer than ever: when, on a sudden, the Sabine women who had been carried off ran down from the hill Palatinus, and ran in between their husbands and their fathers, and prayed them to lay aside their quarrel.t9 So they made peace with one another, and the two people became as one: the Sabines with their king dwelt on the hill Saturnius, which is also called Capitolium, and on the hill Quirinalis; and the people of* Romulus with their king dwelt on the hill Palatinus.

But the kings with their counsellors met in the valley between Saturnius and Palatinus, to consult about their common matters; and the place where they met was called Comitium, which means ” the place of meeting.” Soon after this, Tatius was slain by the people of Laurentum, because some of his kinsmen had wronged them, and he would not do them justices. So Romulus reigned by himself over both nations; and his own people were called the Romans, for Roma was the name of the city on the hill Palatinus; and the Sabines were called Quirites, for the name of their city on the hills Saturnius and Quirinalis was Quirium.3r 25 Livy, I. 10.

Annal. XII. 24. Yet Macrobius relates th6 26 Livy, I. 11. wonder as having happened at one of the gates n2 Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1. 9. Macrobius of the Roman city, when the Romans were at places the scene of this wonder at a gate war with Tatins; and it seemed needless to “which stood at the foot of the hill Vimina-destroy the consistency of the whole-story by lis.”

It would be difficult to reconcile this the unseasonable introduction of a topographl. story with the other accounts of the limits of cal difficulty.

the two cities of Romulus and Tatius: and cer-25 Livy, I. 12. tainly a gate at the foot of the Viminal could 29 Livy, I. 13. not have existed in the walls of the city of so Livy, I. 14. Romulus, according to the historical account of 31 Perhaps I hardly ought to have embodied their direction and extent, as given by Tacitus, Niebuhr’s conjecture in the legend, for certain

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CHAP. I.] EARLY LEGENDS. 5 The people were divided into three tribes;32
the Ramnenses, and the Titienses, and the Luceres: the Ramnenses were called from Romulus,,,owRomulus ordered and the Titienses from Tatius; and the Luceres were called froml his people. Lucumo, an Etruscan chief, who had come to help Romulus in his war with the Sabines, and dwelt on the hill called Cuelius. In each tribe there were ten curiae, each of one hundred men;3 so all the men of the three tribes were three thousand, and these fought on foot, and were called a legion. There were also three hundred horsemen, and these were called Celerians, because their chief was that Celer who had slain Remus. There was besides a council of two hundred men, which was called a senate, that is, a council of elders. Romulus was a just king, and gentle to his people: if any were guilty of crimes, he did not put them to death, but made them pay a fine How he vanished audof sheep or of oxen.34 In his wars he was very successful, and de anly tlefield orenriched his people with the spoils of their enemies. At last, af-shippedasagod. ter he had reigned nearly forty years, it chanced that one day he called his people together in the field of Mars, near the Goats’- Pool 35-when, all on a sudden, there arose a dreadful storm, and all was as dark as night; and the rain, and thunder and lightning, were so terrible, that all the people fled from the field, and ran to their several homes. At last the storm was over, and they came back to the field of Mars, but Romulus was nowhere to be found; for Mars, his father,: had carried him up to heaven in his chariot.36 The people knew not at first what was become of him; but when it was night, as one Proculus Julius was coming from Alba to the city, Romulus appeared to him in more than mortal beauty, and grown to more than mortal stature, and said to him, ” Go, and tell.my people that they weep not for me any more; but bid them to be brave and warlike, and so shall they make my city the greatest in the earth.” Then the people knew that Romulus was become a god; so they built a temple to him, and offered sacrifice to him, and worshipped him evermore by the name of the god Quirinus. THE LEGEND OF NUMA POMPILIUS. When Romulus was taken from the earth, there was no one found to reign in his place.3 The Senators would choose no king, but they divided How for one,whole year the Romans had themselves into tens; and every ten was to have the power of o king. king for five days, one after the other. So a year passed away, and the people murmured, and said, that there must be a king chosen. Now the Romans and the Sabines each wished that the king should be one of them; but at last it was agreed that the king should be a Sabine, How Numa Pompilisa but that the Romans should choose him.38 So they chose Numa was choses king. Pompilius; for all men said that he was a just man, and wise, and holy. Some said that he had learnt his wisdom from Pythagoras, the falnous philosopher of the Greeks;39 but others would not believe that of his wise and pious he owed it to any foreign teacher.

Before he would consent; ordinanc asn;d of the to be king,:he consulted the gods by augury, to know whether it nymphEgeria. was their pleasure that he should reign.4~ And as he feared the gods at first, so did he even to the last. He appointed many to minister in sacred things,41 such as the Pontifices, who were to see that all things relating to the gods were duly observed by all; and the Augurs, who taught men the pleasure of the gods concerning things to come; and the Flamens, who ministered in the temples; lv no encient writer now extant speaks of the 3~ Livy, I. 16. town “Quirium.” Yet it seems so probable a B “Quirinus conjecture, and gives so much consistency to Martis equis Acheronta fugit.” the story, that I have ventured to adopt it. -orat. III. Carm. 8. a2 Livy, I. 13. Varro de Lin.

Lat. ~ 55. Ed. 31 Livy, I. 17. Mliiller. Servius, tEn. V. 560. 3s Dionysius, II. 58. “3 Pateraus, quoted by Lydus, de Magistra-99 Livy, I.

18. Dionysius, 1. 59. -tbus c. 9..‘4o Livy, I. 18. a Cicero de Repablica, II. 9. Al Livy, I. 19.

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6 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. I. and the virgins of Vesta, who tended the ever-burning fire; and the Salii, who honored the god of arms with solemn songs and dances through the city on certain days, and who kept the sacred shield which fell down from heaven. And in all that he did, he knew that he should please the gods; for he did every thing by the direction of the nymph Egeria, who honored him so much that she took him to be her husband, and taught him in her sacred grove, by the spring that welled out from the rock, all that he was to do towards the gods and towards men.42 By her counsel he snared the gods Picus and Faunus in the grove on the hill Aventinus, and made them tell him how he might learn from Jupiter the knowledge of his will, and might get him to declare it either by lightning or by the flight of birds.43 And when men doubted whether Egeria had really given him her counsel,. she gave him a sign by which he mtght prove it to them. He called many of the Romans to supper, and set before them a homely meal in earthen dishes;4 and then on a sudden he said, that now Egeria was come to visit him; and straightway the dishes and the cups became of gold or precious stones, and the couches were covered with rare and costly coverings, and the meats and drinks were abundant and most delicious. But though Numa took so much care for the service of the gods, yet he forbade all costly sacrifices;45 neither did he suffer blood to be shed on the altars, nor any images of the gods to be made.46 But he taught the people to offer in sacrifice nothing but the fruits of the earth, meal and cakes of flour, and roasted corn. For he loved husbandry, and he wished his people to live every man on his Of his goodnes.towards own inheritance in peace and in happiness. So the lands which h:rewrPer..eno warsm Romulus had won in war, he divided out amongst the people, and his reign. gave a certain portion to every man.47 He then ordered landmarks to be set on every portion;48 and Terminus, the god of landmarks, had them in his keeping, and he who moved a landmark was accursed. The craftsmen of the city,49 who had no land, were divided according to their callings; and there were made of them nine companies. So all was peaceful and prosperous throughout the reign of king Numa; the gates of the temple of Janus were never opened, for the Romans had no wars and no enemies; and Numa built a temple to Faith, and appointed a solemn worship for her;“0 that men might learn not to lie or to deceive, but to speak and act in honesty. And when he had lived to the age of fourscore years, he died at last by a gentle decay, and he was buried under the hill Janiculum, on the other side of the Tiber; and the books of his sacred laws and ordinances were buried near him in a separate tomb.51 THE LEGEND OF TULLUS HOSTILIUS. When Numa was dead, the Senators again for a while shared the kingly power How Tullu, Hotilius, amongst themselves. But they soon chose for their king Tullus nw. hoe..o.king. wa casebsking. Hostilius, whose father’s father had come from Medullia, a city of the Latins, to Rome, and had fought with Romulus against the Sabines.6? Tullus loved the poor, and he divided the lands which came to him, as kinga, amongst those who had no land. He also bade those who had no houses to settle themselves on the hill Caelius, and there he dwelt himself in the midst of them. Tullus was a warlike king, and he soon was called to prove his valor; for the Of his war with the countrymen of the Alban border and of the Roman border plunAlbat hwend of thoe.. d b bat between the Horatii dered one another.53 Now Alba was governed by Caius Cluilius, and the Culiatii. who was the dictator; and Cluilius sent to Rome to complain of 42 Livy, I. 19, 20. Ovid, Fasti, III.

276. 47 Cicero de Rep. II. 14. 43 Ovid, Fasti, III. 289, et seqq.

Plutarch, 48 Dionysius, II. 74. Plutarch, Numa, 16. Numa, 15. 49 Plutarch, Numa, 17. 4 Plutarch, Numa, 15. Dionysius, II. 60. 50 Livy, I. 21.’ *

Cicero de Repub. II. 14. 1i Plutalch, Numa, 22. 4’ Plutarch, Numa, 8.

Varro, apud Augus-52 Dionysius, III. 1. tin. Civit. Dei, IV. 31., “3

[Livy, I. 22, et seqq.

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CHAP. I.] EARLY LEGENDS. 7 the wrongs done to his people, and Tullus sent to Alba for the same purpose. So there was a war between the two nations, and Cluilius led his people against Rome, and lay encamped within five miles of the city, and there he died. Mettius Fufetius was then chosen dictator in his room; and as the Albans still lay in their camp, Tullus passed them by, and marched into the land of Alba. But when Mettius came after him, then, instead of giving battle, the two leaders agreed that a few in either army should fight in behalf of the rest, and that the event of this combat should decide the quarrel. So three twin brothers were chosen out of the Roman army, called the Horatii, and three twin brothers out of the Alban army, called the Curiatii. The combat took place in the sight of both armies; and after a time all the Curiatii were wounded, and two of the Horatii were slain. Then the last Horatius pretended to fly, and the Curiatii each, as they were able, followed after him. But when Horatius saw that they were a great way off from one another, he turned suddenly and slew the first of them; and the second in like manner, and then he easily overcame and slew the third. So the victory remained to the Romans. Then the Romans went home to Rome in triumph,54 and Horatius went at the head of the army, bearing his triple spoils. But as they were How Horatius slewhis drawing near to the Capenian gate, his sister came out to meet sist,t.d upof the. him. Now she had been betrothed in marriage to one of the forthedeed. Curiatii, and his cloak, which she had wrought with her own hands, was borne on the shoulders of her brother; and she knew it, and cried out, and wept for him whom she had loved. At the sight of her tears Horatius was so wroth that he drew his sword, and stabbed his sister to the heart; and he said, “So perish the Roman maiden who shall weep for her country’s enemy.” But men said that it was a dreadful deed, and they dragged him before the two judges who judged when blood had been shed. For thus said the law,’ The two men shall give judgment on the shedder of blood. If he shall appeal from their judgment, let the appeal be tried. If their judgment be confirmed, cover his head. Hang him with a halter on the accursed tree; Scourge him either within the sacred limit of the city or without.” So they gave judgment on Horatius, and were going to give him over to be put to death. But he appealed, and the appeal was tried before all the Romans, and they would not condemn him because he had conquered for them their enemies, and because his father spoke for him, and said, that he judged the maiden to have been lawfully slain. Yet as blood had been shed, which required to be atoned for, the Romans gave a certain sum of money to offer sacrifices to atone for the pollution of blood. These sacrifices were duly performed ever afterwards by the members of the house of the Horatii. The Albans were now become bound to obey the Romans;55 and Tullus called upon them to aid in a war against the people of Veii and Fiden. of the feaful punish But in the battle the Alban leader, Mettius Fufetius, stood aloof, tius, and of thte destre and gave no true aid to the Romans. So, when the Romans had tionof Alba. won the battle, Tullus called the Albans together as if he were going to make a speech to them; and they came to hear him, as was the custom, without their arms; and the Roman soldiers gathered round them, and they could neither fight nor escape. Then Tullus took Mettius and bound him between two chariots, and drove the chariots different ways, and tore him asunder. After this he sent his people to Alba, and they destroyed the city, and made all the Albans come and live at Rome; there they had the hill Ceelius for their dwelling-place, and became one people with the Romans. After this, Tullus made war upon the Sabines, and gained a victory over 14 Livy, I. 26.’

Livy, 1. 27, et seqq.

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S HISTORY OF ROME. L~Ar I How king Tullus, hav-them.5? But now, whether it were that Tullus had neglected the was8kinbedb lightning. worship of the gods whilst he had been so busy in his wars, the signs of the wrath: of heaven became manifest. A plague broke out among the eople, and Tullus himself was at last stricken with a lingering disease. Then e bethought him of good and holy Numa, and how, in his time, the gods had been so gracious to Rome, and had made known their will by signs whenever Numa inquired of them. So Tullus also tried to inquire of Jupiter, but the god was angry, and would not be inquired of, for Tullus did not consult him rightly; so he sent his lightnings, and Tullus and all his house were burnt to ashes. - This made the Romans know that they wanted a king who would follow the example of Numa; so they chose his daughter’s son, Ancus Marcius, to reign over them in the room of Tullus. THE STORY OF ANCUS

MARCIUS. Ancient story does not tell much of Ancus Marcius. He published the reliOf the good reign of gious ceremonies which Numa had commanded, and had them Aneus Maius. written out upon whited boards, and hung up round the forum, that all might know and observe them.“7 He had a war with the Latins and conquered them, and brought the people to Rome, and gave them the hill Aventinus to dwell on.5” He divided the lands of the conquered Latins amongst all the Romans;59 and he gave up the forests near the sea which he had taken from the Latins, to be the public property of the Romans. He founded the colony at Ostia, by the mouth of the Tiber.0 He built a fortress on the hill Janiculum, and joined the hill to the city by a wooden bridge over the river.6l He secured the city in the low grounds between the hills by a great dyke, which was called the dyke of the Quirites.6? And he built a prison under the hill Saturnius, towards the forum, because, as the people grew in numbers, offenders against the laws became more numerous also.63 At last king Ancus died, after a reign of three-and-twenty years.64 CHAPTER II, THE EARLY HISTORY OF ROME.‘EKc TGV

E~lPtl/EVI r7ECKIqptci rotaara av rtE voptvi(oy dXtara a &4XMov, oix apaprdvot” Kal o0rT 16s 7r0o6ar72 61y:Kaat 7rep2 abriv, Er’ Ta Pv IOV

KOTotTvrSn, iyaMov xtcrsgwv, oi’re (5 )Xoyoydpabos uvviOeEav bri rb erpooaywy6rspov rJ c&KpodaaEt i AXlqOarEpov, vra ia v ica? rKa ro XXla xr Xpdvov abrav &xr’wog fri re PuVOwg iJcvsvtdKK6ra, EApcQat &a I yl’dpaevog {K T ewv triaVEardmrev cpetiWv,; 7ra> ataXi ZvatL a&roXpPrTwo.-THUCYDIDES, I. 21. I HAVE given the stories of the early kings and founders of Rome, in their wn proper form; not wishing any one to mistake them for real history, but thinking them far too famous and too striking to be omitted.

But what is the real history, in the place of which we have so long admired the tales of Romulus and Numa? This is a question which cannot be satisfactorily answered: I shall 56 Livy, I. 31. “I Livy, I. 33. 57 Livy, I. 32. Dionysius, III. 86. 62 Livy, I. 33. 6s Cicero de Repub. II. 18.

Livy, I. 33. 63 Livy, I. 33.`I Cicero de Repub. II. 18. 64 Cicero de Repub. II 18. Livy says, ” twean. i Cicero, ib. Livy, I. 33. Dionys. III.

44. ty-four years.” I. 35.

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CarP. II.] EARLY HIISTORIY. 9 content myself here with giving the few points that seem sufficiently established; referring those who desire to go deeply into the whole question, to that immortal work of Niebuhr, which has left other writers nothing else to do, except either to copy or to abridge it. The first question in the history of every people is, What was their race and language? the next, What was the earliest form of their society, their social and political organization? Let us see how far we can answer these questions with respect to Rome, The language of the Romans was not called Roman, but Latin. Politically, Rome and Latium were clearly distinguished, but their language Langage of the Roappears to have been the same. This language is different from.an. the Etruscan, and from the Oscan;- the Romans, therefore, are so far marked out as distinct from the great nations of central Italy, whether Etruscans, Umbrians, Sabines, or Samnites. On the other hand, the connection of the Latin language with the Greek is manifest. Many common words, which no nation ever derives Partly connected with from the literature of another,: are the same in Greek and Latin; that f Greece. the declensions of the nouns and verbs are, to a great degree, similar. Tt is probable that the Latins belonged to that great race which, in very early times, overspread both Greece and Italy, under the various names of Pelasgians, Tyrsenians, and Siculians.

It may be believed, that the Hellenians were anciently a people of this same race, but that some peculiar circumstances gave to them a distinct and superior character, and raised them so far above their brethren, that in after ages they disclaimed all connection with them.l But in the Latin language there is another element besides that which it has in common with the Greek. This element belongs to the languages Partly with that of the of central Italy, and may be called Oscan. Further, Niebuhr has osenns.

remarked, that whilst the terms relating to agriculture and domestic life are mostly derived from the Greek part of the language, those relating to arms and war are mostly Oscan.2 It seems, then, not only that the Latins were a mixed people, partly Pelasgian and partly Oscan; but also that they arose out of a conquest of the Pelasgians by the Oscans: so that the latter were the ruling class of the united nation; the former were its subjects. The Latin language, then, may afford us a clue to the origin of the Latin people, and so far to that of the Romans. But it does not explain Differencesbetw eethe Romans and the other the difference between the Romans and Latins, to which the pecu-Latins. liar fates of the Roman people owe their origin. We must inquire, then, what the Romans were, which the other Latins were not; and as language cannot aid us here, we must have recourse to other assistance, to geography and national T1 he Pelasgians, in the opinion of Herodo-The word ” scutumn” was, in the first edition tus, were a barbarian race, and spoke a barba-of this work, introduced inadvertently into the rian language.-I. 57, 58. This merely means list of Latin military terms, unconnected with that they did not speak Greek. No one doubts Greek; as it is evidently of the same family the connection between Greek and Latin; yet with 6uKros: but yet there are so many words Plautus, speaking of one of his own comedies, of the same family in the other languages of the the story of which was borrowed from Phile-Indo-Germanic stock, that the connection bemon, says, longs rather to the general resemblance sub”Philemo scripsit, Plautus vertit barbare.’-
sisting between all those languages, than to the Trinummus, Prolog. v. 19.

closer likeness which may subsist between any That is, ( translated into: Latin.” The discov-two of them towards one another. And this ery of.ftinities in languages, when they are not more distant relationship exists, I doubt not, so close a-to constitute merely a difference of between the Oscan and even the Etruscan larndialect, belongs only to philologers. Who, till guages, and the other branches of the Indovery lately, suspected that Sanskrit and English Germanic family; and so far Greek, as well as nadc any connection with each other? Sanskrit, Persian, or German, may be rightly 2 He instances, on the one hand, Domus, used as an instrument to enable us to deciAger, Aratrum, Vinumi Oleum Lac, Bos, Sus, pher the Etruscan inscriptions. Lanzi’s fault Ovis; while on the other hand, Duellum, En-consisted in assuming too close a resemblance sis, il asta, Sagitta, &c., are quite different from between Greek and Etruscan; in supposing the corresponding Greek terms. See Niebuhr, that they were sisters, rather than distant Ronm. Gesch. Vol. I. p. 82. Ed.

1827. cousins.

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10 HISTORY OF ROME. [C(mr. II traditions. And thus, at the same time, we shall arrive at an answer to the second question in Roman history, What was the earliest form of civil society at Rome? If we look at the map, we shall see that Rome lies at the farthest extremity Distinct geographical of Latium, divided from Etruria only by the Tiber, and having the positinof Rome Sabines close on the north, between the Tiber and the Anio.

No other Latin town, so far as we know, was built on the Tiber;3 some were clustered on and round the Alban hills, others lined the coast of the Mediterranean. but from all these Rome, by its position, stood aloof.

Tradition reports that as Rome was thus apart from the rest of the Latin Intemixture of Sabine cities, and so near a neighbor to the Etruscans and Sabines, so its and Etruscan institution and people. population was in part formed out of one of these nations, and many of its rites and institutions borrowed from the other. Tradition describes the very first founders of the city as the shepherds and herdsmen of the banks of the Tiber, and tells how their numbers were presently swelled by strangers and outcasts from all the countries round about. It speaks of a threefold division of the Roman people, in the very earliest age of its history; the tribes of the Ramnenses, Titienses, and Luceres. It distinctly acknowledges the Titienses to have been Sabines; and in some of its guesses at the origin of the Luceres, it connects their name with that of the Etruscan Lucumones,4 and thus supposes them to have been composed of Etruscans. We know that for all points of detail, and for keeping a correct account of time, tradition is worthless. It is very possible that all Etruscan rites and usages came in with the Tarquinii, and were falsely carried back to an earlier period. But the mixture of the Sabines with the original people of the Palatine Hill cannot be doubted; and the stories of the asylum, and of the violence done to the Sabine women, seem to show that the first settlers of the Palatine were a mixed race, in which other blood was largely mingled with that of the Latins. We may conceive of this earlier people of Mamers, as of the Mamertini of a more historical period: that they were a band of resolute adventurers from various parts, practised in arms, and little scrupulous how they used them. Thus the origin of the highest Roman nobility may have greatly resembled that larger band of adventurers who followed the standard of William the Norman, and were the founders of the nobility of England. The people or citizens of Rome were divided into the three tribes of the RamDivision of the Roman nenses, Titienses, and Luceres,5 to whatever races we may suppose peopleintothreetri8s. them to belong, or at whatever time and under whatever circumstances they may have become united. Each of these tribes was divided into ten smaller bodies called curia; so that the whole people consisted of thirty curite: these same divisions were in war represented by the thirty centuries which made up the legion, just as the three tribes were represented by the three centuries of horsemen; but that the soldiers of each century were exactly a hundred, is apparently as unfounded a conclusion, as it would be if we were to argue in the same way as to the military force of one of our English hundreds. I have said that each tribe was divided into ten curire; it would be more cor9 I had forgotten what may be the single 5 These in Livy’s first book are called merely exception of Ficana, which, according to Fes-1” Centuries equitum,” ch. 13. But in the tentl tus, stood on the road to Ostia, at the eleventh book, ch. 6, they appear as ” Antique tribus.” milestone from Rome: that is, according to Sir Both expressions come to the same thing, for W. Gell and others at the spot now called the three centuries of horsemen, as appears Tenuta di Dragoncella. But Westphal places by the story of Tarquinius Priscus and the Ficana at Traphusa, which is at some distance augur, Attus Navius, were supposed to repfrom the Tiber; so that, according to him, the resent the three tribes, and their number was statement in the textwould be absolutelycorrect. fixed upon that principle: just as the thirty 4 So Junius Gracchanus, as quoted by Varro, centuries of foot soldiers represented the thirty de L. L., V. sec. 55; and so also Cicero, de Re. curiee. publica, II. 8.

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CnAP. I.] EARLY HISTORY. 11 rect to say, that the union of ten curia formed the tribe. For the Tribes made up of Cu state grew out of the junction of certain original elements; and rive; curise fh ouses. these were neither the tribes, nor even the curia, but the gentes or houses which made up the curiae. The first element of the whole system was the gens or house, a union of several families who were bound together by the joint performance of certain religious rites. Actually, where a system of houses has existed within historical memory, the several families who composed a house were not necessarily related to one another; they were not really cousins more or less distant, all descended from a common ancestor. But there is no reason to doubt that in the original idea of a house, the bond of union between its several families was truly sameness of blood: such was likely to be the earliest acknowledged tie; although afterwards, as names are apt to outlive their meanings, an artificial bond may have succeeded to the natural one; and a house, instead of consisting of families of real relations, was made up sometimes of families of strangers, wbhom it was proposed to bind together by a fictitious tie, in the hope that law, and custom, and religion, might together rival the force of nature. Thus the state being made up of families, and every family consisting from the earliest times of members and dependents, the original inhabitants The houses and their of Rome belonged all to one of two classes: they were either clients. members of a family; and if so, members of a house, of a curia, of a tribe, and so, lastly, of the state: or they were dependents on a family; and, if so, their relation went no further than the immediate aggregate of families, that is, the house: with the curia, with the tribe, and with the state, they had no connection.

These members of families were the original citizens of Rome; these dependents on families were the original clients. The idea of clientship is that of a wholly private relation; the clients were something to their respective patrons, but to the state they were nothing. But wherever states composed in this manner, of a Thecommons, orplebs. body of houses with their clients, had been long established, there grew up amidst or close beside them, created in most instances by conquest, a population of a very distinct kind. Strangers might come to live in the land, or more commonly the inhabitants of a neighboring district might be conquered, and united with their conquerors as a subject people. Now this population had no connection with the houses separately, but only with a state composed of those houses: this was wholly a political, not a domestic relation; it united personal and private liberty with political subjection. This inferior population possessed property, regulated their own municipal as well as domestic affairs, and as free men fought in the armies of what was now their common country. But, strictly, they were not its citizens; they could not intermarry with the houses, they could not belong to the state, for they belonged to no house, and therefore to no curia, and no tribe; consequently they had no share in the state’s government, nor in the state’s property. What the state conquered in war became the property of the state, and therefore they had no claim to it; with the state demesne, with whatever, in short, belonged to the state in its aggregate capacity, these, as being its neighbors merely, and not its members, had no concern.

Such an inferior population, free personally, but subject politically, not slaves, yet not citizens, were the original Plebs, the commons of Rome.

The mass of the Roman commons were conquered Latins.6 These, besides receiving grants of a portion of their former lands, to be held by Their ettlomenton the them as Roman citizens, had also the hill Aventinus assigned as AyentineHill. a residence to those of them who removed to Rome. The Aventine was without the walls, although so near to them: thus the commons were, even in the nature of their abode, like the Pfalburger of the middle ages,-men not admitted to live within the city, but enjoying its protection against foreign enemies. See Niebuhr’s chapter ” Die Gemeinde und die plebeischen Tribus.”

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12 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. IIL It will be understood at once, that whatever is said of the people in these eItler.f the houses early times, refers only to the full citizens, that is, to the memwere the only citizens. bers of the houses. The assembly of the people was the assembly of the curira; that is, the great council of the members of the houses; while the senate, consisting of two hundred senators, chosen in equal numbers from the two higher tribes of the Ramnenses and Titienses, was their smaller or ordinary council. The’ power of the king was as varied and ill-defined as in the feudal monarchTho king’s power over ies of the middle ages. Over the commons he was absolute; the citizens, and over the commons. but ovier the real people, that is, over the houses, his power was absolute only in war, ana without the city. Within the walls every citizen was allowed to appeal from the king, or his judges, to the sentence of his peers; that is, to the great council of the curiae. The king had his demesne: lands,’ and in war would receive his portion of the conquered land, as well as of the spoil of movables CHAPTER III. OF THE

CITY OF ROME, ITS TERRITORY, AND ITS SCENERY. Muros, arcemque procul, ac rara domorum Tecta vident. Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice collem, Quis Deus incertum est, habitat Deus.” VIRGIn, En. VIII. IF it is hard to carry back our ideas of Rome from its actual state to the Earlystate of the tity period of its highest splendor, it is yet harder to go back in of Rome. fancy to a time still more distant, a time earlier than the beginning of its authentic history, before man’s art had completely rescued the very soil of the future city from the dominion of nature. Here also it is vain to attempt accuracy in the details, or to be certain that the several features in. our description all existed at the same period. It is enough if we can image to ourselves some likeness of the original state of Rome, before the undertaking of those great works which are ascribed to the later kings. The Pomcerium of the original city on the Palatine, as described by Tacitus,’ The original Pomne-included not only the hill itself, but some portion of the ground rium.: immediately below it; it did not, however, reach as far as any of the other hills. The valley between the Palatine and the Aventine, afterwards the site of the Circus Maximus, was in the earliest times covered with water; 7 Cicero de RepublicA, V. 3. timius Severus, at the Janus Quadrifons.” (this Tacitus, Annal. XII. 24.-It is evident, by must not be confounded with the Arch of Sevthe minuteness of his description, that the con-erus on the Via Sacra, just under the capitol), secratedl limits of the original city had been ” and passed through the valley of the circus, carefully preserved by tradition; and this is so as to include the Ara Maxima, as far as the exactly one of the points on which, as we know Ara Consi, at the foot of the hill. It thein proby our own experience with regard to parish ceeded from the Septizonium (just opposite boundaries, a tradition kept up by yearly cere-the church of S. Gregorio, at the foot of the monies may safely be trusted. The exact line Palatine), till it came under the baths of Traof this original Pomcerium is thus marked by jan (or Titus), which were the Curine Veteres. Bunsen in his description of Rome, Vol. I. From thence it passed on to the top of the p. 137: ” It set out from the Forum Boarium, Velia, on which the Arch of Titus now stands the site of which is fixed by the Arch of Sep-and where Tacitus places the Sacellum Larium.’

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CHAP. III.] CITY OF ROME, ETC. 13 so also was the greater part of the valley between the Palatine and the Capitoline, the ground afterwards occupied by the Roman forum. But the city of the Palatine Hill grew in process of time, so as to become a city of seven hills. Not the seven famous hills of imperial or The original svn republican Rome, but seven spots more or less elevated, and all his-. belonging to three only of the later seven hills, that is, to the Palatine, the Cgelian, and the Esquiline. These first seven hills of Rome were known by the names of Palatium, Velia, Cermalus, Caelius, Fagutal, Oppius, and Cispius.2 Of this town the Aventine formed a suburb; and the dyke of the Quirites, ascribed in the story to Ancus MIarcius, ran across the valley from the, edge of the Aventine to that of the Cwelian Hill near the Porta Capena.3 At this time Rome, though already a city on seven hills, was distinct from the Sabine city on the Capitoline, Quirinal, and Viminal Hills. The They did not include all the seven hills of the two cities, although united under one government, had still a sep-later city. arate existence; they were not completely blended into one till that second period in Roman history which we shall soon have to consider, the reigns of the later kings. The territory of the original Rome during its first period, the true Ager Romanus, could be gone round in a single day.4 It did not ex-The Ager Romnue. tend beyond the Tiber at all, nor probably beyond the Anio; and, on the east and south, where it had most room to spread, its limit was between five and six miles from the city. This Ager Romanus was the exclusive property of the Roman people, that is, of the houses; it did not include the lands conquered from the Latins, and given back to them again when the Latins became the plebs or commons of Rome. According to the augurs,5 the Ager Romanus was a peculiar district in a religious sense; auspices could be taken within its bounds, which could be taken nowhere without them. And now what was Rome, and what was the country around it, which have both acquired an interest such as can cease only when earth Scenery of the neighitself shall perish? The hills of Rome are such as we rarely borhoodofRome. see. in England, low in height, but with steep and rocky sides.6 In early times the natural wood still remained in patches amidst the buildings, as at this day It followed nearly the line of the Via Sacra, as inal Hills, near the church of S. Francesco di far as the eastern end of the Forum Romanurm. Paola, where a miserable sort of square is still But Tacitus does not mention it as going on to called Piazza Suburra) may have joined in the join the Forum Boarium, because in the earli-festival of the inhabitants of these seven hills est times this valley was either a lake or a or heights, although they were not themselves swamp, and the Pomcerium could not descend ” Montanii” (see Varro de L. L., VI. 24. Ed. below the edge of the Palatine Hill. Nibby, in Miller), to show that they belonged to the city his work on the walls of Rome, places the of the Palatine, and not to the Sabine city of Curiot Veteres on the Palatine, and the Sacel-the Capitoline Hill. For the exact situations of lum Larium between the Arch of Titus and the the other seven spots, see Bunsen, description Forum on the Via Nova. The position:of the of Rome, Vol. I. p. 141. Velia was the ascent Curiae Veteres:is certainly doubtful. Niebuhr on the northeast side of the Palatine, where the himself (Vol. I. p. 283. Note 735. Eng. Tr.) Arch of Titus now stands. Cernmalus, or Gerthinks that the Pomcerium can scarcely be car-malus, was on the northwest-side of the Palaried so far as the foot of the Esquiine; and the tine, just above the Velabrum: Fagutal is authority for identifying the Curite Veteres thought to have been the ground near the with the site of the Baths of-Titus or Trajan is Porta Esquilina, between the Arch of Gallinot decisive; for it only appears that Biondo, enus and the Sette Sale. Oppius and Cispius writing in 1440, calls the. ruins of the Baths were also parts of the Esquiline; the former is “Curia Vecchia,” and says that in old legal marked by the present church of S. Maria Maginstruments they were commonly so called. giore, and the latter lay between that church (Beschreibung Roms, Vol. III. part 2, p. 222.) and the baths of Diocletian. Now considering the general use of the word 3 See Niebuhr, Vol. I. p. 403. Ed. 2d. and Curia, and that the name is in the singular num-Bunsen. Beschreibung Roms, Vol. 1. p. 620. ber, it by no means follows that Biondo’s Curia 4See Strabo, Lb. V. p. 253. Ed. Xylauc, Vetus must be the Curios Veteres of Tacitus. and compare Livy, I. 23. ” Fossa Cluilia, ab 2 For the account of this old Septimontium, Urbe haud plus quinque millia.” And II. 39. see Festus, under the word “Septimontio.” “Ad Fossas Cluilias V. ab Urbe M. P. castris Festus adds an eighth name, Suburra. Niebuhr positis, populatur inde A.grum Romanucm. conjectures that the inhabitants of the Pagus 5 See Varro de L. L., V. 33. Ed. Miiller.

RSucusanus (which was the same district as the The substance of this description, taken Suburra, and lay under the Esquiline and Vim-from my journals and recollections of my visit

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14 HISTORY OF ROME. [CGAr. IIL it grows here and there on the green sides of the Monte Testacco. Across the Tiber the ground rises to a greater height than that of the Roman hills, but its summit is a level unbroken line, while the heights, which opposite to Rome itself rise immediately from the river, under the names of Janiculus and Vaticanus, then sweep away to some distance from it, and returned in their highest and boldest form at the Monte Mario, just above the Milvian bridge and the Flaminian road. Thus to the west the view is immediately bounded; but to the north and northeast the eye ranges over the low ground of the Campagna to the nearest line of the Apennines, which closes up, as with a gigantic wall, all the Sabine, Latin, and Volscian lowlands, while over it are still distinctly to be-seen the high summits of the central Apennines, covered with snow, even at this day, for more than six months in the year. South and southwest lies the wide plain of the Campagna; its level line succeeded by the equally level line of the sea, which can only be distinguished from it by the brighter light reflected from its waters.

Eastward, after ten miles of plain, the view is bounded by the Alban hills, a cluster of high, bold points rising out of the Campagna, like Arran from the sea, on the highest of which, at nearly the same height with the summit of Helvellyn,7 stood the Temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the scene of the common worship of all the people of the Latin name.

Immediately under this highest point lies the crater-like basin of the Alban lake; and on its nearer rim might be seen the trees of the grove of Ferentia, where the’ Latins held the great civil assemblies of their nation. Further to the north, on the edge of the Alban hills looking towards Rome, was the town and citadel of Tusculum; and beyond this, a lower summit, crowned with the walls and towers of Labicum, seems to connect the Alban hills with the line of the Apennines just at the spot where the citadel of Praeneste, high upon the mountain side, marks the opening into the country of the Hernicans, and into the valleys of the streams that feed the Liris. Returning nearer to Rome, the lowland country of the Campagna is broken Clar.cter of the Cam-by long green swelling ridges, the ground rising and falling, as pagna. in the heath country of Surrey and Berkshire. The streams are dull and sluggish, but the hill sides above them constantly break away into little rocky cliffs, where on every ledge the wild fig now strikes out its branches, and tufts of broom are clustering, but which in old times formed the natural strength of the citadels of the numerous cities of Latium. Except in these narrow dells, the present aspect of the country is all bare and desolate, with no trees nor any human habitation. But anciently, in the time of the early kings of Rome, it was full of independent cities, and in its population and the careful cultivation of its little garden-like farms, must have resembled the most flourishing parts of Lombardy or the Netherlands. Such was Rome, and such its neighborhood; such also, as far as we can discover, was the earliest form of its society, and such the legends which fill up the place of its lost history. Even for the second period, on which we are now going to enter, we have no certain history; but a series of stories as beautiful as they are unreal, and a few isolated political institutions, which we cannot confidently connect with their causes or their authors. As before, then, I must first give the stories in their oldest and most genuine form; and then offer, in meagre contrast, all that can be collected or conjectured of the real history. to Rome in 1827, was inserted some time since 7 The height of Monte Cavo is variously given in the History of Rome published by the So-at 2938 or 2965 French feet. See Bunsen, ciety for the Diffiusion of Useful Knowledge. Vol. I. p. 40. Helvellyn is reckoned at 3055 I am obliged to mention this, lest I might -be English feet, by Col. Mudge; by Mr. Otley, in suspected of having borrowed from another his Guide to the Lakes, it is estimated at work without acknowledgment what was in 3070. fact furnished to that work by myself.

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CHAPTER IV. STORIES OF THE L.ATER KINGS.: Quis novus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes? Quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis?”

VIPBGIL, AEn. IV. STORY OF L. TARQUINIUS PRISCUSo IN the days of Ancus Marcius there came to Rome from Tarquinii, a city of Etruria, a wealthy Etruscan and his wife.l The father of this stranger was a Greek,2 a citizen of Corinth, who left his native land because it Ofthe irth of Trquinius, and how he came was oppressed by a tyrant, and found a home at Tarquinii. toRome. There he married a noble Etruscan lady, and by her he had two sons. But his son found, that for his father’s sake he was still looked upon as a stranger; so he left Tarquinii, and went with his wife Tanaquil to Rome, for there, it was said, strangers were held in more honor. Now as he came near to the gates of Rome, as he was sitting in his chariot with Tanaquil his wife, an eagle came and plucked the cap from his head, and bore it aloft into the air; and then flew down again and placed it upon his head, as it had been before. So Tanaquil was glad at this sight, and she told her husband, for she was skilled in augury, that this was a sign of the favor of the gods, and she bade him be of good cheer, for that he would surely rise to greatness. Now when the stranger came to Rome, they called him Lucius Tarquinius;3 and he was a brave man and wise in council; and his riches won of his favorwith king the good word of the multitude; and he became known to the A u’. king. He served the king well in peace and war, so that Ancus held him in great honor, and when he died he named him by his will to be the guardian of his children. But Tarquinius was in great favor with the people, and when he desired to be king, they resolved to choose him rather than the son of Ancus. So he began to reign, and he did great works, both in war and peace. He made war on the Latins, and took from them a great spoil.4 Then he made war on the Sabines, and he conquered them in two battles, and took from them the town of Collatia, and gave it to Egerius, his brother’s son, who had come with him from Tarquinii. Lastly, there was another war with the Latins, and Tarquinius went round to their cities, and took them one after another; for none dared to go out to meet him in open battle. These were his acts in war. He also did great works in peace;5 for he made vast drains to carry off the water from between the Palatine and the Aventine, and from between the Palatine and the Capitoline Hills. And in the space between the Palatine and the Aventine, after he had drained it, he formed the Circus, or great race-course, for chariot and for horse races. Then in the space between the Palatine and the Capitoline he made a forum or market-place, and divided out the ground around it for shops or stalls, and made a covered walk round it. Next he set about building a wall of stone to go round the city; and 1 Livy, I. 34 s Cicero, Livy, and Dionysius, in locis citatis. 2 Livy, ibid. Dionys. III. 46-48. Cicero de 4

Livy, I. 35-38. XcpublicA, II. 19. 5 Livy, I. 38. 35. D)ionysius, III. 67, 68.

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16 HISTORY OF ROME. [CnaP. IV he laid the foundations of a great temple on the Capitoline Hill, which was to be the temple of the gods of Rome. He also added a hundred new senators to the senate, and doubled the number of the horsemen in the centuries of the Ramnenses, Titienses, and Luceres, for he wanted to strengthen his force of horsemen; and when he had done so, his horse gained him great victories over his enemies. Now he first had it in his mind to make three new centuries of horsemen, and Of the famous augur, to call them after his own name. But Attus Navius, who was greatly skilled in’ augury, forbade him. Then the king mocked at his art, and said, “Come now, thou augur, tell me by thy auguries, whether the thing which I now have in my mind may be done or not.” And Attus Navius asked counsel of the gods by augury, and he answered, “It may.” Then the king said, “It was in my mind that thou shouldst cut in two this whetstone with this razor. Take them, and do it, and fulfil thy augury if thou canst.” But Attus took the razor and the whetstone, and he cut, and cut the whetstone asunder. So the king obeyed his counsels, and made no new centuries; and in all things afterwards he consulted the gods by augury, and obeyed their bidding. Tarquinius reigned long and prospered greatly; and there was a young man How, Tarqioiuo brought up in his household, of whose birth some told wonderful Servius Tulliustobehi tales, and said that he was’ the son of a god; but others said’ heir, and how he was murdered by the sons that his mother was a slave, and his father was one of the king’s of Ancos. clients. But he served the king well, and was in favor with the people, and the king promised him his daughter in marriage. The young man was called Servius Tullius. But when the sons of king Ancus saw that Servius was so loved by king Tarquinius, they resolved to slay the king, lest he should make this stranger his heir, and so they should lose the crown forever. So they9 set on two shepherds to do the deed, and these went to the king’s palace, and pretended to be quarrelling with each other, and both called on the king to do them right. The king sent for them to hear their story; and while he was hearing one of them speak, the other struck him on the head with his hatchet, and then both of them fled.

But Tanaquil, the king’s wife, pretended that he was not dead, but only stunned by the blow; and she said that he had appointed Servius Tullius to rule in his name, till he should be well again. So Servius went forth in royal state, and judged causes amidst the people, and acted in all things as if he were king, till after a while it was known that the king was dead, and Servius was, suffered to reign in his place. Then the sons of Ancus saw that there was no hope left for them; and they fled from Rome, and lived the rest of their days in a foreign land. THE STORY OF SERVIUS

TULLIUS. “Long live the Commons’ King, King James.” LADY OF THE LAxKE.

Servius Tullius was a just and good king;0 he loved the commons, and he diHow kino Servius en-vided among them the lands which had been conquered in war, larged the city. and he made many wise and good laws, to maintain the cause of the poor, and to stop the oppression of the rich. He made war with the Etruscans,” and conquered them. He added the Quirinal and the Viminal Hills’” to the city, and he brought many new citizens to live on the Esquiline; and there he lived himself amongst them. He also raised a great mound of earth to join the Esquiline and the Quirinal and the Viminal Hills together, and to cover them from the attacks of an enemy. L.

Livy, I. 36. Dionysius, III. 70, 1. Ci-Livy, I. 40. eero de Divinat. I.

1!, ~ 32. 0 Dionysius, IV. 13-15. 40. 7 Dionysius, IV. 2. Ovid, Fasti, VI.

627. 20 Livy, I. 42. e Cicero de Repub. II. 21. 12 Livy, I. 43.

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C1,r. IV.] STORIES OF THE LATER KINGS. 17 He built a temple‘3 of Diana on the Aventine, where the Latins, and the Sabines, and the Romans, should offer their common sacrifices; and the Romans were the chief in rank amongst all who worshipped at the temple. He made a new order of things for the whole”4 people; for he divided the people of the city into four tribes, and the people of the country into Of his good laws.and six-and-twenty. Then he divided all the people into classes, accord-peopl he divclided the ing to the value of their possessions; and the classes he divided “..tue’”’ into centuries; and the centuries of the several classes furnished themselves with arms, each according to their rank and order: the centuries of the rich classes had good and full armor, the poorer centuries had but darts and slings. And when he had done all these works, he called all the people together in their centuries, and asked if they would have him for their king; and the people answered that he should be their king. But the nobles hated him, because he was so loved by the commons: for he had made a law that there should be no king after him, but two men chosen by the people to govern them year by year. Some even said that it was in his mind to give up his own kingly power, that so he might see with his own eyes the fruit of all the good laws that he had made, and might behold the people wealthy, and free, and happy. Now king Servius had no son,‘5 but he had two daughters; and he gave them in marriage to the two sons of king Tarquinius. These daughters How he married his were of very unlike natures, and so were their husbands: for Aruns two sdonghe iotghTr Tarquinius was of a meek and gentle spirit, but his brother Lucius qui““u”’ was proud and full of evil; and the younger Tullia, who was the wife of Aruns, was more full of evil than his brother Lucius; and the elder Tullia, who was the wife of Lucius, was as good and gentle as his brother Aruns. So the evil could. not bear the good, but longed to be joined to the evil that was like itself; and. Lucius slew his wife secretly, and the younger Tullia slew her husband, and then they were married to one another, that they might work all the wickedness of their hearts, according to the will of fate. Then Lucius plotted with the nobles,‘6 who hated the good king; and he joined himself to the sworn brotherhoods of the young nobles, in which How Lucius Tarquin. they bound themselves to stand by each other in their deeds of sidnsptosted amsto hi violence and oppression. When all was ready, he waited for the murdered.

season of the harvest, when the commons,l7 who loved the king, were in the fields getting in their corn. Then he went suddenly to the forum with a band of armed men, and seated himself on the king’s throne before the doors of the senate-house, where hbe was wont to judge the people. And they ran to the king, and told him that Lucius was sitting on his throne.

Upon this the old man‘8 went in haste to the forum, and when he saw Lucius he asked him wherefore he had dared to sit on the king’s seat. And Lucius answered that it was his father’s throne, and that he had more right in it than Servius. Then he seized the old man, and threw him down the steps of the senate-house to the ground; and he went into the senate-house, and called together the senators, as if he were already king. Servius meanwhile arose, and began to make his way home to his house; but when he was come near to the Esquiline Hill, some whom Lucius had sent after him overtook him and slew him, and left him in his blood in the middle of the way. Then the wicked Tullia‘9 mounted her chariot, and drove into the forum, nothing ashamed to go amidst the multitude of men, and she called How the wicked TulLucius out from the senate-house, and said to him, “Hail to thee, va er her fa.thr’sidel king Tarquinius!” But Lucius bade her go home; and as she was body. going home, the body of her father was lying in the way. The driver of the chariot stopped short, and showed to Tullia where her father lay in his blood. But 13 Livy, I. 45.‘6 Livy, I. 46.

Dionysils, IV. 380.!’ Dionysius, IV. 16-20. Livy, I. 438. Cicero 17

Dionysius, IV. 88. de Republica, II. 22. 1 Livy, I. 48. 1 Livy, I. 46. 9

Livy, I. 48. 2

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18is HISTORY OF ROME. [CAP IV she bade him drive on, for the furies of her wickedness were upon her, and the chariot rolled over the body; and she went to her home with her father’s blood upon the wheels of her chariot.

Thus Lucius Tarquinius and the wicked Tullia reigned in the place. of the good king Servius. THE STORY OF LUCIUS TARQUINIUS THE TYRANT.

T6pavvos-vw6yada Tc KtV rdrTpLa, Kal flarat yvvatKas, KrEvEL r aKPtPTVUS.-HERODOTUS, III. 80. - Superbos Tarquini fasces.-H-oRAcE, Carm.

I. 12. Lucius Tarquinius gained his power wickedly, and no less wickedly did he exof king Tarquinius ercise it. He kept a guard20 of armed men about him, and he and his great power. ruled all things at his own will: many were they whom he spoiled of their goods, many were they whom he banished, and many also whom he slew. He despised the senate, and made no new senators in the place of those whom he slew, or who died in the course of nature, wishing that the senators might become fewer and fewer, till there should be none of them left. And he made friends of the chief men among the Latins, and gave his daughter in marriage to Octavius Mamilius of Tusculum; and he became very powerful amongst the Latins, insomuch that when Turnus Herdonius of Aricia had dared to speak against him in the great assembly of the Latins, Tarquinius accused him of plotting his death, and procured false witnesses to confirm his charge; so that the Latins judged him to be guilty, and ordered him to be drowned. After this they were so afraid of Tarquinius, that they made a league with him, and followed him in his wars wherever he chose to lead them. The Hernicans2’

also joined this league, and so did Ecetra and Antium, cities of the Volscians. Then Tarquinius made war upon the rest of the Volscians, and he took22 Suessa Of his buildings, andt Pometia, in the lowlands of the Volscians, and the tithe. of the spoil how he prepared hhe ground for his retem-was forty talents of silver. So he set himself to raise mighty works ple.. in Rome; and he finished what his father had begun; the great drains to drain the low grounds of the city, and the temple on the Capitoline Hill. Now the ground on which he was going to build his temple, was taken up with many holy places of the gods of the Sabines, which had been founded in the days of king Tatius. But Tarquinius consulted the gods by augury whether he might not take away these holy places, to make room for his own new temple. The gods allowed him to take away all the rest, except only the holy places of the god of Youth,23 and of Terminus the god of boundaries, which they would not suffer him to move. But the augurs said that this was a happy omen, for that it showed how the youth of the city should never pass away, nor its boundaries be moved by the conquests of an enemy. A human head was also found, as they were digging the foundations of the temple, and this too was a sign that the Capitoline Hill should be the head of all the earth. So Tarquinius built a mighty temple, and consecrated it te Tupiter,24 and to Juno, and to Minerva, the greatest of the gods of the Etruscans. At this time there came a strange woman25 to the king, and offered him nine Of the strange woman books of the prophecies of the Sibyl for a certain price. When the who brought the books of eSibylto the king. king refused them, the woman went and burnt three of the books, ana came back and offered the six at the same price which she had asked for the nine; but they mocked at her, and would not take the books. Then she went away, and burnt three more, and came back and asked still the same price for the remaining three. At this the king was astonished, and asked of the augurs what he should 2 Livy, I. 49-52.

23 Dionysins, III. 69 He tells the story of the 1 Dionysius, IV. 49. elder Tarquinius,`0 Livy, I. 53, 55, 56. 24 Dionysius, IV, 6:~ 26 Dionysius, s V

62. A. dellius, I. 19.

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CHAP. V.] HISTORY OF THE LATER KINGS, ETO 19 do. They said that he had done wrong in refusing the gift of the gods, and bade him by all means to buy the books that were left. So he bought them; and the woman who sold them was seen no more from that day forwards. Then the books were put into a chest of stone, and were kept under ground in the Capitol, and two men26
were appointed to keep them, and were called the two men of the sacred books. Now Gabii21 would not submit to Tarquinius, like the other cities of the Latins; so he made war against it; and the war was long, and Tarquinius How Tarquinis won.. knew not how to end it. So his son Sextus Tarquinius pretended chery ofhis son Sextus. that his father hated him, and fled to Gabii: and the people of Gabii believed him and trusted him, till at last he betrayed them into his father’s power. A treaty was then made with them, and he gave them the right of becoming citizens of Rome,28
and the Romans had the right of becoming citizens of Gabii, and there was a firm league between the two people. Thus Tarquinius was a great and mighty king; but he grievously oppressed the poor, and he took away all the good laws of king Servius, and let How he oppressed his the rich oppress the poor, as they had done before the days of worlike slaves them Servius. He made the. people labor at his great works: he made them build his temple, and dig and construct his drains; he laid such burdens29 on them, tha’ many slew themselves for very misery; for in the days of Tarquinius the tyrant it was happier to die than to live. CHAPTER V. THE

HISTORY OF THE LATER KINGS OF ROME, AND OF THE GREATNTES OF THE

MONARCHY.‘Eari.leya &9oev paacorXda laxoi.-THUCYD. II. 97.‘Awroqavi ourhc’oi asXXoo osris airoE’.A-3wvatotv ircp 7-)v CrETEpqV 7rvpdvVioV
iJKltEflgS obEm Xtiyovr;z.  TEuCYD. VI. 54. THE stories of the two Tarquinii and of Servius Tullius are so much more disappointing than those of the earlier kings, inasmuch as they seem at The ccounl.ts even or the later kings are not first to wear a more historical character, and as they really contain historical. much that is undoubtedly true; but yet, when examined, they are found not to be history, nor can any one attach what is real in them to any of the real persons by whom it was effected. The great drains or cloaca of Rome exist to this hour, to vouch for their own reality; yet of the Tarquinii, by whom they are said to have been made, nothing is certainly known. So also the constitution of the classes and centuries is as real as Magna Charta or the Bill of Rights; yet its pretended author is scarcely a more historical personage than King Arthur; we do not even know his name or race, whether he were Servius Tullius, or Mastarna, a Latin or an Etruscan; the son of a slave reared in the palace of the Roman king, or a military adventurer who settled at Rome together with his companlons in arms, and was received with honor for his valor.

Still less can we trust 26 See Livy, II[. 10, and VI. 387. Dionysius Etruscan histories, quoted by the Emperor Claugives ” Ten,” which was the later number. Gel-dius in his speech upon admitting the Gauls to [ius gives “Fifteeun.” the Roman franchise. This speech was engraved 27 Livy, I. 53, 54. on a brass plate, and was dug up at Lvons about 28 Dionysius, IV. 58. two centuries since, and is now preserved in that ~29 Cassius iHemna, quoted by Servius, 0Er. city. it was printed by Brotier at the end of XII. 603. his edition of Tacitus, and has been also pub-‘ This is the name by which he was called in the lished in the collections of inscriptions.

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20 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHar. V the pretended chronology of the common story.

The three last reigns, according to Livy, occupied a space of 107 years; yet the king, who at the end of this period is expelled in mature but not in declining age, is the son of the king who ascends the throne a grown man in the vigor of life at the beginning of it: Servius marries the daughter of Tarquinius, a short time before he is made king, yet immediately after his accession he is the father of two grown-up daughters, whom he marries to the brothers of his own wife: the sons of Ancus Marcius wait patiently eight-and-thirty years, and then murder Tarquinius to obtain a throne which they had seen him so long quietly occupy. Still then we are, in a manner, upon enchanted ground; the unreal and the real are strangely mixed up together; but although some real elements exist, yet the general picture before us is a mere fantasy: single trees and buildings may be copied from nature, but their grouping is ideal, and they are placed in the midst of fairy palaces and fairy beings, whose originals this earth has never witnessed. The reigns of the later Roman kings contain three points which require to be Three points con.nect-treated historically. 1st, The foreign dominion and greatness of reignsmust het tea the monarchy. 2d, The change introduced in the religion of historically. Rome. And 3d, The changes effected in the constitution, especially the famous system of the classes and centuries, usually ascribed to Servius Tullius. 1st. The dominion and greatness of the monarchy are attested by two suffiI. The greatness Of cient witnesses; the great works completed at this period, and still ghreastirks. hThe.alls existing; and the famous treaty with Carthage, concluded under ofServius Tullius. the first consuls of the Commonwealth, and preserved to us by Polybius. Under the last kings the city of Rome reached the limits which it retained through the whole period of the Commonwealth, and the most flourishing times of the empire. What are called the walls of Servius Tullius continued to be the walls of Rome for nearly eight hundred years, down to the Emperor Aurelian. They enclosed all those wellknown seven hills, whose fame has so utterly eclipsed the seven hills already described of the smaller and more ancient city. They followed’ the outside edge of the Quirinal, Capitoline, Aventine, and Calian Hills, passing directly across the low grounds between the hills, and thus running parallel to the Tiber between the Capitoline and the Aventine, without going3 down to the very banks. From the outer or southern side of the Cmelian they passed round by the eastern side of the hill to the southern side of the Es-‘quiline; and here, upon some of the highest ground in Rome, was raised a great rampart or mound of earth with towers on the top of it, stretching across from the southern side of the Esquiline to the northern side of the Quirinal. For the Esquiline and Quirinal Hills, as well as the Viminal, which lies between them, are not isolated like the four others, but are like so many promontories running out parallel to one another from one common base,4 and the rampart passing along 2See the account of the walls of Servius in extremely doubtful. See Varro de L. L., V. ~ Bunsen’s Rome, vol. i., p. 623 et seqq., with the 146. 153. Ed.

Mudller. accompanying map, plate I. in the volume of 4 The back of a man’s hand when slightly plates. bent, and held with the fingers open, presents 3It is on this point that the German topog-an exact image of this part of Rome. The finraphers of Rome differ from Nibby, and from gers represent the Esquiline, Viminal, and all the common plans of ancient Rome, which Quirinal, and a line drawn across the hand just make the walls go quite down to the river. Their upon the knuckles would show the rampart of reasons are, 1st, the description of the depart-Servius Tullius. The ground on the outside ure orthe 300 Fabii, who are made to leave the of the rampart falls for some way like the surcity by the Porte Carmentalis; but if the walls face of the hand down to the wrist, and the came close down to the river, they must have later wall of Aurelian passed over the wrist re-entered the city again to cross by the Pons instead of over the knucldes, at the bottom of Sublicius: and 2d, Varro’s statement, that one the slope instead of the top of it. end of the Circus Maximus abutted upon the This comparison was suggested to me merely city wall; and that the fish-market was just on by a view of the grolund. It is a strong prethe outside of the wall. The first argument sumption in favor of its exactness, that the same seems to me valid; the second cannot be insisted resemblance struck Brocchi also. Speaking of on, because the text of Varro in both places is the Pincian, Quirinal, Viminal, and lEsquiline

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CRAP. V.] HISTORY OF THE LATER KINGS, ETC. 21 the highest part of this base formed an artificial boundary, where none was marked out by nature.

The circuit of these walls is estimated at about seven Roman miles. The line of the mound or rampart may still be distinctly traced, and the course and extent of the walls can be sufficiently ascertained; but very few remains are left of the actual building. But the masonry with which the bank of the Tiber was built up, a work ascribed to the elder Tarquinius, and resembling the works of the Babylonian kings along the banks of the Euphrates, is still visible. So also are the massy substructions of the Capitoline temple, which were madein order to form a level surface for the building to stand on, upon one of the two summits of the Capitoline Hill. Above all, enough is still to be The Claca Maxima.

seen of the great Cloaca or drain, to assure us that the accounts left us of it are not exaggerated. The foundations of this work were laid about forty feet under ground, its branches were carried under a great part of the city, and brought at last into one grand trunk which ran down into the Tiber exactly to the west of the Palatine Hill. It thus drained the waters of the low grounds on both sides of the Palatine; of the Velabrum, between the Palatine and the Aventine; and of the site of the forum between the Palatine and the Capitoline. The stone employed in the Cloaca is in itself a mark of the great antiquity of the worlk; it is5 not the peperino of Gabii and the Alban hills, which was the common building stone in the time of the Commonwealth; much less the travertino, or limestone of the neighborhood of Tibur, the material used in the great works of the early emperors; but it is the stone found in Rome itself, a mass of volcanic materials coarsely cemented together, which afterwards was supplanted by the finer quality of the peperino. Such a work as the Cloaca proves the greatness of the power which effected it, as well as the character of its government. It was wrought by taskwork, like the great works of Egypt; and stories were long current cf the misery and degradation which it brought upon the people during its progress. But this taskwork for these vast objects shows a strong and despotic government, which had at its command the whole resources of the people; and such a government could hardly have existed, unless it had been based upon some considerable extent of dominion. What the Cloaca seems to imply, we find conveyed in express terms in the treaty with Carthage.6 As this treaty was concluded in the very first year of the Commonwealth, the state of things to which it refers must clearly be that of the latest period of the monarchy. It appears then that the whole coast’ of Latium was at this time subject to the Roman dominion: Ardeal Antium, Circeii, and Terracina,s are expressly mentioned as the Hills, he adds; ” Pr darns una sensibile ima-for an uncertain state of relations between Rome gine non saprei meglio par.a-narle che alle dita and Latium, such as may well be supposed to di una mano raffiguranclo la palma il mnentovato have followed the expulsion of Tarquinius; a piano a cui tutte si attaccano.” state in which the Romans could not know what Suolo di Roma, p. 84. Latin cities would remain faithful to the new 6 It is the “Tufa litoide” of Brocchi; one government and what would take part with of the volcanic formations which is found in the exiled king. On the other hand there is many places in Rome. Brocchi is positive that no authority for extending the limits of Latiumr this is the stone employed in the Cloaca; and beyond Terracina. The name Campania, it is the masses of it, he adds, taken from the older true, did not exist so early, but Thucydides vwalls of Servius, are still to be seen in the pres-calls Cuma a city of Opicia, not of Latium; and ent walls not far from the Porta S. Lorenzo. the Volsclans or Auruncans must have already Suolo di Roma, p. 112. occupied the country on the Liris, and between 6

Polybius, III. 22. See Niebuhr, vol. I. p. that river and Terracina, although their coin556, ed. 2d. quests of Terracina itself as well as of Antium 7 Niebuhr supposes that the coast eastward took place some years later. For the annals of Terracina was also included at this time speak of Cora and Pometia revolting to the under the name of Latium, because the treaty Aurunci as early as the year 251, which shows speaks of a part of Latium which was not sub-that they must at that time have been powerful Ject to Rome, and because the name of Cam-in the neighborhood of Latium; not to mention pania was notyet in existence. But if Polybius the alleged Volscian conquests of the last king has translated his original correctly, the expres-Tarquinius in the lowlands even of Latium sion av 7Vrevs p’

wCv r6ikeoot would rather seem proper. to provide for the case of a Latin city’s revolt-8 A fourth name is added in the MSS. of ing from Rome andl becoming independent, and Polybius,‘Apvrivblv. The editors have gener

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22 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHLAP. V subject allies (t6xoo,) of Rome. Of these, Circeii is said in the common story to have been a Roman colony founded by the last Tarquinius; but we read of it no less than of the others as independent, and making peace or war with Rome, during the Commonwealth down to a much later period. Now it is scarcely conceivable that the Romans could thus have been masters of the whole coast of Latium, without some corresponding dominion in the interior; and we may well believe that Rome was at this time the acknowledged head of the Latin cities, and exercised a power over them more resembling the sovereignty of Athens over her allies than the modern supremacy of Lacedaemon. On the right bank of the Tiber the Romans seem to have possessed nothing on the coast; but the stories of Etruscan conquests which we find in the common accounts of Servius Tullius, are so far justified by better testimony as to make it probable that in the direction of Veii the Roman dominion9 had reached beyond the Tiber, and that the territory thus gained from the Etruscans formed a very considerable part of the whole territory of Rome. It is well known that the number of local tribes established by the later kings was thirty; whereas a few years after the beginning of the Commonwealth we find them reduced to twenty. Now, as even the common account of the war with -Porsenna describes the Romans as giving up to the Veientians a portion of territory formerly conquered from them, it becomes a very probable conjecture that the Etruscans, soon after the expulsion of the kings, recovered all the country which the kings had taken from them; and that this was so considerable in extent, that by its loss the actual territory’ of the Roman people was reduced by one third from what it had been before. It may thus be considered certain that Rome under its last kings was the seat Probable connection of. of a great monarchy, extending over the whole of Latium on the PRom.e with Etruria. one side, and possessing some considerable territory in Etruria on the other. But how this dominion was gained it is vain to inquire. There are accounts which represent all the three last kings of Rome, Servius Tullius no less than the two Tarquins, as of Etruscan origin. Without attempting to make out their history as individuals, it is probable that the later kings were either by birth or long intercourse closely connected with Etruria, inasmuch as at some early period of the Roman history the religion and usages of the Etruscans gave a deep and lasting coloring to those of Rome; and yet it could not have been at the very origin of the Roman people, as the Etruscan language has left no traces of itself in the Latin; whereas if the Romans had been in part of Etruscan origin, their language, no less than their institutions, would have contained some Etruscan ally adopted Ursini’s correction, Aavpvriwvc: quinii he regards as the decline of the power Niebuhr proposes’APIK&IvY, observing that of the city Tarquinii, andcl the restoration of the Aricia was-a much more import a2t place than independence of the Latin states, Rome being Laurentum, and that Arician merchant vessels one of this number, which had been hitherto are mentioned by Dionysius, VII. 6. Yet in subjection to it. Etrusker, Vol. I. p. 115, Laurentum appears as one of the thirty Latin et seqq. states which concluded the treaty with Sp. Cas-I need not say that this is contrary to the s!.s; and Larentum and Laurentum are but opinion of Niebuhr, who believes the Tarquinii different forms of the same word, as appears in to have been Latins, and not Etruscans. But the name of the wife of Faustulus, who is called I should agree with Miiller, in regarding the both Larentia and Laurentia. reigns of the two Tarquinii as a period during I MUller in his very able work on the Etrus-which an Etruscan dynasty ruled in Rome, incans believes rather that the later reigns of the troducing Etruscan rites, arts, and institutions. Roman kings represent a period in which an It is wholly another question whether these Etruscan dynasty from Tarquinii ruled in Rome, princes regarded Rome as their capital or Tarand extended its power far over Latium; so quinii; but the probability is, that they were that it was a dominion of Etruscans over Latins kings of Rome, and they may very possibly rather than the contrary.

He considers this have used the help of their Latin subjects even dominion to have been interrupted by the reign to make conquests for them in Etruria; Just as of Ser. Tullius, or Mastarna, an Etruscan chief the Norman kings of iEngland soon found that from Volsinii, of a party wholly opposed to that England was more than Normandy, and Henry of the rrinces or Lucumones of Tarquinii; and I. conquered Normandy from his brother, then to have been restored and exercised more chiefly by the help of English men and money, tyranically than ever, in the time described by And yet we retain the mnarks of the Norman the Roman writers as the reign of Tarquiniun conquest impressed on every part of our instithe tyrant.

Finally, the expulsion of the Tar-tutions down to this very hour.

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URAP. V.] HISTORY OF THE LATER KINGS, ETC. 23 elements. The Etruscan influence, however introduced, produced some effects that were. lasting, and others that were only temporary; it affected the religion of Rome down to the very final extinction of Paganism; and the state of the Roman magistrates,’~ their lictors, their ivory chairs, and their triumphal robes, are all said to have been derived from Etruria. A temporary effect of Etruscan influence may perhaps be traced in the overthrow of the free constitution ascribed, to Servius Tullius, in the degradation of the Roman commons under the last king, and in the endeavors of the patricians to keep them so degraded during all the first periods of the commonwealth. It is well known that the government in the cities of Etruria was an exclusive aristocracy, and that the commons, if in so wretched a condition they may be called by that honorable name, were like th6 mass of the people amongst the Sclavonic nations, the mere serfs or slaves of the nobility. This is a marked distinction between the Etruscans, and the Sabine and Latin nations of Italy; and, as in the constitution of Servius Tullius a Latin spirit is discernible, so the tyranny which, whether in the shape of a monarchy or an aristocracy, suspended that constitution for nearly two centuries, tended certainly to make Rome resemble the cities of Etruria, and may possibly be traced originally to that same revolution which expelled the Sabine gods from the capitol, and changed forever the simple religion of the infancy of Rome. II. It is a remarkable story” that towards the end of the sixth century of Rome, the religious books of Numa were accidentally brought to light 1. Changes inreligioa by the discovery of his tomb under the Janiculum. They were itroduced in the time. ot read by A. Petillius, the Praetor Urbanus, and by him ordered later”kings. to be burned in the comitium, because their contents tended to overthrow the religious rites then observed in Rome. We cannot but connect with this story what is told of Tarquinius the elder, how he cleared away the holy places of the Sabine gods from the Capitoline Hill, to make room for his new temple; and the statement which Augustine quotes from Varro,” and which is found also in Plutarch, that during the first hundred and seventy years after the foundation of the city, the Romans had no images of their gods. All these accounts represent a change effected in the Roman religion; and the term of 170 years, given by Varro and’ Plutarch, fixes this change to the reigns of the later kings. It is said”3 also, that Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the three deities to whom the Capitoline temple was dedicated, were the very powers whose worship, according to the Etruscan religion, was essential to every city; there could be no city without three gates duly consecrated, and three temples to these divinities. But here again we gain a glimpse of something real, but cannot make it out distinctly. Images of the gods belong rather to the religion of the Greeks than of the Etruscans; and the Greek mythology, as well as Grecian art, had been familiar in the southern Etruscan cities from a very early period, whether derived from the Tyrrhenians, or borrowed directly from Hellas or the Hellenic colonies. Grecian deities and Greek ceremonies may have been introduced, in part, along with such as were purely Etruscan. But the science of the Haruspices, and especially the attention to signs in the sky, to thunder and lightning, seems to have been conducted according to the Etruscan ritual; perhaps also from the same source came that belief in the punishment of the wicked after death, to which Polybius ascribes so strong a moral influence over the minds of the Romans, even in his own days. And Etruscan rites and ordinances must have been widely prevalent in the Roman commonwealth, when, as some writers asserted, the Roman nobility‘4 were taught habitually the Etruscan language, and when ” Livy, I. 8. Dionysius, III. 62. Etrusce disciplinae aiunt, apud conditores Li vy, XL. 29. Etruscarum urbium non putatas justas vrbes, 12 Varro, Fragments, p. 46. Edit. Dordrecht. in quibus non tres ports essent dedicate at Plutarch, Numa, c. 8. votivs, et tot tenmpla, Jovis, Junonis, Mlinerve, 13 Servius, on Virgil, ALn. I. v. 422. Mira-14

Livy, IX. 36. Habeo auctores, vulgo turnm tur molem 2Eneas, &c. “Miratur”

non sim- (in the middle of the fifth century of Rome), plicitur dictum volunt, quoniam prudentes Romanos pueros sicut nunc Grsecis ita Etruscis

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24 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHaP. Y. the senate’. provided by a special decree for the perpetual cultivation of the Etruscan discipline by young men of the highest nobility in Etruria; lest a science so important to the commonwealth should be corrupted by falling into the hands of low and mercenary persons. III. Nothing is more familiar to our ears than the name of the classes and centuries of Servius Tullius; nothing is more difficult, even after 1II. Changes in the con. itntionintroduced by the the immortal labor of Niebuhr, than to answer all the questions later kings. which naturally arise connected with this part of the Roman history. But first of all, in considering the changes effected in the Roman con stitution during the later period of the monarchy, we find another threefold divi sion of them presenting itself. We have, 1st, the enlargement of the oldei constitution, on the same principles, in the addition to the number of senators and of the centuries of the knights, commonly ascribed to Tarquinius Priscus. 2nd, we have the establishment of a new constitution on different principles, in the famous classes and centuries of Servius Tullius. And, 3rd, we have the overthrow, to speak generally, of this new constitution, and the return to the older state of things, modified by the great increase of the king’s power, in the revolution effected by Tarquinius Superbus, and in his subsequent despotism. I. The old constitution was enlarged upon the same principles, in the increase The alterations effected of the number of senators, and of the centuries of the knights. bythe elderTarqinius. It has been already shown that the older constitution was an oligarchy, as far as the clients and commons were concerned; it is no less true, that it was democratical, as far as regarded the relations of the citizens, or members of the houses, to each other. Both these characters, with a slight modification, were preserved in the changes made by Tarquinius Priscus. He doubled,”’ it is said, the actual number of senators, or rather of patrician houses; which involved a corresponding increase in the numbers of the senate; but the houses thus ennobled, to use a modern term, were distinguished from the old ones by the titles of the lesser houses; and their senators did not vote till after the senators of the greater houses. According to the same same system the king proposed to double the number of the tribes, that is to divide his newly created houses into three tribes, to stand beside tle three tribes of the old houses, the Ramnenses, Titienses, and Luceres. Now as the military divisions of the old commonwealths went along with the civil divisions, the’tribes of the commonwealth were the centuries of the army; and if three new tribes were added, it involved also the addition of three new centuries of knights or horsemen; and it is in this form that the proposed change is represented in the common stories. But here it is said that the interest of the old citizens, taking the shape of a religious objection, was strong enough to force the king ti, modify his project. No new tribes were created, and consequently no new centuries;’ but the new houses were enrolled in the three cAd centuries, so as to form a second division in each, and thus to lteris erudiri solitos. Livy rather 3 lieves that of the commonwealth, not an order; besides, a knowledge of the Etruscan language was a the passage in the treatise de Legibus seems to peculiar accomplishment of the Fabius who decide the question, II. 9, ~ 21, “Etrurieque went on the enterprise, namely, that of penetra-principes disciplinam docento;’” that is, “Let ting through the Ciminian Forest, and exploring them instruct the government in their disciEtruria. But the story of this enterprise comes pline, when any occasion arises for consulting evidently from the Fabian Family Memoirs, and them.” Valerius Maximus, I. 1, 2, has I its authenticity is most suspicious. Whereas believe borrowed his story from Cicero, and the statement of the writers whom Livy refers misunderstood hia meaning. to is extremely unsuspicious and probable. 6 Duplicavit ilium pristinuin Patrum nume15 See the famous passage of Cicero, de Di-rum: et antiquos Patres “majorum gelentium” vinatione, 1. 41. 92. I agree with Ililler that appellavit, quos priores sententiam rogabat, a the “Principum filii” here spoken of are Etrus-se adscitos ” minorum.” Cicero, de Republica, cans, and not Romans. The term “Principes” II. 20. to express the Lucumones of Etruria is common 17 Neque tum Tarquinius de equitum cenenough: I doubt whether it is ever used to turiis quidquamn mutavit: numero alterum express the Roman patricians, or any class of tantum adjecit…. “Posteriores” modo men in Rome. “Principes civitatis” is used sub iisdem nominibus qui additi erant appellati to express the most distinguisned individuals sunt. Livy, I. 30.

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CEA.P. V.] HISTORY OF THE LATER KINGS, ETC. 25 ec.ntinue inferior in dignity to the old houses in every relation of the commonwealth. It may be fairly supposed, that these second centuries in the army were also second tribes and second curiae in the civil divisions of the state; and that the members of the new houses voted after those of the old ones no less in the great council, the comitia of the curise, than in the smaller councils of the senate. The causes which led to this enlargement of the old constitution may be readily conceived. Whether Tarquinius was a Latin or an Etruscan, all the stories agree in representing him as a foreigner, who gained the throne by his wealth and personal reputation. The mere growth of the Roman state would, in the natural course of things, have multiplied new families, which had risen to wealth, and were in their former country of noble blood; but which were excluded from the curiae, that is, from the rights of citizenship at Rome; the time was come to open to them the doors of the commonwealth; and a foreign king, ambitious of adding to the strength of his kingdom, if it were but for the sake of his own greatness, was not likely to refuse or put off the opportunity. Beyond this we are involved in endless disputes and difficulties; who the Luceres were, and whether Tarquinius had any particular’reasons for raising them to a level with the old tribes, we never can determine. That there were only four vestal virgins before,l8 and that Tarquinius made them six, would certainly seem to show, that a third part of the state had hitherto been below the other two-thirds, at least in matters of religion; for it was always acknowledged that the six vestal virgins represented the three tribes of the Ramnenses, Titienses, and Luceres, two for each tribe. But in the additions made to the senate and to the centuries, the new citizens must have been more than a third of the old ones; and indeed here: the story supposes that in military matters, at any rate, the Luceres were already on an equality with the Ramnenses and Titienses. It is enough, therefore, to say, that there had arisen at Rome so great a number of distinguished families, of whatever origin, or from whatever causes, that an extension of the rights of citizenship became natural and almost necessary: but as these were still only a small part of the whole population, the change went no further than to admit them into the aristocracy; leaving the character and privileges of the aristocracy itself, with regard to the mass of the population, precisely the same as they had been before. II. But a far greater change was effected soon afterwards; no less than the establishment of a new constitution, on totally different principles. Cons,,,,ion of Servius This constitution is no doubt historical, however uncertain may Tullin.. be the accounts which relate to its reputed author. “The good king Servius and his just laws,”

were the objects of the same fond regret amongst the Roman commons, when suffering under the tyranny of the aristocracy, as the laws of the good king Edward the Confessor amongst the English after the Norman conquest; and imagination magnified, perhaps, the merit of the one no less than of the other: yet the constitution of Servius was a great work, and well deserves to be examined and explained. Servius, like Tarquinius, is represented as a foreigner, and is said also, like him, to have ascended the throne to the exclusion of the sons of the late king. According to the account which Livy followed, he j fog was acknowledged’g by the senate, but not by the people; and this, which 18 See Dionysius, III. 67; and compare Livy, Populum de se ipse consulnit, jussusque regX. 6. nare, legem de imperio suo curiatam tulit.” Di 19 Primus injussu Populi, voluntate Patrum Republica, II. 21. If indeed there existed a regnavit. Livy, I. 41.

Dionysius, confusing genuine “‘Lex Regia curiata de imperio” of as usual the curies and the commons, and sup-the reign of Servius Tullius, then it must belong posing that the most aristocratical body in the to a later period of his reign, when having esstats must needs be the senate, represents him tablishedc his power by means of his new conas chosen by the people in their curiae, but not stitution, the curime would have had no choice, confirmed by the senate. Cicero says, “Non but to acknowledge him; and this according to commisit se Patribus, sed, Tarquinio sepulto, Livy’s narrative was the case; for he says that;

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26 HISTORY OF ROME. tGOLr. I seemed contradictory so long as the people, populus, and the commons, plebs, were confounded together, is in itself consistent and probable, when it is understood that the people, who would not acknowledge Servius, were the houses assembled in their great council of the curiae, and that these were likely to be far less manageable by the king whom they disliked, than the smaller council of their representatives assembled in the senate. Now supposing that the king, whoever he may have been, was unwelcome to what was then the people, that is, to the only body of men who enjoyed civil rights; it was absolutely necessary for him, unless he would maintain his power as a mere tyrant, through the help of a foreign paid guard, to create a new and different people out of the large mass of inhabitants of Rome who had no political existence, but who were, free, and in many instances wealthy and of noble origin; who therefore, although now without rights, were in every respect well fitted to receive them. The principle of an aristocracy is equality within its own body, ascendency He establishes thirty over all the rest of the community.

Opposed to this is the tribes for the commons. system, which, rejecting these extremes of equality and inequality, subjects no part of the community to another, but gives a portion of power to all; not an equal portion, however, but one graduated according to a certain standard, which standard has generally been property. Accordingly, this system has both to do away with distinctions, and to create them; to do away, as it has generally happened, with distinctions of birth, and to create distinctions of property. Thus at Rome, in the first instance, the tribes or divisions of the people took a different form. The old three tribes of Ramnenses, Titienses, and Luceres, had been divisions of birth, real or supposed: each was made up of the houses of the curiae, and no man could belong to the tribe without first belonging to a curia, and to a house; nor could any stranger become a member of a house except by the rite of adoption, by which he was made as one of the same race, and therefore a lawful worshipper of the same gods. Each of these tribes had its portion of the Ager Romanus, the old territory of Rome. But now as many others had become Romans in the course of time, without belonging to either of these three tribes, that is, had come to live under the Roman kings, many in 1Rome itself, and had received grants of land from the kings beyond the limits of the old Ager Romanus, a new division was made including all these; and the whole city and territorytt of Rome, except the Capitol, were divided into thirty after the institution of the Comitia Centuriata, of the tribes. On the whole I agree with NieServius ” ausus est ferre ad poplulm,‘vellent buhr in preferring the statement of Fabius, juberentne se regnare?’ tantoque consensu preserved by Dionysius, IV. 15, that the counquanto haud quisquam alius ante, rex cst de-try tribes in the Servian constitution were six jlaratus,” I. 46. On the other hand Livy, or and twenty. But the great difficulty relates to the annalist whom he followed, may have added three points; the Capitol, the Aventinc, and the the circumstance ” voluntate Patrum regnavit,” Ager Romanus. The four city tribes or regions, because he could not conceive how Servius for tribe as a local division is synonymous with could have reigned without the consent of either region, included neither the Capitol, ilor the senate or curin.

But if we adopt the Etruscan Aventine. This we know from that curious story, and suppose that the king whom the acceunt preserved by Varro of the situation of Rlomans called Servius Tullius had gained his the twenty-four Argean chapels in these regions; power in the first instance as the leader of an a passage which has been considered ancl corarmy, which after various adventures in Etruria rected both by Miller and Bunsen, and may be had been driven out from thence, and had taken now read in an intelligible form either in Mi.lpossession of the Caelian Hill in Rome, it is very ler’s edition of Varro, I. ~ 45-54; or in Bunsen’s conceivable that he may have reigned at first and Platner’s Beschreibung Roms, Vol. I. pp. independently of the consent of any part of the 688-702.

But there is this farther perplexity, old Roman people, whether Senate or burghers; that the chapels of the Argei are said by Varro and that he may only have asked for that con-to have been distributed through twenty-seven sent after his creation of a new Roman people, parts of the city; and yet the wooden figures formed perhaps in part out of his own soldiers, called Argei, which were every year thrown by when he would wish to reign according to all the Pontifices into the Tiber, ae by Varro himthe old legal forms, and to be no longer king self, according to the MSS. said to have been by the choice of a part of his subjects only, but twenty-four, and by Dionysius thirty. [Antiqq. with the approbation of all. Rom. I. 38.] Bunsen adopts this latter number, 20 Every reader who is acquainted with the and supposes that the three celln of the Capitosubject knows the difficulties which beset the line Temple, and the three of the old Capitol on whole question respecting the original number the Quirinal, were inc.,“ded in the reckoning,

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CHAP. V.] HISTORY OF THE LATER KINGS, ETC. 27 tribes, four for the city, and twenty-six for the country, containing all the Romans who were not members of the houses, and classing them according to the local situation of their property. These thirty tribes corresponded to the thirty curia..

of the houses; for the houses were used to assemble, not in a threefold division, according to their tribes, but divided into thirty, according to their curia: and the commons were to meet and settle all their own affairs in the assembly of their tribes, as the houses met and settled theirs in the assembly of their cu-ia. Thus then were two bodies existing alongside of each other, analogous to the house of lords and the house of commons of our own ancient The centuries, a militar. constitution, two estates distinct from and independent of each division, to includo bot other, but with no means as yet provided for converting them commons. into states-general or a parliament. Nor could they have acted together as jointly legislating for the whole nation; for the curia still regarded themselves as forming exclusively the Roman people, and would not allow the commons, as such, to claim any part in the highest acts of national sovereignty. There was one relation, however, in which the people and the commons felt that they belonged to one common country, in which they were accustomed to act together, and in which therefore it was practicable to unite them into one great body. This was when they marched out to war against a foreign enemy; then, arrayed in the same army, and fighting under the same standard, in the same cause, the houses and the commons, if not equally citizens of Rome, felt that they were alike Romans. It has ever been the case, that the distinctions of peace”’ vanish amidst the dangers of war; arms and courage, and brotherhood in perils, confer of necessity power and dignity. Thus we hear of armies22 on their return home from war stopping before they entered the city walls to try, in their military character, all offences or cases of misconduct which had occurred since they had taken the field: whereas when once they had entered the walls, civil relations were resumed, and all trials were conducted according to other forms, and before other judges. This will explain the peculiar constitution of the comitia of centuries, which was a device for uniting the people and the commons into a national and sovereign assembly in their capacity of soldiers, without shocking those prejudices which as yet placed a barrier between them as soon as they returned to the relations of peace. But in order to do this with effect, and to secure in this great assembly a This appears to me unsatisfactory, but I call session or occupation was not property, the offer nothing better. However, the exclusion patricians might possess land in a tribe without of the Capitol from the four. city tribes is con-becoming members of it. But if the Ager sistent enough; for the Capitol as the citadel of Romanus had formed a tribe, then: wo might Rome, and the seat of the three protecting gods be led to suppose that the patricians must of the city, was reserved exclusively for the have been members of this tribe, and so the patricians, or old citizens, and no plebeian might tribes would cease to be an exclusively piedwell on it: whereas in the other parts of the beian body, which Niebuhr, rightly, as I think, city both orders dwelt promiscuously, till the supposes them to have been in the outset. It famous Ic;lasn law appropriated the Aventine is possible, however, that the whole territory, to the plebeians alone, as the Capitol was appro-not excepting even the A.ger Romanus, might priated to the patricians. It will be remem-locally have been included within the tribes, bered that the Eupatridse at Athens were inasmuch as no district would be wholly without distinguished in the old state of things by the plebeian lands; and yet the patricians themntitle ou Kar’ a’erv ol0oVvre, and the a’arv in the selves, as belonging to a differentpolitical body, earliest times would be the Acropolis of a later might have had nothing to do with the tribe age.

With regard to the Aventine, it must I politically: just as the estates of our peers are conceive have been included in one of the geographically included within some county, country tribes; nor is this to be wondered at, and yet no peer may be elected as knight of the as the Aventine was still considered properly shire, nor even vote at any election. as a suburb, although it was included within 21 ” For he to-day who sheds his blood with the walls. It is not to be supposed that the me whole of the land in the country tribes was the Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, property of the plebeians; much of it undoubt-This day shall gentle his condition.” edly remained as domain land, and as such HENRY V. became “possessed,” il the Roman sense of 22 This was the case at Argos. rbv BedavXAothe term, by the patricians; as appears in the alaXwpravres EV T
ri Xapd,6py oersp rat 47ri arpaaccount of the state of the Aventine Hill, before T-s dixas 7rpiv EvrEaL KXpivova~V,‘jpfarro Au’s-Y. the passing of the Lex-Icilia. But as such pos-Thucyd. V. 60.

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28 HISTORY OF ROME. [CIAP. V Change in the organiza-preponderance to the commons, a change in the military organition of the army. zation and tactic of the army became indispensable. In all aristocracies in an early stage of society, the ruling order or class has fought on horseback23 or in chariots; their subjects or dependents have fought on foot. The cavalry service under these circumstances has been cultivated, that of the infantry neglected; the mounted noble has been well armed and carefully trained in warlike exercises, whilst his followers on foot have been ill armed and ill disciplined, and quite incapable of acting with equal effect. The first great step then towards raising the importance of the infantry, or, in other words, of the commons of the state, was to train them to resist cavalry, to form them into thick masses instead of a thin extended line, to arm them with the pike instead of the sword or the javelin. Thus the phalanx order of battle was one of the earliest improvements in the art of war; and at the time we are now speaking of, this order was in general use in Greece, and must have been well known, if only through the Greek colonies, in Italy also.24 Its introduction into the Roman army would be sure to make the infantry from henceforward more important than the cavalry; that is, it would enable the commons to assert a greater right in Rome than would be claimed by the houses, inasmuch as they could render better service. Again, the phalanx order of battle furnished a ready means for giving importance to a great number of the less wealthy commons, who could not supply themselves with complete armor; while, on the other hand, it suggested a natural distinction between them and their richer fellows, and thus established property as the standard of political power, the only one which can in the outset compete effectually with the more aristocratical standard of birth; although in a later stage of society it becomes itself aristocratical, unless it be duly tempered by the mixture of a third standard, education and intelligence. In a deep phalanx, the foremost ranks needed to be completely armed, but those in the rear could neither reach or be reached by the enemy, and only served to add weight to the charge of the whole body. These points being remembered, we may now proceed to the details of the great comitia of Servius. He found the houses, that is to say, the nobility or citizens of Rome, for I canDetails of the institution not too often remind the reader that in this early period of Roman offth gtntuaie.d pThe aix history these three terms were synonymous, divided into three cencenturies of knights.

turies of knights or horsemen, each of which, in consequence of the accession to its numbers made by the last king, contained within itself two centuries, a first and a second. The old citizens, anxious in all things to keep up the old form of the state, had then prevented what were really six centuries from being acknowledged as such in name; but the present change extended to the name as well as the reality; and the three double centuries of the Ramnenses, Titienses, and Luceres, became now25
the six votes (sex suffragia) of the new united assembly. To these, which contained all the members of the houses, there were now added twelve new centuries2” of knights, formed, as usual in the Greek states, from the richest members of the community, continuing, like the centuries below them, to belong to the thirty tribes of the commons. It remained to organize the foot soldiers of the state. Accordingly, all those The cen.uries of infantry. of the commons whose property was sufficient to qualify them The fve claesea. for serving even in the hindmost ranks of the phalanx, were 238 omer’s battles are a sufficient example of roeg apatofs o9x (rXipXow, iar’ Ev Taro9 L’rsiieI, this: it explains also the name of ir7rgS applied to eJTat rliv’aTXiV. the three hundred Spartans of the king’s guard, 2 Again, if Ser. Tullius was an Etruscan, ho and retained long after the reality had ceased, would have introduced the tactic of his own and the guard no longer consisted of cavalry country, in arming the Roman infantry with or chariots, but of infantry. See Thucydides, the long spear and shield: for these were the V. 72. See also Aristotle, Politics, IV. 13. j weapons used by the Etruscans as well as by tEtv el ipXig (roXtrsia lylvero) {lK r7v’,rtnoEv. rev the Greeks. See Diodorus Siculus, XXIII. 1, yaep ItXVv Kai r’v rfepoX% EV TO4f 7rcrEvaYv b reAE-Fragm. Mai. oC EXtvy’ iaEv piV yap avvrdeisTos NXpnarov rIb arXt-25

Festus in Sex Suifragia. sxFdV at sei Rerp Tre)V rotoraOv 4erEpial Kasi raErd ey 26 0Livy, I. 43. Cicero de Rep’ubl. II. 22.

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CIIAP. V.] HISTORY OF THE LATER KINGS, ETC. 2[ divided2” into four classes. Of these, the first class contained all whose property amounted to or exceeded one hundred thousand pounds weight of copper. The soldiers of this class were required to provide themselves with the complete arms used in the front ranks of the phalanx; the greaves, the coat of mail, the helmet and the round shield, all of brass; the sword, and the peculiar weapon of the heavyarmed infantry, the long pike. And as these were to bear the brunt of every battle, and were the flower of the, state’s soldiers, so their weight in the great military assembly was to be in proportion; they formed eighty centuries; forty of younger men, between the ages of fifteen and fortyfive years”2 complete; and forty of elders, between fortyfive and sixty: the first to serve in the field, the second to defend the city. The second class contained those whose property fell short of one hundred thousand pounds of copper, and exceeded or amounted to seventy-five thousand. They formed twenty centuries, ten of younger men, and ten of elders; and they were allowed to dispense with the coat of mail, and to bear the large oblong wooden shield called scutum, instead of the round brazen shield, clipeus, of the first ranks of the phalanx. The third class contained a like number of centuries, equally divided into those of the younger men and elders; its qualification was property between fifty thousand pounds of copper, and seventy-five thousand; and the soldiers of this class were allowed to lay aside the greaves as’ well as the coat of mail. The fourth class, again, contained twenty centuries; the lowest point of its qualification was twentyfive thousand pounds of copper, and its soldiers were required to provide no defensive armor, but to go to battle merely with the pike and a javelin. These four classes composed the phalanx; but a fifth class, divided into thirty centuries, and consisting of those whose property was between twentyfive thousand pounds of copper, and twelve thousand five hundred, formed the regular lightarmed infantry of the army, and were required to provide themselves with darts and slings. The poorest citizens,29 whose property fell short of twelve thousand five hundred pounds, were considered, in a manner, as supernumeraries in this The Accensi and velati, division. Those who had more than one thousand five hundred and the Proletarii. pounds of copper, were still reckoned amongst the tax-payers, Assidui, and were formed into two centuries, called the Accensi and Velati. They followed the army, but without bearing arms, being only required to step into the places of those who fell; and, in the mean time, acting as orderlies to the centurions and decurions. Below these came one century of the Proletarii, whose property was between one thousand five hundred pounds and three hundred and seventy-five. These paid no taxes, and in ordinary times had no military duty; but on great emergencies arms were furnished them by the government, and they were called out as an extraordinary levy. One century more included all whose property was less than three hundred and seventy-five pounds, and who were called Capite Censi; and from these last no military service was at any time required, as we are told, till a late period of the republic. Three centuries of a different character from all the rest remain to be described, centuries defined, not by the amount of their property, but by The Fabri, Concines, the nature of their occupation; those of carpenters and smiths, and Tubicines. Fabrorum; of horn-blowers, Cornicines; and of trumpeters, Tubicines, or, as Cicero calls them, Liticines. The first of these was attached to the centuries of the first class, the other two to the fourth. The nature of their callings so connected them with the service of the army, that this peculiar distinction was granted to them. The position held in the comitia by the patricians’ clients is involved in great 2 See, for all this account of the census, Livy, buhr’s quotations, if, indeed, any could suspect I. 43, and Dionysius, IV. 16-19. it; and having been fully satisfied with his 28

See Niebuhr, vol. I. p. 459. Ed. 2. results, I have thought it best to refer to his 29 See Niebuhr, p. 465, and the authorities work, rather than to the original writers, as the acere quoted. I have gone over the ground combined view of the several facts belongs to myself, and have verified the accuracy of Nie-him, and not to them.

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30 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. V obscurity. We know that they had votes, and probably they must have been enrolled in the classes according to the amount of their property, without reference to its nature: at the same time, Niebuhr thinks that they did not serve in the regular infantry along with the plebeians. It would seem from the story of the three hundred Fabii, and from the adventures related of Caius Marcius,‘0 that the clients followed their lords to the field at their bidding, and formed a sort of feudal force quite distinct from the national army of the commons, like the retainers of the nobles in the middle ages, as distinguished from the free burghers of the cities. Such is the account transmitted to us of the constitution of the comitia of centuries. As their whole organization was military, so they were accustomed to meet”3 without the city, in the Field of Mars; they were called together, not by lictors, like the comitia of the curira, but by the blast of the horn; and their very name was, “
the Army of the City,” “Exercitus Urbanus.“32 It is quite plain that this constitution tended to give the chief power in the state to the body of the commons, and especially to the richer class The constitution as soon destroyed, and among them, who fought in the first ranks of the phalanx.

For wherever there is a well-armed and well-disciplined infantry, it constitutes the main force of an army; and it is a true observation of Aristotle,“3 that in the ancient commonwealth the chief power was apt to be.possessed by that class of the people whose military services were most important; thus, when the navy of Athens became its great support and strength, the government became democratical; because the ships were chiefly manned by citizens of the poorer classes. But we know that for a very long period after the time of Servius, the commons at Rome, far from being the dominant part of the nation, were excluded from the highest offices in the state, and were grievously oppressed, both individually and as a body. Nay, further, whenever we find any details given of the proceedings of the comitia, or of the construction of the army, we perceive a state of things very different from that prescribed by the constitution of Servius. HIence have arisen the difficulties connected with it; for, as it was never fully carried into effect, but overthrown within a very few years after its formation, and only gradually and in part restored; as thus the constitution with which the oldest annalists, and even the law-books which they copied, were familiar, was not the original constitution of Servius, but one bearing its nanme, while in reality it greatly differed from it; there is a constant confusion between the two, and what is ascribed to the one may often be true only when understood of the other. Other good and popular institutions were ascribed to the reign of Servius. As he had made the commons an order in the state, so he gave for theiomnanorder.3 of them judges out of their own body to try all civil‘4 causes; whereas before they had no jurisdiction, but referred’ all their suits either to the king or to the houses. These judges were, as Niebuhr thinks, the centumviri, the hundred men, of a later period, elected three from each tribe, so that in the time of Servius their number would probably have been ninety. To give a further organization to the commons, he is said also to have instituted Theo fstivals of the Pa-the festivals called Paganalia and Compitalia. In the tribes in the ganalia and Compitalia. country, many strongholds on high ground, pagi,35 had been fixed 30 Dionlysiis, VII. 19, 20. clans as formerly, repi rda atr b6Xata, IV. 43. The’i A. Gellius, XV. 27, quoted firm Lvlius Ephori, in like manner, at Sparta were judges in Felix. rag rOv avPoioXa1Wv GfKag. Aristot. Polit. III 1.,a Varro, de L. L., VI. 93.

Ed. Bekker. 33 Politics, V. 4. VI. 7 Ed. Bekker. 35 It does not appear from Dionysius’ account 34 Dionysius calls these causes 1LWtorkad, as whether there were one or more pagi in every opposed to eri gs r’ eCroLV

Opoerav IV. 2a; but tribe. It would be most natural to suppose afterwards he expresses himself more freely, that there was but one, as otherwise the nulmwhen he calls these laws, laws which hindered bers of the people would have been taken;be comrn ons from being wronged by the patri-according to a different division than that into

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CHAP. V.] HISTORY OF THE LATER KINGS, ETC. 31 upon as a general refuge for the inhabitants and their cattle in case of invasion. Here they all met once a year, to keep festival, and every man, woman, and child paid on these occasions a certain sum, which, being collected by the priests, gave the amount of the whole population. And for the same purpose,36 every one living in the city paid a certain sum at the temple of Juno Lucina for every birth in his family, another sum at the temple of Venus Libitina for every death, and a third at the temple of Youth for every son who came to the age of military service. The Compitalia37 in the city answered to the Paganalia in the country, and were a yearly festival in honor of the Lares or guardian spirits, celebrated at all the compita, or places where several streets met. Other laws and measures are ascribed to Servius, which seem to be the fond invention of a later period, when the commons, suffering under a Other laws acribed to cruel and unjust system, and wishing its overthrow, gladly be-Sarvius. lieved that the deliverance which they longed for had been once given them by their good king, and that they were only reclaiming old rights, not demanding new ones.

Servius, it is said,38 drove out the patricians from their unjust occupation of the public land, and ordered that the property only, and not the person, of a debtor should be liable for the payment of his debt.

Further, to complete the notion of a patriot king, it was said that he had drawn out a scheme of popular government, by which two magistrates, chosen every year, were to exercise the supreme power, and that he himself pyoposed to lay down his kingly rule to make way for them. It can hardly be doubted that these two magistrates were intended to be chosen the one from the houses and the other from the commons, to be the representatives of their respective orders. III. But the following tyranny swept away the institutions of Servius, and much more prevented the growth of that society, for which alone his in-The constitution of Servius succeeded by stitutions were fitted. No man can tell how much of the story of a yran.y.

the murder of the old king and of the impiety of the wicked Tullia is historical; but it is certain that the houses, or rather a strong faction among them, supported Tarquinius in his usurpation: nor can we doubt the statement that the aristocratical brotherhoods or societies served him more zealously than the legal assembly of the curiae; because these societies are ever to be met with in the history of the ancient commonwealths, as pledged to one another for the interests of their order, and ready to support those interests by any crime. Like Sylla, in after times, he crushed the liberties of the commons, doing away with the laws39
of tribes; which does not seem probable. The 37 Dionysius, IV. 14. What Dionysius here pagus was in a manner the town of the tribe, calls the Compitalia, and which he says were or rather would have become so, had this state kept a few days after the Saturnalia, are not of things continued. Dionysius connects pagus marked in the calendars, because, though the with the Greek frdyo, which is likely enough; seasons at which they fell was fixed, the day although afterwards the word merely signified was not so: they were amongst the ”’ concepa district or canton, whether in a plain country, tivo Ferin,” or festivals announced every year or in ahilly. Nor do Varro’s words (L. L. V. p. by the magistrates, of which the precise day in 49. Edit. Dordr. 1619), “Ferie non populi sed some instances varied. (Macrobins, Saturnal. montanorum modo ut Paganalibus, qui sunt ali-I. 16.) They must not be confounded with the cujus pagi,”

imply that the Pagani were monta-festival of the Lares Prestites on the first of ni: for the whole passage,when rightly stopped, May. The Lares were the spirits of the dead and as Midller has now printed it, runs thus:-‘atloveE, who watched over their living pos”Dies Septimontium, nominatus ab his septem terity; thence Dionysius calls them;1pwes, bemontibus in queis sita urbs est, ferim non populi cause the heroes were deified men, like Iiesiod’s sed montanorum modeo: ut Paganalibus, qui 6altOVes, whom he calls oAeaKeg Ovrlrcv dhOpcyr7ov. sunt alicujus pagi.” “

Montani” refers to the The name of Lares is Etruscan, Lar is prince or inhabitants of the seven hills (the seven hills mighty one. Yet as spirits, and belonging to of old Rome, existing before the time of Ser-the invisible world, they were called also the vius); and Varro says that the Septimontium children of Mania (Macrobius, Saturnal. I. 7), was a festival kept not by the whole people, but a horrible goddess, whose name was given to by the inhabitants of those hills only; just as, frightful masks, the terror of children. Mania at the Paganalia, the inhabitants of the pages is clearly connected with the Dii Manes, who alone shared in the festival. See Festus, in were also the spirits of a man’s departed ancesSeptimotio, ontio epti ntio ut ait Antistius tors. Laneo, hisce montibuls Ferie,” &c. Y8 Dionysius, IV. 9. a Dionysius, IV. 15. >

Dionysius, IV. 43.

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32 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. VL Servius, and, as we are told, destroying the tables on which they were written; abolishing the whole system of the census, and consequently the arrangement of the classes, and with them the organization of the phalanx; and forbidding even the religious meetings of the Paganalia and Compitalia, in order to undo all that had been done to give the commons strength and union. Further, it is expressly said,40 that he formed his military force out of a small portion of the people, and employed the great bulk of them in servile works, in the building of the Circus and the Capitoline Temple, and the completion of the great drain or cloaca; so that in his wars his army consisted of his allies, the Latins and Hernicans, in a much greater proportion than of Romans. His enmity to the commons was all in the spirit of Sylla; and the members of the aristocratical societies, who were his ready tools in’ every act of confiscation, or legal murder, or mere assassination, were faithfully represented by the agents of Sylla’s proscription, by L. Catilina and his patrician associates. But in what followed, Tarquinius showed himself, like Critias or Appius Claudius, a mere vulgar tyrant, who preferred himself to his order, when the two came into competition, and far inferior to Sylla, the most sincere of aristocrats, who, having secured the ascendancy of his order, was content to resign his own personal power, who was followed therefore by the noblest as well as. by the vilest of his countrymen, by Pompeius and Catulus no less than by Catilina. Thus Tarquinius became hated by all that was good and noble amongst the houses, as well as by the commons; and both orders cordially joined to effect his overthrow. But the evil of his tyranny survived him; it was not so easy to restore what he had destroyed as to expel him and his family: the commons no longer stood beside the patricians as an equal order, free, wealthy, well armed, and well organized; they were now poor, ill armed, and with no bonds of union; they therefore naturally sunk beneath the power of the nobility, and the revolution which drove out the Tarquins established at Rome not a free commonwealth, but an exclusive and tyrannical aristocracy.

CHAPTER VI, MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES OF THE STATE OF THE ROMANS UNDER THEIR

KINGS. “Ad nos vix tenuis famne perlabitur aura.” VIRGIL, tEn. VII. THE
last chapter was long, yet the view which can be derived from it is imperfect. Questions must suggest themselves, as I said before, to which it contains no answers. Yet it seemed better to draw the attention first to one main point, and to state that point as fully as possible, reserving to another place much that was needed to complete the picture. For instance, the account of the classes of Servius leads naturally to questions as to the wealth of the Romans, its sources, its distribution, and its amount: the division of the people into centuries excites a curiosity as to their numbers: the mention of the change of the Roman worship, and the introduction of Etruscan rites, dispose us to ask, how these rites affected the moral character of the people; what that character was, and from whence derived. Again, when we read of the great works of the later kings, we think what advance or what style of the arts was displayed in them; and the laws of king Servius written on tables, with the poetical and uncertain nature of the story of his reign, make us consider what was the state of the human mind, and what 40 Dionysius, IV.

44.

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CHAP. VI.] MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES, ETC. 33 use had as yet been made of the great invention of letters. It is to these points, so far as I am able, that the following chapter will be devoted. I. Niebuhr has almost exhausted the subject of the Roman copper money. He has’ shown its originally low value, owing to the great abundance Of the wealth of tho of the metal; that as it afterwards became scarce, a reduction in terkinl55.a Their copthe weight of the coin followed naturally, not as a fraudulent de-per money. preciation of it, but because a small portion of it was now as valuable as a large mass had been before. The plenty of copper in early times is owing to this, that where it is found, it exists often in immense quantities, and even in large masses of pure metal on the surface of the soil. Thus the Copper Indians of North America found it in such abundance on their hills that they used it for all domestic purposes; but the supply thus easily obtained soon became exhausted: and as the Indians have no knowledge of mining, the metal is now comparatively scarce. The small value of copper at Rome is shown not only by the size of the coins, the as having been at first a full pound in weight, but also by the price of the warhorse, according to the regulation of Servius Tullius, namely, ten thousand’ pounds of copper. This statement, connected as it is with the other details of the census, seems original and authentic; nor considering the great abundance of cattle, and other circumstances, is it inconsistent with the account in Plutarch’s life of Publicola, that an ox, in the beginning of the commonwealth, was worth one hundred oboli, and a sheep worth ten; nor with the provisions of the Aternian law, which fixed the price of the one at one hundred ases and the other at ten. The sources of wealth amongst the Romans, under their later kings, were agriculture, and also, in a large proportion, foreign commerce. Agri-Their principal sourculture, indeed, strictly speaking, could scarcely be called a source Ce ofWealt of wealth; for the portions of land assigned to each man, even if from the beginning they were as much as seven jugera, were not large enough to allow of the growth of much superfluous produce. The ager publicus, or undivided public land, was indeed of considerable extent, and this, as being enjoyed exclusively by the patricians, might have been a source of great profit. But in the earliest times it seems probable that the greatest part of this land was kept as pasture;3 and only the small portions of two jugera, allotted by the houses to their clients, to be held during pleasure, were appropriated to tillage. The low prices of sheep and oxen show that cattle must have been abundant; the earliest revenue, according to Pliny, was derived from pasture; that is, the patricians paid so much to the state 1Vol. I. p. 474, et seqq. Ed. 2. See also M[dl-licola. Was it from Timnus, from whom Pliny ler, Etrusker, I.

4. ~ 13. learnt that Servius Tullius was the first person 2 ” Ad equos emendos dena millia eris.ex pub-who stamped money at Rome? And if so at lico data.”’ Livy, I. 43. It has been doubted what did he reckon the as Polybius reckoned whether this sum be meant as the price of one the light as of his time at half an obolus, wb;.ch horse or two: Niebulir supposes that it includes would make the denarius, as it was already the purchase of a slave to act as groom, and also equivalent to sixteen ases, equal to eight obolh, of a horse for hil; -And this seems confirmed ora drachm, and onethird. (II. 15.) By a comin some degree.by Festus, who says that the Ro-parison with the Aternian law, one would supmans used two horses in battle, to have a fresh pose that the obolus was meant to be equivalent one to n{ouant when the first one was tired; and to the as; if so, copper had so risen in value, that the money given to furnish these two hors-that although the as of half an ounce weight was es was called Pararium.

Festus in ” Pararimn,” equal to half an obolus, the as, when it weighed and ” Paribus equis.” Yet I find in Von Rau-twenty-four times as much, that is, a full pound, mer’s account of the prices of Things in the mid-had only been worth twice as much; a diminudle ages (Geschichte der IHohenstaufen, V. p. tion in value of twelve hundred per cent. 436, et seqq.), that in the year 1097, at the siege 3 “Din,” says Pliny, XVIII.3.

pascua solum of Antioch, an ox was sold cheap at five shil-vectigal fuerant.” Varro says, ” Quos agros non lings; and in 1225, at Verona, the average price colebant propter silvas, aut id genus ubi pecus of a horse was twentyfive pounds. This is posset pasci, et possicshbnst, ab usu suo Saltus reckoning by the Italian lira or pound, divided nominarunt.” IDe L.L. V. ~ 36. “Possidere,” into twenty solidi or shillings; but the value as Niebuhr’s readers well know, is the proper of both the pound and the shilling differed so term for the occupation of the public land. And mluch in different times and places, that the the Scholiast on Thucydides, I.

139, rightly concomparison cannot be depended on without fur-siders yes aopiarov to be equivalent to oie a7repeother examination. We should like to know from uvrsvq, because undivided land was commonly left what Greek writer Plutarch borrowed his state-in pasture. ment of the price of an ox in the time of Pub3

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34 HISTORY OF ROME. [OHAP. VI for their enjoyment of the ager publicus, which was left unenclosed as pasture ground; and all accounts speak of the great quantities of cattle reared in Italy from time immemorial. Cattle then may have been a source of wealth; but commerce must have been so in a still greater degree. The early foundation of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, ascribed to Ancus Marcius, could have had no object, unless the Romans had been engaged in foreign trade; and the treaty with Carthage, already alluded to, proves the same thing directly and undeniably. In this treaty the Romans are allowed to trade with Sardinia, with Sicily, and with Africa westward of the Fair Headland, that is, with Carthage itself, and all the coast westward to the Pillars of Hercules; and it is much more according to the common course of things that this treaty should have been made to regulate a trade already in activity, than to call it for the first time into existence. By this commerce great fortunes were sure to be made, because there were as yet so many new markets4 open to the enterprising trader, and none, perhaps, where the demand for his goods had been so steadily and abundantly supplied as to destroy the profit of his traffic. But although much wealth must thus have been brought into Rome, it is another question how widely it was distributed. Was foreign trade open to every Roman, or was it confined to the patricians and their clients, and in a still larger proportion to the king? The king had large domains of his own,5 partly arable, partly pasture, and partly planted with vines and olives; hence he was in a condition to traffic with foreign countries, and much of the Roman commerce was, probably, carried on by the government for its own direct benefit, as was the case in Juduea, in the reign of Solomon. The patricians also, we may be sure, exported, like the Russian nobility, the skins and wool of the numerous herds and flocks which they fed upon their public land, and were the owners of trading ships, as it was not till three centuries afterwards that a law6 was passed with the avowed object of restraining senators, a term then become equivalent with patricians, from possessing ships of a large burden. Nor can we suppose that the new plebeian centuries of knights, who had been chosen from the richest of the commons, were excluded from those commercial dealings which their order in later times almost monopolized.

All these classes,‘then, might, and probably did, become wealthy; but, it may be doubted whether the plebeian landholders had the same opportunities open to them. Agriculture was to them the business of their lives; if their estates were ill cultivated, they were liable to be degraded from their order; nor had they the capital which could enable them to enter with advantage upon foreign trade. It is possible, indeed, that foreign trade may have been one of the privileges of the higher classes, as it is at this day in Russia;7 but surely Niebuhr is not warranted by the passage which he quotes from Dionysius, in asserting that the plebeians were excluded from commerce as well as from handicraft occupations; retail trade,8 which is all that Dionysius speaks of, was 4 Thus Herodotus speaks of the enormous pro-the term 4ir6pwv, but I think that it is ir4dpwv fits made by a Samian ship which accidentally which he uses in an improper sense, and not found its way to Tartessus; observing, b Ei p. - KcirnXov.

Cicero distinguishes between them in 7r6Lpov rouro iv a&riparov robrov tra Xp6vov. IV. 152. a wellknown passage. “Sordidi etiam putandi P Cicero de RPepublic, V. 2. These were the qui mercantur a mercatoribus quod statim venGreek TreEPr, which the kings always had as-dant; (KdarboX) opificesque omnes (%Ep6rrXval) signed to them. See tIerodot. IV. 161. in sordid& arte versantur. * Mereatura By-Caius Flaminius, a short time before the autem, si tenuis est, sordida putanda est: sin second Punic war. See Livy, XXI. 63. magna et copiosa multa undique apportans, mul7 Of the’” Merchants of the three Guilds,” tisque sine vanitate impertiens, non est admoonly those of the first guild, possessing a capital dum vituperanda.” De Officiis, II. prope finem. of at least fifty thousand francs (something Cicero wrote at a time when all trade was conmoe-3:han two thousand pounds), are allowed sidered degrading to a senator, and his language to own merchant ships, and to carry on foreign breathes the spirit of modern aristocracy. Yet trade. Those of the second guild may only trade even he distinguishes between the merchant and within the Russian empire; those of the third the petty trader or shopkeeper. The plebeians guild may only carry on retail trades. See were excluded from following thelatter callings Schl-itzler, Statistique de lEmpire de Russie, by positive institution; from the former they p. 117, might have been virtually excluded by their povB Oiers K~drfXov ol’re Xetporxvrtiv fiov B X:otv, IX. erty. 25. It is true that Dionysius had just before used Since writing the above note, I see that Nie

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CHAP. VI.] MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES, ETC. 35 considered by the ancients in a very different light from the wholesale dealings of the merchant with foreign countries. Beyond this we have scarcely the means of proceeding.

Setting aside the tyranny ascribed to Tarquinius, and remembering that it was his policy to deprive the commons of their lately acquired citizenship, and to treat them like subjects rather than members of the state, the picture given of the wealth and greatness of Judoea under Solomon, may convey some idea of the state of Rome under its later kings.

Powerful amongst surrounding nations, exposed to no hostile invasions, with a flourishing agriculture, and an active commerce, the country was great and prosperous; and the king was enabled to execute public works of the highest magnificence, and to invest himself with a splendor unknown in the earlier times of the monarchy. The last Tarquinius was guilty of individual acts of oppression, we may be sure, towards the patricians no less than the plebeians; but it was these last whom he labored on system to depress and degrade, and whom he employed, as Solomon did the Canaanites,5 in all the servile and laborious part of his undertakings.

Still the citizens or patricians themselves found that the splendor of his government had its burdens for them also; as the great majority of the Israelites, amid all the peace and prosperity of Solomon’s reign, and although exempted from all servile labor, and serving only in honorable offices,‘l yet complained that they had endured a grievous yoke, and took the first opportunity to relieve themselves from it by banishing the house of Solomon from among them forever. Of the population of Rome under its later kings nothing can be known with certainty, unless we consider as historical the pretended return of the census taken by Servius Tullius, eighty-four thousand seven hun-P dred. Nor is it possible to estimate the numbers of the army from the account of the centuries. We, are expressly told that the centuries were very unequal in the number of men contained in them; and even with regard to the centuries of the first class, we know not whether they consisted of any fixed number. It is possible that the century in the Roman army, like the 1rags in the Athenian, bore two different senses; the Athenian heavyarmed infantry were divided into ten RQiusgs, but the number contained in each of these must necessarily have been indefinite. We read, however, of r-k’sis and r’au;iexo0 in particular expeditions, by which, apparently, we are to understand certain drafts from the larger rhEsi6 with their commanders, and the numbers here would be fixed according to the force required for the expedition. So the centuri”’ of the different classes must have each furnished their contingents for actual service on a certain fixed proportion, and these contingents from the centuries would be called centuries themselves; but we do not know either their actual force, or their force comparatively with one another; a century of the fifth class, consisting of lightarmed soldiers, must have contained many more men than a century of heavyarmed soldiers of the first class. II. It is difficult to form a clear idea of the moral character of the Roman people under its kings, because we cannot be sure that the pictures Moral and political handed down to us of that period were not copied from the man-mans. ners of a later time, and thus represent, in fact, the state of the commonwealth rather than that of the monarchy.; Thus the simple habits of Lucretia seem copied from the matrons of the republic in the time of its early poverty, and cannot safely be ascribed to the princesses of the magnificent house of the Tarquinii.

Again, we can scarcely tell how far we may carry back the origin of those charbuhr has himself tacitly corrected his mistake 10 1 Kings, v. 22.

Compare xii. 4-16. it the second volume, p. 450, 2dc Ed. by transas I propose to reserve all consideration of the lating Kti7rrXao in this samne passage of Diony-numbers and constitution of the early Roman sins, ” wer liJramh4adet erwihlte,” instead legion for the next volume, when we shall for of 4” Irandel.” ” Kramhandel” is ” retail the first time have any historical accounts in detrade.” tail of the military operations of the Roman ar-‘ 1 Kings, ix. 20, 21. mies.

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36 HISTORY OF ROME, [CIIAP. VL acteristic points in the late’ Roman manners, the absolute authority possessed by the head of a family over his wife and children. But it is probable that they are of great antiquity; for the absolute power of a father over his sons extended only to those who were born in that peculiar form of marriage called Connubium, a connection which anciently could only subsist between persons of the same order, and which was solemnized by a peculiar ceremony called Confarreatio; a ceremony so sacred, that a marriage thus contracted could only be dissolved by certain unwonted and horrible rites, purposely ordered, as it seems, to discourage the practice of divorce. All these usages point to a very great antiquity, and indicate the early severity of the Roman domestic manners, and the habits of obedience which every citizen learned under his father’s roof. This severity, however, did not imply an equal purity; connubium could only be contracted with’one wife, but the practice of concubinage was tolerated, although the condition of a concubine is marked as disreputable by a law so old as to be ascribed to Numa.l2 And the indecency of some parts of the ancient religious worship, and the license allowed at particular festivals, at marriages, and in the festal meetings of men amongst themselves, belong so much to an agricultural people, as well as to hu.man nature in general, that these, too, may be safely presumed to be coeval with the very origin of the Roman nation. But the most striking point in the character of the Romans, and that which has Their love of institu-SO permanently influenced the condition of mankind, was their love tions anl law. of institutions and of order, their reverence for law, their habit of considering the individual as living only for that society of which he was a member. This character, the very opposite to that of the barbarian and the savage, belongs, apparently, to that race to which the Greeks and Romans both belong, by whatever name, Pelasgian, Tyrrhenian, or Sikelian, we choose to distinguish it. It has, indeed, marked the Teutonic race, but; in a less degree: the Kelts have been strangers to it, nor do we find it developed amongst the nations of Asia: but it strongly characterizes the Dorians in Greece, and the Romans; nor is it wanting among the Ionians, although in these last it was modified by that individual freedom which arose naturally from the surpassing vigor of their intellect, the destined wellspring of wisdom to the whole world. But in Rome, as at Lacedaemon, as there was much less activity of reason, so the tendency to regulate and to organize was much more predominant. Accordingly, we find traces of this character in the very earliest traditions of Roman story. Even in Romulus, his institutions go hand in hand with his deeds in arms; and the wrath of the gods darkened the last years of the warlike Tullus,’ because he had neglected the rites and ordinances established by Numa. Numa; and Servius, whose memory was cherished most fondly, were known only as lawgivers; Ancus, like Romulus, is the founder of institutions as well as the conqueror, and one particular branch of law is ascribed to him as its author, the ceremonial to be observed before going to war. The two Tarquinii are represented as of foreign origin, and the character of their reigns is foreign also. They are great warriors and great kings; they extend the dominion of Rome; they enlarge the city, and embellish it with great and magnificent works; but they add nothing to its institutions; and it was the crime of the last Tarquinius to undo those good regulations which his predecessor had appointed. It is allowed, on all hands, that the works 6f art executed in Rome under the later kings; whether architecture”a or sculpture,‘4 were of Etruscan Of the stateof the arts.

origin; but what is meant by “Etruscan,” and how far Etruscan 12 Pellex aram Junonis ne tangito..si tan-been Etruscan. (Pliny, XXXV. 12.) Micali get, Junoni crinibus demissis anllum feminam supposes the temple here meant to have been cuedito. Festus in “Pellex.”- the one vowed by A.

Postumins, dictator at tho “1 Intentus perlficiendo templo, fabris undique battle of the lake Regillus (Tacitus, Annal. II. ex Etruria accitis, &c.

Livy, I. 56. 49), described as a temple, “‘Libero, Liberseque 14 Before the ornamenting of the temple of et Cereri, juxta Circum Maximum.” At any Ceres at Rome, near the Circus Maximus, by two rate, the two Greek artists must belong to a Greeks, Damophilus and Gorgasus, all works of period later than the foundation of the cappainting or sculpture, according to Varro, had itol.

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CrAr. VI.] MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES, ETC. 37 art was itself derived from Greece, is a question which has been warmly disputed. The statue of Jupiter‘6 in the capitol, and the four-horsed chariot on the summit of the temple, together with most of the statues of the gods, were at: this period wrought in clay; bronze was not generally employed till a later age. There is no mention of any paintings in Rome itself earlier than the time of the commonwealth; but Pliny speaks of some frescoes at Ardea and at Caere, which he considered to be older than the very foundation of the city, and which in his own age preserved the freshness of their coloring, and in his judgment were works of remarkable merit. The Capitoline Temple‘6 itself was built nearly in the form of a square, each side being about two hundred feet in length; its front faced southwards, towards the Forum and the Palatine, and had a triple row of pillars before it, while a double row inclosed the sides of the temple. These, it is probable, were not of marble, but made either of the stone of Rome itself, like the cloaca, or possibly from the quarries of Gabii or Alba. The end of the reign of the last king of Rome falls less than twenty years before the battle of Marathon. The age of the Greek heroic poetry Lan.uae -and intel.

lectual character of the was long since past; the evils of the iron age, of that imperfect civil-Romans. ization, when legal oppression has succeeded to the mere violence of the plunderer and the conqueror, had been bewailed by Hesiod three centuries earlier; Theognis had mourned over the sinking importance of noble birth, and the growing influence of riches; the old aristocracies had been overthrown by single tyrants, and these, again, had everywhere yielded to the power of aristocracies under a mitigated form, which in some instances admitted a mixture of popular freedom. Alcoeus and Sappho had, been dead for more than half a century; Simonides was in the vigor of life; and prose history had already been attempted by Hecatmus of Miletus. Of the works of these last, indeed, only fragments have descended to us; but their entire writings, together with those of many other earlier poets, scattered up and down through a period of more than two hundred years, existed till the general wreck of ancient literature, and furnished abundant monuments of the vigor of the Greek mind, long before the period when history began faithfully to record particular events. But of the Roman mind under the kings, Cicero knew no more than we do. He had seen no works of that period, whether of historians or of poets; he had never heard the name of a single individual whose genius had made it famous, and had preserved its memory, together with his own. A certain number of laws ascribed to the kings, and preserved, whether on tables of wood or brass, in the capitol, or in the collection of the jurist Papirius, were almost the sole monuments which could illustrate the spirit of the early ages of the Ro15 Pliny, XXXV. 12, quotes Varro, as saying term of the Etruscans, properly so called, the “Turrianum a Fregellis accitum, cui locaret conquerors of the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians, or of Tarquinius Priscus effigiem Jovis in capitolio these Tyrrheno-Pelasgians themselves, who dicandam.” He had just before said that all the must have held Agylla at least, if not other places images of this period were Etruscan; how, then, on the coast, down to the time of the last kings do we find the statue of Jupiter himself ascribed of Rome; or, again, how much of Etruscan art to an artist of Fregellhe, a Volscian town on the was introduced directly into Italy from Greece Livis, with which the Romans in Tarquinius’ itself, as is indicated in the story of Demaratus reign are not known to have had any connec-coming from Corinth to Tarqvinii, with the arttion Besides, ” Turrianus” is apparently only ists Euchir and Eugrammus, ”’ Cunning hand” another form of ” Tyrrhenus,”

and seems, to and “Cunning carver.” The paintings at Armark the artist as an Etruscan. Are we, then, dea and Caere, mentioned by Pliny, both occur to read Fregena instead of Fregella, or are we in towns of Pelasgian origin; and the arts may to suppose the artist’s fame to have been so emi-have thus been cultivated to a certain degree in nent that the people of Fregellae had first invi-Italy, even before the beginning of any commuted him thither from his own country, and the nication with Greece. But the vases and other Roman king afterwards brought him from Fre-monuments now found in Etruscan towns, in gellas to Rome? In this manner, Polycrates of the ruins of Tarquinii, for instance, and of Vulci, Samos sent for Democedes, the physician from belong to a later period, and are either actually Athens; and the Athenians had invited him of Greek workmanship, or were executed by from lEgina, where he had first settled after Etruscans to whom Greek art was familiar. See leaving his own country, Croton. Herodotus, M. Bunsen’s ” Discours,” in the 6th volume of III. 131.

the Annals ofthe Antiquarian Institute of Rome, But the question still returns, What is meant p. 40, &c. by Etruscan art? Are we to understand this‘6 Dionysius IV. 61.

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38 HISTORY OF ROME. [CIAP. VI man people. But even these, to judge from the few extracts with which we are acquainted, must have been modernized in their language; for the Latin of a law ascribed to Servius Tullius, is perfectly intelligible, and not more ancient in its forms than that of the fifth century of Rome; whereas the few genuine monuments of the earliest times, the Hymns of the Salii, and of the Brotherhood of Husbandry, Fratres Arvales, required to be interpreted to the Romans of Cicero’s time, like a foreign language; and of the hymn of the Fratres Arvales we can ourselves judge, for it has been accidentally preserved to our days, and the meaning of nearly half of it is only to be guessed at. This agrees with what Polybius says of the language of the treaty between Rome and Carthage, concluded in the first year of the commonwealth; it was so unlike the Latin of his own time, the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century of Rome, that even those who understood it best found some’things in it which, with their best attention, they could scarcely explain. Thus, although verses were uindoubtedly made and sung in the times of the kings, at funerals and at feasts, in commemoration of the worthy deeds of the noblest of the Romans; and although some of the actual stories of the kings may, perhaps, have come down from this source, yet it does not appear that they were ever written, and thus they were altered from one generation to another, nor can any one tell at what time they attained to their present shape. Traces of a period much later than that of the kings may be discerned in them; and I see no reason to differ from the opinion of Niebuhr, who thinks that as we now have them they are not earlier than the restoration of the city after the invasion of the Gauls.

If this be so, there rests a veil not to be removed, not only on the particular history of the early Romans, but on that which we should much more desire to know, and which in the case of Greece stands forth in such full light, the nature and power of their genius; what they thought, what they hated, and what they loved. Yet although the legends of the early Roman story are neither historical, nor yet coeval with the subjects which they celebrate, still their fame is so great, and their beauty and interest so surpassing, that it would be unpardonable to sacrifice them altogether to the spirit of inquiry and of fact, and to exclude them from the place which they have so long held in Roman history. Nor shall I complain of my readers, if they pass over with indifference these attempts of mine to put together the meagre fragments of our knowledge, and to present them with an outline of the times of the kings, at once incomplete and without spirit; while they read with eager interest the immortal story of the fall of Tarquinius, and the wars with Porsenna and the Latins, as it has been handed down to us in the rich coloring of the old heroic lays of Rome.

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CHAPTER VII. THE STORY OF THE BANISHING OF KING TARQUINIUS AND HIS HOUSE, AND OF THEIR ATTEMPTS TO GET THEMSELVES BROUGHT BACK AGAIN. “Vis et Tarquinios reges, animasmque superbam Ultoris Bruti, fascesque videre receptos?” VIGILm, LEn. VI. WHILE king Tarquinius was at the height of his greatness, it chanced upon a time, that from the altar’ in the court of his palace there crawled out a How king Tarquiniu,, snake, which devoured the offerings laid on the altar. So the king gy iZ his pilace, se.t thought it not enough to consult the soothsayers of the Etruscans Lucius Brutus to consult the oracle of Delwhom he had with him, but he sent two of his own sons to Del-phi. phi, to ask counsel of the oracle of the Greeks; for the oracle of Delphi2 was famous in all lands. So his sons Titus and Aruns went to Delphi, and they took with them their cousin Lucius Junius, whom men call Brutus, that is, the Dullard; for he seemed to be wholly without wit, and he would eat wild figs with honey.3 This Lucius was not really dull, but very subtle; and it was for fear of his uncle’s cruelty, that he made himself as one without sense; for he was very rich, and he feared lest king Tarquinius should kill him for the sake of his inheritance. So when he went to Delphi he carried with him a staff of horn, and the staff was hollow, and it was filled within with gold, and he gave the staff to the oracle4 as a likeness of himself; for though he seemed dull, and of no account to look upon, yet he had a golden wit within. When the three young men had performed the king’s bidding, they asked the oracle for themselves, and they said, “0 Lord Apollo, tell us which of us shall be king in Rome?” Then there came a voice from the sanctuary and said, ” Whichever of you shall first kiss his mother.” So the sons of Tarquinius agreed to draw lots between themselves, which of them should first kiss their mother, when they should have returned to Rome; and they said they would keep the oracle secret from their brother Sextus, lest he should be king rather than they. But Lucius understood the mind of the oracle better; so as they all went down from the temple, he stumbled as if by chance, and fell with his face to the earth, and kissed the earth; for he said, ” The earth is the true mother of us all.” Now when they came back to Rome, king Tarquinius was at war with the people of Ardea;5 and as the city was strong, his army lay a long How, atthe siege ofAr. while before it, till it should be forced to yield through famine.

dea,ithe Roat.trthe So the Romans had leisure for feasting and for diverting them-atho f their wiveas, selves: and once Titus and Aruns6
were supping with their brother judged the. erthiest. Ovid, Fasti, II.

711. ing them when just taken out of it, i. e. with the Ecce, nefas visu, mediis altaribus anguis honey clinging all about them. Compare PlauExit, et extinctis ignibus exta rapit. tus, Merc. I. 2, 28,’ Resinamn ex melle devora2 ivy, I. 56, maxime inclitunm in terris oracu-to,” where the sense of the preposition can hardlum. The story of the last of the Roman kings ly be distinguished from that of” cum.” Grossi sending to consult the oracle at Delphi, is in it-and grossuli are imperfect and unripe figs; eiself nothing improbable. We read of the Agyl-ther those of the wild fig which never come to lmans of Agylla or Csere doing the same thing perfection, or the young fruit of the cultivated at an earlier period.

HIerodotus, I. 167. These fig gathered before its time. were Tyrrhenians, or Pelasgians; and there was Per ambages effigiem ingenii sui. Livy, L a sufficient mixture of the same race in the Ro-56. man people, to give themn a natural connection 5 Livy, I. 57. This is one of the incongruiwith the religion of Greece. ties of the story. Ardea, in the first year of the 3 A. Postumins Albinus, cotemporary with commonwealth, is mentioned as one of.the deCato the censor, quoted by Macrobius, Satur-pendent allies of Rome. See the famous treaty nalia, II. 16. Grossulos ex melle edebat. “Ex with Carthage, as given by Polybius, III. 22. melle,” dipping them into the honey, and eat-Livy, I. 57.

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40 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. VIL Sextus, and their cousin Tarquinius of Collatia was supping with them. And they disputed about their wives, whose wife of them all was the worthiest lady. Then said Tarquinius of Collatia, ” Let us go and see with our own eyes what our wives are doing, so shall we know which is the worthiest.” Upon this they all mounted their horses, and rode first to Rome; and there they found the wives of Titus, and of Aruns, and of Sextus, feasting and making merry. They then rode on to Collatia, and it was late in the night, but they found Lucretia, the wife of Tarquinius of Collatia, neither feasting nor yet sleeping, but she was sitting with all her handmaids around her, and all were working at the loom. So when they saw this, they all said, “Lucretia is the worthiest lady.” And she entertained her husband and his kinsmen, and after that they rode back to the camp before Ardea. - But a spirit of wicked passion7
seized upon Sextus, and a few days afterwards Of the wvicked deed of he went alone to Collatia, and Lucretia received him hospitably, -extus Tarquinius against L ucreia. for he was her husband’s kinsman. At midnight he arose and went to her chamber, and he said that if she yielded not to him, he would slay her and one of her slaves with her, and would say to her husband that he had slain her in her adultery. So when Sextus had accomplished his wicked purpose, he went back again to the camp., Then Lucretias sent in haste to Rome, to pray that her father Spurius Lucretius HowLncretia,hv.ingtold would come to her; and she sent to Ardea to summon her husband. tbaendand her f..therlew Her father brought along with him Publius Valerius, and her husherself. band brought with him Lucius Junius, whom men call Brutus. When they arrived, they asked earnestly, “Is all well?” Then she told them of the wicked deed of Sextus, and she said, “If ye be men, avenge it.” And they all swore to her that they would avenge it. Then she said again, ” I am not guilty; yet must I too share in the punishment of this deed, lest any should think that they may be false to their husbands and live.” And she drew a knife from her bosom, and stabbed herself to the heart. At that sight9 her husband and her father cried aloud; but Lucius drew the oknife from the wound, and held it up, and said, ” By this blood,-ow her father and her husband and Lucius Bru-I swear, that I will visit this deed upon king Tarquinius, and all tue excited the peopleto drive oat king Tarquieius his accursed race; neither shall any man hereafter be king in Rome, lest he do the like wickedness.”

And he gave the knife to her husband, and to her father, and to Publius Valerius. They marvelled to hear such words from him whom men called dull; but they swore also, and they took up the body of Lucretia, and carried it down into the forum; and they said, “Behold the deeds of the wicked family of Tarquinius.” All the people of Collatia were moved, and the men took up arms, and they set a guard at the gates, that none might go out to carry the tidings to Tarquinius, and they followed Lucius to Rome. There, too, all the people came together, and the crier summoned them to assemble before the tribune of the Celeres, for Lucius held that office.‘0 And Lucius spoke to them of all the tyranny of Tarquinius and his sons, and of the wicked deed of Sextus. And the people in their curia took back from Tarquinius the sovereign power, which they had given him, and they banished him and all his family. Then the younger men followed Lucius to Ardea, to win over the army there to join them; and the city was left in the charge of Spurius Lucretius. But the wicked Tullia fled in haste from her house, and all, Livy, I. 58. with Gravis; this would show a connexion beLivy, I. 58. tween the word and the Greek fPaps. It is Livy, I. 59. very possible that its early signification, as a 0l The tribune of the Celeres was to the king cognomen, may have differed very little from what the master of the horse was afterwards to that of Severus. When the signification of the dictator. It is hardly necessary to point ” dulness”

came to be more confirmed, the out the extravagance of the story, in represent-story of Brutus’ pretended idiotcy would be ing Brutus, though a reputed idiot, yet invested invented to explain the fact of so wise a man with such an important office. Festus says being called by such a name. that Brutus, in old Latin, was synonymous

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CHAP. VII.] THE BANISHING OF KING TARQUINIUS, ETC. 41 both men and women, cursed.her as she passed, and prayed that the furies of her father’s’

blood might visit her with vengeance. Meanwhile” king Tarquinius set out with speed to Rome to put down the tumult. But Lucius turned aside from the road, that he might Of the drivingoutof ling not meet him, and came to the camp; and the soldiers joyfully Tagrquniseal n.tlostesre received him, and they drove out the sons of Tarquinius.. King appointedinhisroom.

Tarquinius came. to Rome, but the gates were shut, and they declared to him, from the walls, the sentence of banishment which had been passed against him and. his family. So he yielded to his fortune, and wentL to live at Caere with his sons Titus and Aruns. His other son, Sextus,l” went to Gabii, and the people there, remembering how he had betrayed them to his father, slew him. Then the army left the camp before Ardea, and went back to Rome. And all men said, ” Let us follow the good laws of the good king Servius; and let us meet in our centuries, according as he directed,l3 and let us choose two men year by year to govern us, instead of a king.” Then the people met in their cdenturies in the Field of Mars, and they chose two men to rule over them, Lucius Junius, whom men called Brutus, and Lucius Tarquinius of Collatia. But the people‘4 were afraid of Lucius Tarquinius for his name’s sake, for it seemed as though a Tarquinius was still king over them. So they prayed How Luciis Tnrquinius, him to depart from Rome, and he went and took all his goods teo h’,beutad of,,Lr tia, with him, and settled himself at Lavinium. Then the senate name’ sake. and the people decreed that all the house of the Tarquinii should be banished, even though they were not of the king’s family. And the people met again in their centuries, and chose Publius Valerius to rule over them together with Brutus, in the room of Lucius Tarquinius of Collatia. Now at this time15 many of the laws of the good king Servius were restored, which Tarquinius the tyrant had overthrown. For the commons The lls of the goodking again chose their own judges, to try all causes between a man Serviutd and his neighbor; and they had again their meetings and their sacrifices in the city and in the country, every man in his own tribe and in his own district. And lest there should seem to be two kings instead of one, it was ordered that one only of the two should bear rule at one time, and that the lictors, with their rods and axes, should walk before him alone. And the two were to bear rule month by month. Then king Tarquiniusl6 sent to Rome, to ask for all the goods that had belonged to him; and the senate, after a while, decreed that the goods How certain of the young should be given back. But those whom he had sent to Rome Roman plotted to bring to ask for his goods, had meetings with many young men of back kingTarquinius. noble birth, and a plot was laid to bring back king Tarquinius. So the young men wrote letters to Tarquinius, pledging to him their faith, and among them were Titus and Tiberius, the sons of Brutus.

But a slave happened to overhear them talking together, and when he knew that the letters were to be given to the messengers of Tarquinius, he went and told all that he had heard to Brutus and to Publius Valerius. Then they came and seized the young men and their letters, and so the plot was broken up. After this there was a strange and piteous sight to behold.

Brutus and Publius”’ sat on their judgmnent-seats in the Forum, and the young How Lncis B:us at i men were brought before them. Then Brutus bade the lictors to judgment pon’his own bind his own two sons, Titus and Tiberius, together with the others, sn. and to scourge them with rods, according to the law. And after they had been ” Livy, I. 60. 13 Consules inde comitiis centuriatis-ex com12 Livy, I. 60. Dionysius makes Sextus live mentariis Ser. Tullii creati sunt. Livy, I. 60. till the battle by the lake Regillus, and describes 14 Livy, II. 2. him as killed there. When the stories differ, 1 Dionysius, V. 2. I have generally followed Livy, as the writer 1B Livy, II. 3, 4. of the best taste, and likely to give the oldest 17 Livy, II. 5. and most poetical version of them.

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42 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. VII scourged, the lictors struck off their heads with their axes, before the eyes of their father; and Brutus neither stirred from his seat, nor turned away his eyes from the sight, yet men saw as they looked on him that his heart was grieving inwardly’s over his children. Then they marvelled at him, because he had loved justice more than his own blood, and had not spared his own children when they had been false to their country, and had offended against the law. When‘9 king Tarquinius found that the plot was broken up, he persuaded the How the people of veil people of Veii and the people of Tarquinii, cities of the Etruscans, and Tar euinii made war i bc R f a uponthe R omans, andh how to try to bring him back to Rome by force of arms. So they LuciBrutus was slin. assembled their armies, and Tarquinius led them within the Roman border. Brutus and Publius led the Romans out to meet them, and it chanced that Brutus with the Roman horsemen, and Aruns, the son of king Tarquinius, with the Etruscan horse, met each other in advance of the main battles. Aruns seeing Brutus in his kingly robe, and with the lictors of a king around him, levelled his spear, and spurred his horse against him.

Brutus met him, and each ran his spear through the body of the other, and they both fell dead. Then the horsemen on both parts fought, and afterwards the main battles, and the Veientians were beaten, but the Tarquinians beat the Romans, and the battle was neither won nor lost; but in the night there came a voice out of the wood that was hard by, and it said, i” One man more20 has fallen on the part of the Etruscans than on the part of the Romans; the Romans are to conquer in the war.” At this the Etruscans were afraid, and believing the voice, they immediately marched home to their own country, while the Romans took up Brutus, and carried him home and buried him; and Publius made an oration in his praise, and all the matrons of Rome mourned for him for a whole year, because he had avenged Lucretia well. When Brutus was dead,2’ Publius ruled over the people himself; and he began HowPubliusValerius was to build a great and strong house on the top of the hill Velia, sunpehotedby the eae.hi-which looks down upon the Forum.22 This made the’people say, self. 1 “Publius wants to become a king, and is building a house in a strong place, as if for a citadel where he may live with his guards, and oppress us.” But -he called the people together, and when he went down to them, the lictors who walked before him lowered the rods and the axes which they bore, to show that he owned the people to be greater than himself. He complained that they had mistrusted him, and he said that he would not build his house on the top of the hill Velia, but at the bottom of it, and his house should be no stronghold. And he called on them to make a law,23 that whoever should try to make himself king should be accursed, and whosoever would might slay him. Also, that if a magistrate were going to scourge or kill any citizen, he might carry his cause before the people, and they should judge him. When these laws were passed, all men said, “Publius is a lover of the people, and seeks their good:” and he was called Poplicola, which means, ” the people’s friend,” from that day forward. Then Publius called the people together24 in their centuries, and they chose Spurius Lucretius, the father of Lucretia, to be their magistrate for the year in the room of Brutus. But he was an old man, and his strength was so much gone, that after a few days he died. They then chose in his room Marcus Horatius.25 Now Publius and Marcus cast lots which should dedicate the temple to Jupiter 18 Eminente animo patrio inter publicae pcente Palatine, up which the Via Sacra passes. The ministerium. Livy, II. 5. arch of Titus is on the Velian Hill.‘9 Livy, II. 6. 23 Livy II. 8. 20 Uno plus Etruscorum cecidisse in acie; 24 Livy, II. 8. -sincere bello Romanum.

Li-vy, II. 7. 25 The treaty with Carthage makes M. Hura21 Livy, II. 7.

tius the colleague of Brutus: another proof of a2 It is the rising ground just under the the irreconcilableness of the common story with the real but lost history.

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CHAP. VII.] THE BANISHING OF KING TARQUINIUS, ETC. 43 on the hill of the Capitol, which king Tarquinius had built; and Of the dedicating of lhb the lot fell to Marcus, to the great discontent of the friends of temple on the Capitol by Publius.26 So when Marcus was going to begin the dedication, oratiu and had his hand on the door-post of the temple, and was speaking the set words of prayer, there came a man running to tell him that his son was dead. But he said, “Then let them carry him out and bury him;” and he neither wept, nor lamented, for the words of lamentation ought not to be spoken when men are praying to the blessed gods, and dedicating a temple to their honor. So Marcus honored the gods above his son, and dedicated the temple on the hill of the Capitol; and his name was recorded on the front of the temple. But when king Tarquinius found that the Veientians and Tarquinians were not able to restore him to his kingdom, he went to Clusium,21 a city in Howking Porsennamado the farthest part of Etruria, beyond the Ciminian forest, and be-wealeothem Rlake back sought Lars Porsenna,28 the king of Clusium, to aid him. So Por-king Tarquinio. senna raised a great army, and marched against Rome, and attacked the Romans on the hill Janiculum, the hill on the outside of the city beyond the Tiber; and he drove them down from the hill into the city.

There was a wooden bridge over the Tiber at the bottom of the hill, and the Etruscans followed. close upon the Romans to win the bridge, but a single man, named Horatius Oftheworthydeedof Ho. Cocles, stood fast upon the bridge, and faced the Etruscans;19 rti Cocles. two others then resolved to stay with him, Spurius Lartius and Titus Herminius; and these three men stopped the Etruscans, while the Romans, who had fled over the river, were busy in cutting away the bridge. When it was nearly all cut away, Horatius made his two companions leave him, and pass over the bridge into the city. Then he stood alone on the bridge, and defied all the army of the Etruscans; and they showered their javelins upon him, and he caught them on his shield, and stood yet unhurt. But just as they were rushing on him to drive him from his post by main force, the last beams of the bridge were cut away, and it all fell with a mighty crash into the river; and while the Etruscans wondered, and stopped in their course, Horatius turned and prayed to the god of the river, ” 0 father”3 Tiber, I pray thee to receive these arms, and me who bear them, and to let thy waters befriend and save me.” Then he leapt into the river; and though the darts fell thick around him, yet they did not hit him, and he swam across to the city safe and sound.” For this the Romans set up his statue in the comitium, and gave him as much land as he could drive the plough round in the space of a whole day. But the Etruscans still lay before the city, and the Romans suffered much from hunger. Then a young man of noble blood, Caius Muciusa2 How CaIuMci.sought by name, went to the senate, and offered to go to the camp of thelifef” king P.orednni the Etruscans, and to slay king Porsenna. So he crossed the ownhand inthefire. river and made his way into the camp, and there he saw a man sitting on a high place, and wearing a scarlet robe, and many coming and going about him; and saying to himself, “This must be king Porsenna,” he went up to his seat amidst the crowd, and when he came near to the man he drew a dagger from under his garment, and stabbed him. But it was the king’s scribe whom he had slain, who was the king’s chief officer; so he was seized and brought before the king, Livy, II. 8. It is vain to attempt to write a history of these 27 Livy, II. 9.

events; and none can doubt that the poetical 20 “Lars,” like “Iucumo,” is not an indi-story, which alone I am wishing to preserve, vidual name, but expresses the rank of the per-was that given by Livy. son, like Eva{.

Micali connects it with the leu-32 “Adolescens nobilis,” Livy, II. 12.

Nietonic word “Lord.” - buhr doubts whether the old; story called him 29

Liw, II. 10. by any other name than Caius. Mucius, he so “14Tiberine pater, te sancte precor, lhne thinks, was a later addition; because the Mucii arma et hunc militem propitio flumine acci-had the same cognomen of Scsvola; and -he pias.” Livy, II. 10. considers it inconsistent, because the Muci& m Polybius says that he was killed, VI. 55. were plebeians.

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44 HISTORY OF ROME. [CLAP. VIL and the guards threatened33 him with sharp torments, unless he would answer all their questions. But he said, ” See now, how little I care for your torments;” and he thrust his right hand into the fire that was burning there on the altar, and he did not move it till it was quite consumed. Then king Porsenna marvelled at his courage, and.: said, “Go thy way, for thou hast harmed thyself more than me; and thou art a brave man, and I send thee back to Rome unhurt and free.” But Caius answered, “For this thou shalt get more of my secret than thy tortures could have forced from me. Three hundred noble youths of Rome have bound themselves by oath to take thy life. Mine was the erst adventure; but the others will each in his turn lie in wait for thee. I warn you, therefore, to look to thyself well.” Then Caius was let go, and went back again into the city. But king Porsenna was greatly moved,34 and made the Romans offers of peace, Of the pece made be-to which they listened gladly, and gave up the land beyond the tween kicng Porsenna..

Tiber, which had been won in former times from the Veientians; the Romans: and of the great spirit of the maiden and he gave back to them the hill Janiculum. Besides this, the Romans gave hostages to the king, ten youths and ten maidens, children of noble fathers, as a pledge that they would truly keep the peace which they had made. But it chanced, as the camp of the Etruscans was near the Tiber, that Cloelia, one of the maidens, escaped with her fellows, and fled to the brink of the river, and as the Etruscans pursued them, Clcelia spoke to the other maidens, and persuaded them, and they rushed all into the water, and swam across the river; and got safely over. At this king Porsenna marvelled more than ever, and when the Romans sent back Clcelia and her fellows to him, for. they kept their faith truly, he bade her go home free, and he gave her some of the youths also who were hostages, to choose whom she would; and she chose those who were of tenderest age, and king Porsenna set them free. Then the Romans gave lands to Cams, and set up a statue of ClOelia in the highest part of the Sacred Way; and king Porsenna led away his army home in peace. After this king Porsenna35 made war against the Latins, and his army was trow Tarquinius soCuit beaten, and fled to Rome; and the Romans received them kindly, or aidfrom the Ltis. and took care of those who were wounded, and sent them back safe to king Porsenna. For this the king gave back to the Romans all the rest of their hostages whom he had still with him, and also the land which they had won from the Veientians. So Tarquinius, seeing that there.was no more hope of aid from king Porsenna, left Clusium and went to. Tusculum of the Latins; for Mamilius Octavius, the chief of the Tusculans, had married his daughter, and he hoped that the Latins would restore him to Rome, for their cities were many, and when he had been king he had favored them rather than the Romans. So after a time thirty cities of the Latins joined together and made Octavius Of the war hetween the Mamilius their general, and declared war against the Romans. Romnaes ad Lateenson ac-Now Publius Valerius was dead, and the Romans so loved and eountofTTarqiniue. honored him that they buried him within the city,36
near the hill Velia, and all the matrons of Rome had mourned for him for a. Whole year: also because the Romans37 had the Sabines for their enemies as well as the Latins, they had made one man to be their ruler for a time instead of two; and he was called the Master of the people, or the commander, and he had all the power which the kings of Rome had in times past. So Aulus Postumius was appointed Master of the people at this time, and Titus,Ebutius was the chief or Master of the horsemen; and they led out the whole force of the Romans, and met the Latins by the lake Regillus, in the country of Tusculum; and Tarquinius himself “s Here I have followed Dionysins rather than S4 Livy, II. 138. Livy, because in Livy’s story Mucius tells Por-3 Livy, II. 14, 15. senna in reward of his generosity no more than 3 Plutarch in Publi-ola, 23. Livy, II. 16. he had told him at first as a mere vaunt to 7 Livy, II. 18. frighten him.

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CaaP. VII.] THE BANISHING OF KING TARQUINIUS, ETC. 45 was with the army of the Latins, and his son and all the houses of the Tarquinii: for this was their last hope, and fate was now to determine whether the Romans should be ruled over by king Tarquinius, or whether they should be free forever.

There were many Romans who had married Latin wives,38 and many Latins who had married wives from among the Romans. So before the How the Roman women war began, it was resolved that the women on both sides might ihu Ubeandes aied tolL t leave their husbands if they chose, and take their virgin daughters to Rome. with them, and return to their own country. And all the Latin women, except two, remained in Rome with their husbands: but the Roman women loved Rome more than their’husbands, and took their young daughters with them, and came home to the houses of their fathers. Then the Romans and the Latins joined battle by the lake Regillus.39 There might you see king Tarquinius, though far advanced in years, Ofthegreatbattleby the yet mounted on his horse and bearing his lance in his hand, as lake Regillus. bravely as though he were still young. There was his son Tarquinius, leading on to battle all the band of the house of the Tarquinii, whom the Romans had banished for their name’s sake, and who thought it a proud thing to win back their country by their swords, and to become again the royal house, to give a king to the Romans. There was Octavius Mamilius, of Tusculum, the leader of all the Latins, who said, that he would make Tarquinius his father king once more in Rome, and the Romans should help the Latins in all their wars, and Tusculum should be the greatest of all the cities, whose people went up together to sacrifice to Jupiter of the Latins, at his temple on the high top of the mountain of Alba. And on the side of the Romans might be seen Aulus Postumius, the Master of the people, and Titus Ibutius, the Master of the horsemen. There also was Titus Herminius, who had fought on the bridge by the side of Horatius Cocles, on the day when they saved Rome from king Porsenna. There was Marcus Valerius, the brother of Publius, who said he would finish by the lake Regillus40 the glorious work which Publius had begun in Rome; for Publius had driven out Tarquinius and his house, and had made them live as banished men, and now they should lose their lives as they had lost their country. So at the first onset king Tarquinius levelled his lance, and rode against Aulus; and on the left of the battle, Titus i]butius spurred his horse against Octavius Mamilius. But king Tarquinius, before he reached Aulus, received a wound in his side, and his followers gathered around him, and bore him out of the battle. And Titus and Octavius met lance to lance, and Titus struck Octavius on the breast, and Octavius ran his lance through the arm of Titus. So Titus withdrew from the battle, for his arm could no longer wield its weapon; but Octavius heeded not his hurt, but when he saw his Latins giving ground, he called to the banished Romans of the house of the Tarquinii, and sent them into the thick of the fight. On they rushed so fiercely that neither man nor horse could stand before them; for they thought how they had been driven from their country, and spoiled of their goods, and they said that they would win back both that day through the blood of their enemies. Then Marcus Valerius, the brother of Publius, levelled his lance and rode fiercely against Titus Tarquinius, who was the leader of the band of the How two h.o.emen o Tarquinii. But Titus drew back, and sheltered himself amidst tilebattle a..r…dpt his band; and Marcus rode after him in his fury, and plunged the Romns. into the midst of the enemy, and a Latin ran his lance into his side as he was rushing on; but his horse stayed not in his career till Marcus dropped from him’ dead upon the ground. Then the Romans feared yet more, and the Tarquinii charged yet more vehemently, till Aulus, the leader of the Romans, rode up with ” Dionysius, VI. 1. familiza decus ejecti reges erant, ejusdem intr4 “ivy, II. 19. fectiforentL. ivy, II.

20.’ Domestica etiam gloria accensus, ut cujus

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46 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. VIL his own chosen band; and he bade them level their lances, and slay all whose faces were towards them, whether they were friends or foes. So the Romans turned from their flight, and Aulus and his chosen band fell upon the Tarquinii; and Aulus prayed, and vowed that he would raise a temple to Castor and to Pollux,41 the twin heroes, if they would aid him to win the battle; and he promised to his soldiers that the two who should be the first to break into the camp of the enemy should receive a rich reward. When behold, there rode two horsemen at the head of his chosen band,42 and they were taller and fairer than after the stature and beauty of men, and they were in the first bloom of youth, and their horses were white as snow. Then there was a fierce battle when Octavius, the leader of the Latins, came up with aid to rescue the Tarquinii; for Titus Herminins rode against him, and ran his spear through his body, and slew him at one blow; but as he was spoiling him of his arms, he himself was struck by a javelin. and he was borne out of the fight and died. And the two horsemen on white horses rode before the Romans; and the enemy fled before them, and the Tarquinii were beaten down and slain, and Titus Tarquinius was’slain among them; and the Latins fled, and the Romans followed them to their camp, and the two horsemen on white horses were the first who broke into the camp. But when the camp was taken, and the battle was fully won, Aulus sought for the two horsemen to give them the rewards which he had promised; and they were not found either amongst the living or amongst the dead, only there was seen imprinted4 on the hard black rock44 the mark of a horse’s hoof, iwhich no earthly horse had ever made; and the mark was there to be seen in after ages. And the battle was ended, and the sun went down. Now they knew at Rome45 that the armies had joined battle, and as the day wore away all men longed for tidings. And the sun went down, How the two horsemen appeared at Rome in and suddenly there were seen in the forum two horsemen, taller and the eveninn’, and told that the lattle was fairer than the tallest and fairest of men, and they rode on white Wol1. horses, and they were as men just come from the battle, and their horses were all bathed in foam. They alighted by the temple of Vesta, where a spring of water bubbles up from the ground and fills a small deep pool. There they washed away the stains of the battle, and when men crowded round them, and asked for tidings, they told them how the battle had been fought, and how it was won. And they mounted their horses and rode from the forum, and were seen no more; and men sought for them in every place, but they were not found. Then Aulus and all the Romans knew how Castor and Pollux, the twin heroes, had heard his prayer, and had fought for the Romans, and had yanThe two horsemen wer e n h t the twin heroes, Castor quished their enemies, and had been the first to break into the enea. mies’ camp, and had themselves, with more than mortal speed, borne the tidings of their victory to Rome.

So Aulus built a temple according to his vow to Castor and Pollux, and gave rich offerings; for he said, ” These are the rewards which I promised to the two who should first break into the enemies’ camp; and the twin heroes have won them, and they and no mortal men have won the battle for Rome this day.” So perished the house of the Tarquinii, in the great battle by the lake Regillus, How Tarqssinius, after and all the sons of king Tarquinius, and his son-in-law, Octavius thent of his house, Mamilius, were slain on that battle-field. Thus king Tarquinins saw died.

the ruin of all his family and of all his house, and he was left alone, utterly without hope. So he went to Cume,“4 a city of the Greeks, and there he 41 Livy, II. 20. under La Colonna, Labicum, to the ordinary 42

Dionysins, VI. 13. level of the Campagna, in going to Rome. Ci43 Cicero, de NaturA Deorum, III. 5. cero speaks of the mark being visible ” in sili44 The lake of Regillus is now a small and ce;” and silex is the name given by the Roman weedyv pool surrounded by crater-like banks, writers to the lava and basalt of the neighborand with nmuch lava or basalt about it, situated hood of Rome. at some height above the plain on the right hand 46

Dionysius, VI. 13. of the road as you descend from the high ground’I Livy, II. 21.

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CHAP. VIII.] ROME AFTER THE END OF THE MONARCHY. 47 died. And thus the deeds of Tarquinius and of the wicked Tullia, and of Sextue their son, were visited upon their own heads; and the Romans lived in peace, and none threatened their freedom any more. CHAPTER VIII. ROME AFTER THE END OF THE

MONARCHY-THE DICTATORSHIP-THE TRIBUNES OF THE COMMONS.’:Hlst S &vJp6)v Tv apiartov nfLrXavreT &/1?bM*V roiatroaS 7ireptwcEv TO Kpdrog’ iv yap Zi roTrowo Kxa, atrol a6dpca.-HERODOT. III. 81. MEN love to complete what is imperfect, and to realize what is imaginary. The portraits of king Fergus and his successors in Holyrood palace The Roman history is were an attempt to give substance to the phantom names of the still meager and uncerearly Scotch story; those of the founders of the oldest colleges in the gallery of the Bodleian library betray the tendency to make much out of little, to labor after a full idea of those who are only known to us by one particular action of their lives. So it has fared with the early history of Rome; Romulus and Numa are like king Fergus; John of Balliol, and Walter of Merton, are the counterparts of Servius Tullius, and Brutus, and Poplicola. Their names were known, and their works were living; and men, longing to image them to their minds more completely, made up by invention for the want of knowledge, and composed in one case a pretended portrait, in the other a pretended history. There have been hundreds, doubtless, who have looked on the portrait of John of Balliol, and, imposed upon by the name of portrait and by its being the first in a series of pictures of which the greater part were undoubtedly copied from the life, have never suspected that the painter knew no more of the real features of his subject than they did themselves. So it is that we are deceived by the early history of the Roman commonwealth. It wears the form of annals, it professes to mark accurately the events of successive years, and to distinguish them by the names of the successive consuls, and it begins a history which, going on with these same forms and pretensions to accuracy, becomes, after a time, in a very large proportion really accurate, and ends with being as authentic as any history in the world. Yet the earliest annals are as unreal as John of Balliol’s portrait; there is in both cases the same deception. I cannot as yet give a regular history of the Roman people; all that can be done with the first years of the commonwealth, as with the last of the monarchy, is to notice the origin and character of the institutions, and for the rest, to be contented with that faint outline which alone can be relied upon as real. The particulars of the expulsion of the last king of Rome, and his family and house, can only be given, as they already have been, in their poeti-The commons gained cal form. It by no means follows that none of them are historical, somnethiog by the exbut we cannot distinguish what are so. But we may be certain, PolIon of Tarquinius. whether Brutus belonged to the commons, as Niebuhr thinks, or not, that the commons immediately after the revolution recovered some of the rights of which the last king had deprived them; and these rights were such as did not interfere with the political ascendancy of the patricians, but yet restored to the commons their character of an order, that is, a distinct body with an internal organization

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48 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. VIIL of its own. The commons again chose their judges to decide ordinary civil causes when both parties belonged to their own order, and they again met in their Compitalia and Paganalia, the common festivals of the inhabitants of the same neighborhood in the city and in the country. They also gained the important privilege of being, even in criminal matters, judges of their own members, in case of an appeal from the sentence of the magistrate. As a burgher might appeal to the people or great council of the burghers, so a commoner might appeal to the commons assembled in their tribes, and thus in this respect the two orders of the nation were placed on a footing of equality. It is said also that a great many of the richest families of the commons who belonged to the centuries of knights, or horsemen, were admitted as new patrician houses into the order of the patricians, or burghers, or people of Rome; for I must again observe, that the Roman people or burghers, and the Roman commons, will still for a long period require to be carefully distinguished from each other. In the first year of the commonwealth, the Romans still possessed the dominForeign rel.tins of ion enjoyed by their king; all the cities of the coast of Latium, as Romalle. Rupture ofthe we have already seen, were subjected to them as far as Terracina. alliance with the Latins. The territory on Within twelve years, we’ cannot certainly say how much sooner, the right bank of the Tiber is conquered by these were all become independent. This is easily intelligible, if we only take into account the loss to Rome of an able and absolute king, the natural weakness of an unsettled government, and the distractions produced by the king’s attempts to recover his throne. The Latins may have held, as we are told of the Sabines2 in this very time, that their dependent alliance with Rome had been concluded with king Tarquinius, and that as he was king no longer, and as his sons had been driven out with him, all covenants between Latium and Rome had become null and void. But it is possible also, if the chronology of the common story of these times can be at all depended on, that the Latin cities owed their independence to the Etruscan conquest of Rome. For that war, which has been given in its poetical version as the war with Porsenna, was really a great outbreak of the Etruscan power upon the nations southward of Etruria, in the very front of whom lay the Romans. In the very next year after the expulsion of the king, according to the common story, and certainly at some time within the period with which we are now concerned, the Etruscans fell upon Rome.

The result of the war is, indeed, as strangely disguised in the poetical story as Charlemagne’s invasion of Spain is in the romances. Rome was completely conquered; all the territory which the kings had won on the right bank of the Tiber was now lost.3 Rome itself was surrendered to the Etruscan’conqueror;4 his sovereignty was fully acknowledged,5 the Romans gave up their arms and recovered their city and territory on condition of renouncing the use of iron6 except for implements of agriculture. But this bondage did not last long: the Etruscan power was broken by a great defeat sustained before Aricia; for after the fall of Rome the conquerors attacked Latium, and while besieging Aricia, the united force of the Latin cities, aided by the Greeks7 of Cumre, succeeded in de1 ArtcaS 7rep rz-v ~VlPoXLativ. Dionysius, V. 2. ” Deditio” meant may be seen by the form pre 2 Dionysius, V. 40. served by Livy, I. 38. 3 This-is confessed in the poetical story: only 5 The senate, says Dionysins, V. 34, voted him it is added that Porsenna, out of admiration for an ivory throne, a sceptre, a golden crown, and the Romans, gave the conquered land back triumphal robe.

These very same honors had again to them after the war. - But Niebuhr has been voted, according to the same writer, to the well observed that the Roman local tribes, which Roman king Tarquinius Priscus by the Etruswere thirty in number in the days of Ser. Tul-canlls, as an acknowledgment of his supremacy, lius, appear reduced to twenty in the earliest lII. 62.

mention of them after the expulsion of Tarquin-6 Pliny, XXXIV. 14. In fcedere quod expulius; and it appears from the account of the Vei-sis regibus populo Romano dedit Porsenna, noentian war of 271, that the Roman territory could minatim comprehensum invenimus, ne ferro not then have extended much beyond the hill nisiin agricultura uterentur. Compare 1

Samuel Janiculum. xiii. 19, 20. These passages from Tacitus’and 4 Tacitus, Histor. III. 72. Sedem Jovis op-Pliny were first noticed by Beaufort in his Essay timi maximi,-quam non Porsenna dedit& urbe, on’the Uncertainty of the Early Roman History neque Galli captA, temerare potuissent. What 7

Dionysius, V. 36, et VII. 2-11.

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CHAP. VIII.] ROME AFTER THE END OF THE MONARCHY. 49 stroying their army, and in confining their power to their own side of the Tiber. Still, however, the Romans did not recover their territory on the right bank of that river, and the number of their tribes, as has been already noticed, was consequently lessened by one third, being reduced from thirty to twenty. Thus, within a short time after the banishment of the last king, the Romans lost all their territory on the Etruscan side of the Tiber, and all their Relations of Rome dominion over Latium. A third people were their immediate neigh-with the Sabitte. bors on the northeast, the Sabines. The cities of the Sabines reached, says Varro, from Reate, to the distance of half a day’s journey from Rome, that is, according to the varying estimate of a day’s journey,8 either seventy-five or a hundred stadia, about ten or twelve miles. But with the more distant Sabines of Reate, andt the high valley of the Velinus, our history has yet no concern. The line of mountains which stretches from Tiber to the neighborhood of Narnia was a natural division between those Sabines who lived within it, and those who had settled without it, in the lower country nearer Rome. These last were the Sabines of Cures,9 twenty-four miles from Rome, of Eretum, five miles nearer to it, of Nomentum, about the same distance, of Collatia and Regillus, southward of the Anio, and in the midst of Latium; and at a more ancient period, these same Sabines possessed Crustumerium, Csenina, Antemnae, and, as we have seen, two of the very hills which afterwards made up the city of Rome. But living so near I ( rr even in the midst of the Latins, these more lowland Sabines had become in some degree Latinized, and some of their cities partook in the worship of Diana on the Aventine,”~ together with the Romans and the Latins, during the reign of the last king of Rome. Perhaps they also were his dependent allies, and, like the Latins, renounced their alliance with Rome immediately after his expulsion. At any rate, we read of a renewal of wars between them and the Romans four years after the beginning of the commonwealth, and it is said, that at this time Attus Clausus,” a citizen of Regillus, as he strongly opposed the war, was banished by his coun, trymen, and went over to the Romans with so large a train of followers, that he was himself received immediately as a burgher, gave his name to a new tribe, which was formed out of those who went over with him, and obtained an assignment of lands beyond the Anio, between Fidenme and Ficulea. But when we read of the lake Regillus as belonging to the territory of Tusculum,” and when we also find Nomentum included amongst the thirty cities of the Latins, which concluded the great alliance with Rome, in the consulship of Spurius Cassius, we are inclined to suspect that the lowland Sabines about this time were forced to join themselves some with the Romans and some with the Latins, being pressed by both on different quarters, when the alliance between the three nations was broken up.. Thus Collatia, Regillus, and Nomentum fell to the Latins; and then it may well have happened that the Claudii and Postumii, with their followers, may have preferred the Roman franchise to the Latin, and thus removed themselves to Rome; while if Niebuhr’s conjecture be true, that the Crustuminian tribe as well as the Claudian was created at this time, we might suppose that Crustumeria,, and other Sabine cities in its neighborhood, whose very names have perished, united themselves rather with the Romans: certain it is that from this time forward we hear of no Sabine city nearer to Rome than Eretum, which, as I have already said, was nineteen miles distant from it. It is certain also that the first enlargement of the Roman territory, after its great diminution in the Etruscan war, took place towards the northeast, between the Tiber and the Anio; and here were the lands of the only new tribes that were added to the Roman nation, for the space of more than one hundred and twenty years”3 after the establishment of the commonwealth. H8 Eerodotus reckons the day’s journey in one 10 As appears from the story in Livy, I. 45..

place at two hundred stadia, IV. 801, and in an-A2 Livy, JI. 16.

Dionysius, V. 40. other place at one hundred andfifty stadia, V. 53. “

Livy, II. 19, “acd lacum Begillum in agro 9 Bunsen, ” Antichi Stabilimenti Italici ” in Tusculano.” the “IAnnali dell’ Instituto.ldi Corrispondenza “

The number of tribes continued to be Archeologica,” Vol. VI. p. 133.

twenty-one till three years after the invasion. oI 4

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50 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. VIII The chronology of this period is confessed by Livy‘4 to be one mass of confusion; it was neither agreed when the pretended battle at the lake Of the pretended yeturns of the eensus Regillus was fought, nor when the first dictator was created; and during this period. accordingly, Dionysius sets both events three years later than they are placed by Livy. But a far more surprising disorder is indicated by the returns of the census, if we may rely on them as authentic; for these make the number of Roman citizens between fifteen and sixteen years of age to have been one hundred and thirty thousand,‘5 in the year following the expulsion of the Tarquinii; to have risen to one hundred and fifty thousand seven hundred’t at the end of the next ten years, and again five years later to have sunk to one hundred and ten thousand.’ It should be added, that these same returns gave eighty-four thousand seven hundred as the number of citizens, at the first census of Servius Tullius; and for this-amount Dionysius quotes expressly the tables of the census. Now, Niebuhr rejects the census of Servius Tullius as unhistorical, but is disposed to admit the authenticity of the others.

Yet surely if the censor’s tables are to be believed in one case, they may be in the other; a genuine record of the census of Servius Tullius might just as well have been preserved as that of Sp. Lucretius and P. Valerius Poplicola. And it is to be noted, that although Dionysius gives the return of the census taken by the dictator T. Lartius, as one hundred and fifty thousand seven hundred, yet he makes Appius Claudius, five years afterwards, give the number at one hundred and thirty thousand;18 and then, although Appius quotes this number as applying to the actual state of things, yet the return of the census, at the end of that same year, gives only one hundred and ten thousand. I am inclined to suspect that the actual tables of the census, before the invasion of the Gauls, perished in the destruction of the city; and that they were afterwards restored from the annalists, and from the records of different families, as was the case with the Fasti Capitolini. If this were so, different annalists might give different numbers, as they also give the names of consuls differently; and exaggeration might creep in here, as in the list of triumphs, and with much less difficulty. For although Niebuhr’s opinion is no less probable than ingenious, that the returns of the census include the citizens of all those foreign states which enjoyed reciprocally with Rome each other’s franchise, still the numbers in the period under review seem inconsistent, not only with the common arrangement of the events of these years, but with any probable arrangement that can be devised. For if the Latins and other foreigners are not included in the census of Poplicola, the number of one hundred and thirty thousand is incredibly large; if they are included, with what other states can we conceive the interchange of citizenship to have been contracted in the ten following years, so as to have added twenty thousand names to the return made at the end of that period? I am inclined, therefore, to think that the second pretended census of the commonwealth, taken by the dictator T. Lartius, which gives an amount of one hundred and fifty thousand seven hundred citizens within the military age, is a mere exaggeration of the annalist or poet, whoever he was, who recorded the acts of the first dictator. But the really important part of the history of the first years of the commonProgress ef distress wealth is the tracing, if possible, the gradual depression of the comamongst the sommons. mons to that extreme point of misery which led to the institution of the tribuneship. We have seen that, immediately after the expulsion of the king, the commons shared in the advantages of the revolution; but within a few years we find them so oppressed and powerless, that their utmost hopes aspired, the;Gaulfs, when four new ones were added. rum modo sed etiam auctorurm digerere poes Livy, VI. 5.. sis.

“4 II. 21. Tanti errores implicant temporum, 15 Dionysius, V. 20. aliter apud alios ordinLatis magistratibus, ut nee 16 Dionysius, V. 75. qui consules secundum quosdam, nee quid quo-17 Dionysius, V. 96. que,mao actual sit, in tantA vetustate non re-18 Dionysius, V. 6.

que~~~~~~~~~~~~~ uinony i s V. O.

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CHAP. VIII.] ROME AFTER THE END OF THE MONARCHY. 51 not to the assertion of political equality with the burghers, but merely to the obtaining protection from personal injuries. The specific character of their degradation is stated to have been this: that there prevailed‘9 among them severe distress, amounting in many cases to actual ruin; that to relieve themselves from their poverty, they ter, that they became were in the habit of borrowing money of the burghers; that the volved i det. distress continuing, they became generally insolvent; and that as the law of debtor and creditor was exceedingly severe, they became liable in their persons to the cruelty of the burghers, were treated by them as slaves, confined as such in their workhouses, kept to taskwork, and often beaten at the discretion of their taskmasters. In reading this statement, a multitude of questions suggest themselves. Explanations and discussions must occupy a large space in this part of our history, for when the poetical stories have been once given, there are no materials left for narrative or painting; and general views of the stateof a people, where our means of information are so scanty, are little susceptible of liveliness, and require at every step to be defended and developed. The perfect character of history in all its freshness and fulness is incompatible with imperfect knowledge; no man can step boldly or gracefully while he is groping his way in the dark. A population of free landowners naturally engages the imagination; but such a state of society requires either an ample territory or an uninterrupted state of peace, if it be dependent on agriculture alone. The tothis stnte. of debt. Roman territory might be marched through in a day; and after sions of the.le.nborthe overthrow of the powerful government of Tarquinius, which, g by the extent of its dominion, kept war at a distance, the lands of the Roman commons were continually wasted by the incursions of their neighbors, and were actually to a large extent torn away by the Etruscan conquest. The burghers suffered less, because their resources were greater: the public undivided land, which they alone enjoyed, was of a very different extent from the little lots assigned to each commoner, and besides, as being chiefly left in pasture, it suffered much less from the incursions of an enemy; a burgher’s cattle might often be driven off in time to one of the neighboring strongholds, while a commoner’s corn and fruit-trees were totally destroyed. Again, if commerce were forbidden to a commoner, it certainly was not to a burgher; and those whose trade with Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa was sufficiently important to be made the subject of a special treaty, were not, like the commoners, wholly dependent on a favorable season, or on escaping the plundering incursions of the neighboring people. Thus it is easy to conceive how, on the one hand, the commoner would be driven to borrow, and on the other how the burgher would be able to lend. The next step is also plain. Interest was as yet wholly arbitrary; and where so many were anxious to borrow, it was sure to be high. Thus The high rate of inter. again the commons became constantly more and more involved et. and distressed, while the burghers engrossed more and more all the wealth of the community. Such a state of things the law of the Israelites had endeavored by every means to prevent or to mitigate. If a small proprietor found himself Theseverityofthe law ruined by a succession of unfavorable seasons, or by an inroad of of debtor ad creditor. the Philistines or Midianites, and was obliged to borrow of his richer neighbor, the law absolutely forbade his creditor to take any interest at all. If he were obliged to pledge his person for payment, he was not to serve his creditor without hope, for at the end of seven years, at the farthest, he was restored to his freedom, and the whole of his debt cancelled. Or if he had pledged his land to his creditor, not only was the right secured to him and to his relations of redeeming it at any time, but even if not redeemed it was necessarily to return to him or to his 10 See the story of the old centurion, in Livy, II. 28.

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52 HISTORY OF ROME. [CIIAP. VIII heirs in the year of jubilee, that no Israelite might by any distress be degraded fort ever friom the rank of a freeman and a landowner. A far different fate awaited the plebeian landowner at Rome. When he found himself involved in a debt which he could not pay, his best resource was to sell himself to his creditor, on the condition that unless the debt were previously discharged, the creditor, at the expiration of a stated term, should enter into possession of his purchase. This was called, in the language of the Roman law, the entering into a nexum,20 and the person who had thus conditionally sold himself was said to be “nexus.” When the day came, the creditor claimed possession, and the magistrate awarded it; and the debtor, thus given over to his purchaser, addictus, passed, with all that belonged to him, into his power; and as the sons were considered their father’s property, they also, unless previously emancipated, were included in the sale, and went into slavery together with their father. Or if a man, resolved not by his own act to sacrifice his own and his children’s liberty, refused thus to sell himself, or, in the Roman language, to enter into a nexum, and determined to abide in his own person the consequences of his own -debt, then he risked a fate still more fearful. If, within thirty days after the justice of the claim had been allowed, he was unable to discharge it, his creditor might arrest him, and bring him before the court; and if no one then offered to be his security, he was given over to his creditor, and kept by him in private custody, bound with a chain of fifteen pounds weight, and fed with a pound of corn daily. If he still could not, or would not, come to any terms with his creditor, he was thus confined during sixty days, and during this period was brought before the court in the comitium, on three successive market-days, and the amount of his debt declared, in order to seewhether any one would yet come forward in his behalf. On the third market-day, if no friend appeared, he was either to be put to death, or sold as a slave into a foreign land beyond the Tiber; that is, into Etruria, where there was as yet no interchange of franchise with Rome, amidst a people of a different language. Or if there were several creditors, they might actually hew his body in pieces; and whether a creditor cut off a greater or smaller piece than in proportion to his debt,21 he incurred no penalty. Aulus Gellius, who wrote in the age of the Antonines, declares that he had never heard or read of a single instance in which this concluding. provision had been acted upon; But who was there to. record the’particular cruelties of the Roman burghers in the third century of Rome? and when we are told generally that they enforced the law against their debtors with merciless severity, can we doubt that there were individual monsters, like the Shylock and Front de Bceuf of fiction, or the Earl of Cassilis of real history, who would gratify their malice against an obnoxius or obstinate debtor, even to the extremest letter of the law? It is more important to observe that this horrible law was continued in the twelve tables, for we cannot suppose it to have been introduced there for the first time; that is to say, that it made part of a code sanctioned by the commons, when they were triumphant over their adversaries. This shows, that the extrimest cruelty against an insolvent debtor was not repugnant, in all cases, to the general feeling of the commons themselves, and confirms the remark of Gellius, that the Romnans had the greatest abhorrence of breach of faith, or a failure in performing engagements, whether in private matters or in public. It explains also the long o For this explanation of the term “Nexus,” lock had in his boncl omitted to insert. “Si see Niebuhr, Vol. I. p. 601, et seqq. Ed. 2. plus minusve secuerunt, se fraude esto” (” se” 2 See the Extracts from the law of the XII. is the old form for ” sine”). Besides, the last tables in A.

Gellius, XX. 1. ~ 45, et seqq. Some penalty, reserved for him who continued obstimodern writers have imagined that the words nate, was likely to be atrocious in its severity. “p’artes secanto” were to be understood of a What do we think of the ” peine foite et dure” division of the debtor’s property,‘and not of his denounced by the English law against a prisoner person. But Niebulir well’observes, that the who refused to plead? a penalty not repealed till following provision alone refutes such anotion; the middle of the last century, and quite as a provision giving to the creditor that very se-cruel as that of the law of the XII. tables, and eurity in the infliction of his cruelty, which Shy-not less unjust.

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CHAP. VIII.] ROME AFTER THE END OF THE MONARCHY. 53 patience of the commons under their distress, and, when at last it became too grievous to endure, their extraordinary moderation in remedying it. Severity against a careless or fraudulent debtor seemed to them perfectly just; they only desired protection in cases of unavoidable misfortune or wanton cruelty, and this object appeared to be fulfilled by the institution of the tribuneship, for the tribune’s power of protection enabled him to interpose in defence of the unfortunate, while he suffered the law to take its course against the obstinate and the dishonest. Such a state of things, however, naturally accounts for the political degradation of the commons, and the neglect of the constitution of Servius s of the Tullius.

The Etruscan conquest had deprived the Romans of their commons led to their weakness politically. arms: how, amidst such general distress, could the commons again provide themselves with the full arms of the phalanx; or how could they afford leisure for that frequent training and practice in warlike exercises, which were essential to the efficiency of the heavyarmed infantry? It may be going too far to say that the tactic of the phalanx was never in use after the establishment of the commonwealth; but it clearly never existed in any perfection. It is quite manifest, that if the heavyarmed infantry had constituted the chief force of the nation, and if that infantry, according to the constitution of Servius Tullius, had consisted exclusively of the commons, the’ commons and not the burghers would soon have been the masters of Rome; the comitia of the centuries would have drawn all power to itself, the comitia of curies would have been’ abolished, as incompatible with the sovereignty of the true Roman people. The comitia of the tribes would have been wholly superfluous, for where could the commons have had greater weight than in an assembly where they formed exclusively every century except six?

Whereas the very contrary to all this actually happened: the commons remained for more than a century excluded from the government; the curiae retained all their power; the comitia of tribes were earnestly desired by the commons, as the only assembly in which they were predominant; and when, after many years, we can trace any details of the comitia of centuries, we find them in great measure assimilated to those of the tribes, and the peculiarity of their original constitution almost vanished. But the comitia of centuries were not an assembly in which the commons were all-powerful. We are expressly toldt2 that the burghers’

clients nfluence exercise by voted in these centuries; and these were, probably, become a more their clients, ont wealthy and a more numerous body, in proportion as the commons comitia of ceturies. became more and more distressed and miserable. If a third part of the commons had lost their::lands by the event of the Etruscan war, if a large proportion of thle rest were so involved in debts that their property was scarcely more than nominally their own, we may feel quite sure that there would be many who would voluntarily become clients, in order to escape from their actual misery. What they lost, indeed, by so doing, was but little in comparison of what they gained; they gave up their order, they ceased to belong to a tribe, and became personally dependent on their patron; but, on the other hand, they might follow any retail trade or manufacture; they retained their votes in the comitia of centuries, and were saved by the protection of their patron from all the sufferings which were the lot of the insolvent commoner. For as the patron owed his client protection, he was accounted infamous if he allowed him to be reduced to beggary: and thus we read of patrons granting lands to their clients, which, although held by them only at will, were yet, under present circumstances, a far more enviable possession than the freeholds of the commons. And whilst the clients had thus become more numerous, so they would also, from the same causes, become more wealthy, and a greater number of them would thus be enrolled in the higher classes, whilst the commons, on the other hand, were continually sinking to the lower. 22 Livy, II. 64. Irata plebs interesse consularibus comitiis noluit. Per patres, clientesque patrum consules creati.

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54 HISTORY OF ROME. [CnAP. VIII Yet, amidst the general distress of the commons, we meet with an extraordiSepration of the rich-nary statement in one of the speeches23 in Dionysius, that more than er commons from the four hundred persons had been raised in one year from the infantry to the cavalry service on account of their wealth. This, strange as it seems at first, is probable, and full of instruction. When money bore so high a rate of interest, capital was sure to increase itself rapidly, and in a time of distress, whilst many become poorer, there are always some also who, from that very circumstance, become richer. The rich commons were thus likely to increase their fortunes, whilst the poorer members of their order were losing every thing. It was, then, the interest of the burghers to separate these from the mass of the commons, and to place them in a class which already seems to have acquired its character of a moneyed and commercial interest; a class which resigned the troubles and the honors of political contests for the pursuit and safe enjoyment of riches. Further, the removal of the richest commoners from the infantry service rendered the organization of the phalanx more and more impracticable, and thus preserved to the burghers, whether serving as cavalry or heavyarmed infantry, their old superiority; for that the burghers in these times did sometimes serve on foot,24 although generally they fought cm horseback, is proved not only by the story of L. Tarquitius, whose poverty, it is said, had forced him to do so, but by the legend of the valiant deeds of Caius Marcius, and of the three hundred Fabii who established themselves on the Cremera. It is probable that, when occasion required it, they were the principes in rich armor who fought in the van of the infantry, although, in ordinary circumstances, they fought on horseback; and as the infantry of the neighboring nations was not better organized than their own, the horsemen in these early times are constantly described as deciding the issue of the battle. Thus the monarchy was exchanged for an exclusive aristocracy, in which the The gvernment be-burghers or patricians possessed the whole dominion of the state. rcomes an exclusive For, mixed as was the influence in the assembly of the centuries, and although the burghers through their clients exercised no small control over it, still they did not think it safe to intrust it with much power. In the election of consuls, the centuries could only choose out of a number of patrician or burgher candidates; and even after this election it remained for the burghers in their great council in the curite to ratify or to annul it, by conferring upon, or refusing to the persons so elected, ” the Imperium;”

in other words, that sovereign power which belonged to the consuls as the successors of the kings, and which, except so far as it was limited within the walls of the city, and a circle of one mile without them, by the right of appeal, was absolute over life and death. As for any legislative power, in this period of the commonwealth, the consuls were their own law. No doubt the burghers had their customs, which, in all great points, the consuls would duly observe, because otherwise, on the expiration of their office, they would be liable to arraignment before the cuimae, and to such punishment as that sovereign assembly might please to inflict; but the commons had no such security, and the uncertainty of the consuls’

judgments was the particular grievance which afterwards led to the formation of the code of the twelve tables. We are told, however, that within ten years of the first institution of the conA. U. C253. A. C. 499.

suls, the burghers found it necessary to create a single magistrate Institution ofhle dicta-with powers still more absolute, who was to exercise the full sovtorship. ereignty of a king, and even without that single check to which the kings of Rome had been subjected. The Master of the people,25 that is, of the 2a That of M. Valerius on resigning his die-foot, are given by Dionysius, VI. 33, and VIII: tatorship in the year 260.

See Dionysius, VI. 6, and by Livy, II. 65. III. 62. IV. 38. 4a-45. 5 “i Malister populi.” See Varro, de Ling. 24 Instances of battles won by the cavalry, Lat. V. 82. Ed. IVliller, et Festus in ” optima when they had left their horses and fought on lex.”

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CHAP. VIII.] ROME AFTER THE END OF THE MONARCHY. 55 burghers, or, as he was otherwise called, the Dictator, was appointed, it is true, for six months only; and therefore liable, like the consuls, to be arraigned, after the expiration of his office, for any acts of tyranny which he might have committed during its continuance. But whilst he retained his office he was as absolute within the walls of the city, as the consuls were without them; neither commoners nor burghers had any right to appeal from his sentence, although the latter had enjoyed this protection in the times of the monarchy. This last circumstance seems to prove that the original appointment of the dictator was a measure of precaution against a party amongst the burghers themselves, rather than against the commons; and gives a probability to that tradition” which Livy slighted, namely, that the consuls who were for the first time superseded by ” the Master of the burghers,” were inclined to favor the return of the exiled king. It is not likely that they were the only Romans so disposed: and if a strong minority amongst the burghers themselves, and probably a large portion of the commons, were known to favor the restoration of the old government, it is very intelligible that the majority of the burghers should have resolved to strengthen the actual government, and to appoint an officer who might summarily punish all conspirators, of whatever rank, whether belonging to the commons or to the burghers, If the consuls were superseded by the dictator because they could not be relied upon, we may be quite sure that the appointment was not left to their free choice.27

One of the consuls received the name of the person to be declared dictator from the senate; he then declared him dictator, and he was confirmed and received the imperium by a vote of the great council of the curis. The dictator must previously have held the highest magistracy in the state,28
that is, he must have been pritor, the old title of the consuls. Thus, afterwards, when the powers of the original pretors were divided between the consuls and prmetors of the later constitution, any man who had been printor was eligible to the dictatorship, no less than one who had been consul. Together with the Master of the burghers, or dictator, there was always appointed the Master of the knights or horsemen. In later times this The M.aster of the officer was always named by the dictator himself, but at first it knightsorhorsemen. seems as if both alike were chosen by the senate. The Master of the knights was subject, like every other citizen, to the Master of the burghers; but his own authority was equally absolute within his own jurisdiction, that is, over the knights and the rest of the commons. Lydus expressly says that from his sentence there was no appeal; Varro says that his power was supreme2 over. the knights and over the accensi; but who are meant by this last term it is difficult to determine. Fifteen years after the expulsion of Tarquinius, the commons, driven to despair by their distress, and exposed without protection to the ca-secession of the compricious cruelty of t!:e burghers, resolved to endure their degraded niS to the Spocred I-rul, and first appointstate no longer. The particulars of this second revolution are as ment of the tribunes. uncertain as those of the overthrow of the monarchy; but thus much is certain, and is remarkable, that the commons sought safety, not victory; they desired to escape from Rome, not to govern it. It may be true that the commons who were left in Rome gathered together30 on the Aventine, the quarter appropriated to their order, and occupied the hill as a fortress; but it is universally agreed that the most efficient part of their body, who were at that time in the field as soldiers, deserted their generals, and marched off to a hill”3 beyond the Anio; that is, to a spot beyond the limits of the Ager Romanus, the proper territory of the 25

Ex factione Tarquinia essent (consules), id 29 “f Magister equitum, quod summa potestas guoqUe enim traditur, parum creditumn sit. hujus in equites et accensos.” Varro, de L. L., Livy, II. 81. V. 82. Ed. Miller. I See on this point Niebuhr, Vol. I. p. 591, 30 “Piso auctor est in Aventinum secessioet seqq. nem. factam.” Livy, II. 32. So also Cicero, de 28

“Consulares leg6re.” Livy, II. 18. This, Republica, II. 33, and Sallust, Fragm. Histor. in the language of the time, would have been I. 2. “
praetorios legore.” 31 “Trans Anienem amnem est.” Livy, 1L. 82.

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56 EHISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. VIII, burghers, but within the district which had been assigned to one of the newly created tribes of the commons, the Crustuminian.32 Here they established themselves, and here they proposed to found a new city of their own, to which they would have gathered their families, and the rest of their order who were left behind in Rome, and have given up their old city to its original possessors, the burghers and their clients. But the burghers were as unwilling to lose the services of the commons, as the Egyptians in the like case to let the Israelites go, and they endeavored, by every means, to persuade them to return. To show how little the commons thought of gaining political power, we have only to notice their demands. They required’ a general cancelling of the obligations of insolvent debtors; and: the release of all those whose persons, in default of payment; had been assigned over to the power of their creditors: and, further, they insisted on having two34 of their own body acknowledged by the burghers as their protectors; and to make this protection effectual, the persons of those who afforded it were to be as inviolable as those of the heralds; the sacred messengers of the gods; whosoever harmed them.was to be held accursed, and might be slain by any one with impunity. To these terms the burghers agreed; and a solemn treaty was concluded between them and the commons, as between two distinct nations; and the burghers swore for themselves, and for their posterity, that they would hold inviolable the persons of two officers, to be chosen by the centuries on the Field of Mars, whose business it should be to extend full protection to any commoner against a sentence of the consul; that is to say, who might rescue any debtor from the power of his creditor, if they conceived it to be capriciously or cruelly exerted. The two officers thus chosen retained the name which the chief officers of the commons had borne before: they were called Tribuni, dr tribe-masters; but instead of being merely the officers of one particular tribe, and’exercising an authority only over the members of their own order, they were named tribunes of the commons at large, and their power, as protectors in stopping any exercise of oppression towards their own body, extended over the burghers, and was by them solemnly acknowledged. The number of the tribunes was, probably, suggested by that of the consuls;3
there were to be two chief officers of the commons, as there were of the burghers. When these conditions had been formally agreed to, the commons returned to Rome. The spot on which this great deliverance had been achieved became to the Romans what Runnymede is to Englishmen: the top of the hill36 was left forever unenclosed and consecrated, and an altar was built on it, and sacrifices offered to Jupiter, who strikes men with terror and again delivers them from their fear; because the commons had fled thither in fear, and were now returning in safety. So the hill was known forever by the name of the Sacred Hill.‘2 Hence Varro calls it “
secessio Crustume-and forwards; and it may have been raised to ri1na,” de L. L., V. 81. Ed. Mdller. ten in the year 261, when Sp. Cassius was con33

Dionysius, VI. 83-89. sul, and afterwards reduced to its original num34 “

Two” is the number given by Piso (Livy, ber, when his popular measures were repealed II. 58), and by Cicero Fragm. pro Cornelio, 23. or set aside by the opposite party. With regard Ed. Nobb., et de Republice, II. 84. “

Two,” to the curie, I agree with Niebuhr, that their according to Livy and Dioinysius, were origin-share in the appointment of the tribunes must ally created, and then three more were added to have been rather a confirmation or rejection of the number immediately. According to Piso, the choice of the centuries, than an original electhere were only two for the first’ twenty-three tion. This the curiae would claim at every elecyears, and by the Publilian law they became five. tion made by the centuries; and it was the obFourteen years after this, in 297, the number, ject of the Publilian law to get rid of this clain, according to Livy and Dionysius, was raised to amongst other advantages, by transferring the len. (Livy, III. 80. Dionys. X. 30.) But Cice-appointment to the comitia of the tribes. ro, in his speech for the tribune Cornelius, says 5 Or, as Niebuhr supposes, by the number of that ten were chosen inD the very next year after tribes, at this time reduced to twenty-one, so the first institution of the office, and chosen by that each decury of tribes should have one tribthe comitia cunriata. So great are the varieties une of its own. But the odd number, twentyin the traditions of these times. Possibly, how-one, may seem to make against this supposition. ever, the number really was altered backwards‘6 Dionysius, VI. 90.

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CsAP. IX.] SPURILTS CASSIUS-LEAGUE WITH THE LATINS. 57 Thus the dissolution of the Roman nation was prevented; the commons had gained protection; their rights as an order were again and more fully recognized; their oppressions were abated; better times came to relieve their distress, and they became gradually more and more fitted for a higher condition, to become citizens and burghers of Rome in the fullest sense, sharing equally with the old burghers in all the benefits and honors of their common country. CHAPTER IX, 3P1URIUS CASSIUS-THE LEAGUE WITH THE

LATINS AND HIERNICANS THE AGRARIAN LAW.-A. U. C. 261-269. ” The noble Brutus Hath told you, Coesar was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Cesar answered it.” O0 irpoardra Tol o64#ov, T r XOXE#LKsi 7yVOLVTO, rupavvi6L freriSeTvro’ 7rdvrE de rToro c pwv 6a To i#ov xVtCrevgivres, 5 6E 7rtcTlsg’v 6 aEriXLua 6 rprsg ros 7riovosv.-AR1usTO. Politic. V. 5. BRUTUS and Poplicola were no doubt real characters, yet fiction has been so busy with their actions, that history cannot venture to admit them within her own proper domain. By a strange compensation of fortune, the first Roman whose greatness is really historical, is the man whose deeds no poet sang, and whose memory the early annalists, repeating the language of the party who destroyed him, have branded with the charge of treason, and attempted tyranny. This was Spurius Cassius. Amidst the silence and the calumnies of his enemies, he is known as the author of three works to which Rome owed all her future greatness; he concluded the league with the Latins in his second consulship, in his third he concluded the league with the Hernicans, and procured, although with the price of his own life, the enactment of the first agrarian law. I. We know that the Latins were in the first year of the commonwealth subject to Rome. We know that almost immediately afterwards League with the Lati they must have become independent; and it is probable that they ins. may have aided the Tarquinii in some of their attempts to effect their restoration. But the real details of this period cannot be discovered: this only is certain, that in the year of Rome 261, the Latin confederacy, consisting of the old national number of thirty cities, concluded a lhague with Rome on terms of perfect equality; and the record of this treaty, which existed at Rome on a brazen pillar’ down to the time of Cicero, contained the name of Spurius Cassius, as the consul who concluded it, and took the oaths to the Latin deputies on behalf of the Romans. It may be that the Roman burghers desired to obtain the aid of the Latins against their own commons, and that the fear of this union led the commons at the Sacred Hill to be content with the smallest possible concessions from their adversaries; but there was another cause for the alliance, no less natural, in the common danger which threatened both Rome and Latium from the growing power of their neighbors on the south, the Oscan, or Ausonian, nations of the _fEquians and the Volscians. The thirty cities which at this time formed the Latin state, and concluded the’

Cicero pro Balbo, 23. Livy, II. 33.

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58 HISTORY OF ROME. [COHA. IX A. U.. 261. The thie-league with Rome, were these: Ardea, Aricia, Bos ilke, Bubenty states of Latium. tun, Corniculum, Carventum, Circeii, Corioli, Corbio, Cora, For. Conditi. tuna or Foretii, Gabii, Laurentum, Lanuvium, Lavinium, Lavici, Nomentum, Norba, Praeneste, Pedum, Querquetulum, Satricum, Scaptia, Setia, Tellena, Tibur, Tusculum, Toleria, Tricrinum, Velitrae. The situation of several of these places is unknown; still the list clearly shows to how short a distance from the Tiber the Roman territory at this time extended, and how little was retained of the great dominion enjoyed by the last kings of Rome. Between this Latin confederacy and the Romans there was concluded a perpetual league:’ “There shall be peace between them so long as the heaven shall keep its place above the earth, and the earth its place below the heaven: they shall neither bring nor cause to be brought any war against each other, nor give to each other’s enemies a passage through their land; they shall aid each other when attacked with all their might, and all spoils and plunder won by their joint arms shall be shared equally between them.

Privote causes shall be decided within ten days, in the courts of that city where the business which gave occasion to the dispute may have taken place.” Further, it was agreed that the command of the Roman and Latin armies, on their joint expeditions, should one year4 be given to the Roman general, and another to the Latin: and to this league nothing was to be added, and nothing taken away, without the mutual consent of the Romans and the confederate cities of the Latins. II. Seven years afterwards the same Spurius Cassius, in his third consulship,5 A. U. c. 268. League concluded a similar league with the cities of the Hernicans. The with the Hernio s. Hernicans were a Sabine, not a Latin people, and their country lay chiefly in that high valley which breaks the line of the Apennines at Proeneste, and running towards the southeast, falls at last into the valley of the Liris. The number of their cities was probably sixteen; but with the exception of Anagnia, Veruloa, Alatrium, and Ferentinum, the names of all are unknown to us. They, like the Latins, had been the dependent allies of Rome under the last Tarquinius; they, too, had broken off this connection after the establishment of the commonwealth, and now renewed it on more equal terms for mutual protection against the zEquians and Volscians. The situation of their country, indeed, rendered their condition one of peculiar danger; it lay interposed in the very midst of the country of these enemies, having the _/Equians on the north, and the Volscians on the south, and communicating with the Latin cities and with Rome only by the opening in the Apennines already noticed under the citadel of Prseneste. 2 Dionysius, V. 61. I have followed the read-and only gives an additional proof of the’-systeings of the Vatican MS. given in the various matic falsehood of the Roman annals in their readings in Reiske’s Edition, with Niebuhr’s accounts of the relations of Rome with foreigncorrections, Vol. II. p. 19, 2d Ed. ers. It is true that the words of Cincius, quo 3 Dionysius, VI. 95. anno,” do not expressly assert that the com4 Cincius de Consulum Potestate, quoted by mand was held by a Roman every other year; Festus in “Prsetor ad Portam.” The whole and it may be that after the Hernicans joined passage is remarkable.’” Cincius ait, Albanlos the alliance, the Romans had the command only rerum potitos usque acl Tullum regem: Alb’ once in three years. But as the Latin states deinde dirutA usque ad P. Decimn Murem cos. were considered as forming one people,and the populos Latinos ad caput Ferentinse, quod est Romans another, it is most likely that so long sub Monte Albano, consulere solitos, et imperias the alliance subsisted between these two par  um communi consilio administrare. Itaque quo ties only, the command shifted from the one to anno Romanos imperatores ad exercitum mit-the other year by year. tere oporteret jussu nominis Latini, complures 5 Dionysius, VIII.

69. TVs rpt’vEpviKag i nostros in Capitolio a sole oriente auspiclis ope-V/yKEV boaXoya’* avral Z’ eaav arrtypaCoI rTv ram dare solitos. Ubi aves addixissQnt, mili-7rpbs AariovOVg ysvPoUivov. Amongst other clauses, tem ilium qui a communi Latio missus esset, therefore, of the treaty was one which secured to illum quem aves addixerant praetorem salutare the Hernicans their equal share of all lands consolitum, qui eam provinciam obtineret pr.etoris quered by the confederates; namely, onethird rnomine.” Cincius lived in the time of the see-p]art. This is disfigured by t he annalist, whom ond Punic war, and his works on various points Livy copied, in a most extraordinary manner; of Roman law and antiquities were of high value. he represented the Hernicans as being deprived His statement, which bears on the face of it a by the treaty of two-thirds of their own land. character of authenticity, is quite in agreement ” Cum Hernicis feedus ictum, agri partos dua with what Dionysius reports of the treaty itself, ademtme.”) Livy, II. 41.

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CHAP. IX.] THE AGRARIAN LAW. 59 On the other hand, the Romans were glad to obtain the willing aid of a brave and numerous people, whose position enabled them to threaten the rear of the Volscians, so soon as they should break out from their mountains upon the plain of Latium or the hills of Alba. Thus by these two treaties with the Latins and Hernicans, Spurius Cassius had, so far as was possible, repaired the losses occasioned to the Importance oftlhese two Roman power by the expulsion of Tarquinius, and had reorganized treaties. that confederacy to which, under her last kings, Rome had been indebted for her greatness. The wound was healed at the very critical moment, before the storm of the great Volscian invasions burst upon Latium. It happened of necessity that the Latins, from their position, bore the first brunt of these attacks; Rome could only be reached when they were conquered: whereas, had it not been for the treaty concluded by Spurius Cassius, the Volscians, on their first appearance in Latium, might have been joined by the Latins; or the surviving cities of the confederacy, after the conquest of some of their number, might have taken refuge under the protection of the conquerors. But in restoring the league with the Latins and Hernicans, Spurius Cassius had only adopted a part of the system of the Roman kings. Sp. Cassiusproposes an Another, and a far more difficult part, yet remained: to strengthen agrarian law’ the state within; to increase the number of those who, as citizens, claimed their share of the public land, and out of this public land to relieve the poverty of those who united the two inconsistent characters of citizenship and beggary. Spurius Cassius proposed, what tradition ascribed to almost every one of the kings as amongst his noblest acts, an agrarian law. But he was not a king; and it is but too often a thankless act in the eyes of the aristocracy, when one of their own members endeavors to benefit and to raise the condition of those who are not of his own order. If, amongst Niebuhr’s countless services to Roman history, any single one may claim our gratitude beyond the rest, it is his explanation of the The true character of true nature and character of the agrarian laws. Twenty-four the efigeai.anl.la’.ea years have not yet elapsed since he first published it, but it has buhr. already overthrown the deeply rooted false impressions which prevailed universally on the subject; and its truth, like Newton’s discoveries in natural science, is not now to be proved, but to be taken as the very corner-stone of all our researches into the internal state of the Roman people. I am now to copy so much of it as may be necessary to the right understanding of the views -and merits of Spurius Cassius. It seems to have been a notion generally entertained in the ancient world, that every citizen of a country should be a landholder, and that the of the public or deterritory of a state, so far as it was not left unenclosed or reserved…t lidn’. t’e a-; for public purposes, should be divided in equal portions amongst,ad its occupatio.. the citizens. But it would almost always happen that a large part of it was left unenclosed; the complete cultivation of a whole country, without distinction of soil, being only the result of an eicess of population, and therefore not taking place till a late period. The part thus left out of cultivation was mostly kept as pasture, and a revenue was raised from it, not only from every citizen who had turned out sheep or cattle upon it, but also from strangers, who, although incapable of buying land, might yet rent a right of pasture for their flocks and herds. But when a new territory was gained in war, the richer parts of it already in cultivation were too valuable to be given up to pasture; while, on the other hand, if they were divided, the division could only follow the general rule, and allot an equal portion to every citizen. In these circumstances, it was the practice at Rome, and doubtless in other states of Italy, to allow individuals to occupy such lands, and to enjoy all the benefits of them, on condition of paying to the state the tithe of the produce as an acknowledgment that the state was the proprietor of the land, and the individual merely the occupier. With regard to the state,

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60 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. ISX the occupier was merely a tenant at will; but with respect to other citizens, he was like the owner of the soil, and could alienate the land which he occupied either for a term of years or forever, as much as if he had been its actual proprietor. This public land thus occupied was naturally looked to as a resource on every Portions of it were admission of new citizens. They were to receive their portion of granted tonew citizens. freehold land, according to the general notion of a citizen’s condition; but this land could only be found by a division of that which belonged to the public, and by the consequent ejectment of its tenants at will. Hence, in the Greek states, every large accession to the number of citizens6 was followed by a call for a division of the public land; and as this division involved the sacrifice of many existing interests, it was regarded with horror by the old citizens,’ as an act of revolutionary violence. For although the land was undoubtedly the property of the state, and although the occupiers of it were in relation to the state mere tenants at will, yet it is in human nature that a long undisturbed possession should give a feeling of. ownership, the more so, as while the state’s claim lay dormant, the possessor was in fact the proprietor; and the land would thus be repeatedly passing by regular sale from one occupier to another. And if there was no near prospect of the state’s claiming its right, it is manifest that the price of land thus occupied would, after some years of undisturbed possession, be nearly equal to that of an actual freehold. Under such circumstances the English law, with its characteristic partiality toThe occupiers of the individual and existing interests, would no doubt have decided, as pwablie ted catd nh-it did in the somewhat similar case of the copyholds, that the way she ejected at the pleasure of the state. occupier could not be ejected so long as he continued to pay his tithe to the state. The Roman law, on the other hand, in a spirit no less characteristic, constantly asserted the utterly precarious tenure of the occupier,s whenever the state might choose to take its property into its own hands. And accordingly, most of the kings of Rome are said to have carried an agrarian law, that is, to have divided a portion, more or less, of the public land amongst those whom they admitted to the rights of citizenship. Yet it was understood that these new citizens, the Roman commons, although they received their portion of land as freehold, whenever the public land was divided, had still no right to occupy it9 while it lay in the mass unallotted; while the old burghers, who Asovr7vo-o-roXras rTo rypdt4avro NrXXiOS, Kial possideret,” was understood by every Roman t zP0os rlV ylv revorut clvaudaafciOa. Thucyd. V. 4. withoutthe addition of the word “publici” to So, again, when the Cyrensans in Africa ” agri,” because the word “possidere” could wished to increase the number of their citizens, not in a legal sense apply to private property, they invited over any Greek that chose to come, although there is no doubt that in common lanholding out the temptation of an allotment of guage it is often found in that signification. land. Herodotus, IV. 169. 9 This was because the plebs was not yet con7 Hence it was a clause of the oath taken by sidered to be a part of the populus: dr6loS and every member of the court of Helinea at Athens, r6Xsg were still carefully distinguished, and the that he would allow no division of the land of state, or people, or burghers, claimed the exthe Athenians (Demosthen. Timocrat. p. 746); elusive administration of what may be called by which it was not meant that there was any the corporate property of the state. Those who dream of a division of the private property of are acquainted with the affairs of the colleges Athenian citizens, but of the public land of the of the English universities will recollect the commonwealth, which being beneficially en-somewhat similar practice there with regard to joyed by the existing citizens, could not, with-fines. Whatever benefits arise out of the adout loss to them, be allotted out to furnish free-ministration of the college property belong exhold properties, Kc7pol, for any citizens newly clusivelyto the ruling part of the society: the admitted to the franchise.

fellows engross the fines to themselves, just as 8 I have used the words “occupation” and the burghers at Rome enjoyed the exclusive “occupier,”

-rather than “possession” and right of occupying the public land. But the ” possessor 1 to express the Latin terms ” posrents of college lands are divided in certain sessio” and “possessor,” because the English fixed proportions amongst the fellows and scholword “possession” is often usedto denote what ars, the populus and plebs of the society. And is a man’s own property, whereas it was an es-a law which should prohibit the practice of sential part of the definition of 1”possessio,” taking a fine on the renewal of a lease of colthat it could relate only to what was not a man’s lege property, and should order the land to be own property. Hence the clause in the Licin-let at its full value, in order to secure to the ian law, ” Ne quis plus quingenta jugera agri scholars their due share in all the benefits aris*

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UCHAP. IX.] THE AGRARIAN L_&W, 61 enjoyed exclusively the right of occupation with regard to the undivided public land, had no share in it whatever when it was divided, because they already enjoyed from ancient allotment a freehold property of their own. Thus the public land was wholly unprofitable to the commons, so long as it was undivided, and became wholly lost to the burghers whenever it was divided. Now twenty-four years after the expulsion of Tarquinius, there must have been at least as great need of an agrarian law as at any former An agrarian law was period of the Roman history. The loss of territory on the righi period of greatly needet this bank of the Tiber, and. all those causes which had brought on the tory. general distress of the commons, and overwhelmed them hopelessly in debts, called aloud for a remedy; and this remedy was to be found, according to precedent no less than abstract justice, in an allotment of the public land. For as the burghers who occupied this land had even grown rich amidst the distress of the commons, so they could well afford to make some sacrifice; while the reservation to them of the exclusive right of occupying the public land till it was divided, held out to them the hope of acquiring fresh possessions, so soon as the nation, united and invigorated by the proposed relief, should be in a condition to make new conquests. Spurius Cassius accordingly proposed an agrarian law”m for the division of a certain proportion of the public land, while from the occupiers of Spurius Cassius pi’. the remainder, he intended to require the regular payment of the ni laoppw, which iby tithe, which had’

been greatly neglected, and to apply the revenue the burgh.err. thus gained to paying the commons, whenever they were called out to serve as soldiers. Had he been king he could have carried the measure without difficulty, and would have gone down to posterity invested with the same glory which rendered sacred the memory of the good king Servius. But his colleague, Proculus Virginius,l’ headed the aristocracy in resisting his law, and in maligning the motives of its author. His treaties with the Latins and Hernicans were represented as derogating from the old supremacy of Rome; and this cry roused the national pride even of the commons against him, as, four centuries afterwards, a similar charge of sacrificing the rights of Rome to the Italian allies ruined the popularity of M. Drusus. Still it is probable that the popular feeling in favor of his law was so strong, that the burghers yielded to the storm for the moment, and consented to pass it.“2 They followed the constant policy of an aristocracy, in out of the college property, would give no been that the law was passed, and its execution bad idea of the nature and objects of an agra-fraudulently evaded; and that the tribunes derian law at Rome.

manded no more than the due execution of an 10 I have here followed Niebuhr (Vol. II. 188, edxsting law. And he supposes that the words 2dl ed.) in assuming as the original proposal of of Dionysius, reoro 7a t6ycta eld Trov 6oov e1CEVX%Cassius, what is represented in Dionysius as Oev, r6v -E Kda’torv!‘ravee rS Jr#paywyia;S Kat rs1v the proposal of A. Sempronius Atratinus, to &vappLrr&o/eivrlv EK Trtv rEVtrTWV radcv oUK e’acOE nEwhich the senate assented. Dionysius, VIII. paaltrpo rpeOEX01v, VIII. 76, are taken from some 75 76. Roman annalist, who bythe words “ad populum i~

Livy, II. 41. This was the great quarrel latum” meant the old populus, the assembly of between the nobles and the commons in Castile. the burghers in their curlie. At any rate, the The commons complained that the crown do-words se rov tiinov elaevexOev seem to imply more mains had been so granted away to the nobles, than the mere communicating to the people that now, as the nobles were exempt from tax-the knowledge of a decree of the senate. They ation, the commons were obliged to. defray all must apparently signify that the decree of the the expenses of the public service’at their own senate, as a nrpoeolXevua, was submitted to the private cost. And it was the commons’ insist-people for its acceptance and ratification; and ing that the nobles should give up the domains this “peoeple” must have been the burghers in as being strictly public property, which deter-their curla, and by its being stated that the mined the nobles to take part with the crown, bringing the measure before the people put an in the famous war of the commons in the reign end to the agitation, it must surely be conof Charles V. See Ranke, Fursten und Vdlker ceivel that the measure was not rejected, but von Sfid-Europa. Vol.

I. p. 218. passed. For the’words, la#ipuv gis 7TV4 St(Oyv as 12 See Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 196. He argues, signifying “to submit a measure to the people that as the tribunes, before the Publiian laws, for their confirmation of it,” it can hardly be had no power of originating any legislative necessary to quote instances, robe Ivyypaeas  measure, and as we hear of their agitating the Ivyypahmavras yvWtrlv ErEvLYKEeIzv Cs rY v #OV. Thu. question of the agrarian law, year after year cyd. VIII. 67.

from the death of Cassius, the fact must have

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62 HISTORY OF ROME. [CIAP. X to separate the people from their leaders, to pacify the former by a momentary resignation of the point in dispute, and then to watch their time for destroying the latter, that so when the popular party is deprived of its defenders, they may wrest from its hands that concession which it is then unable to retain. When, therefore, the year was over, and Spurius Cassius was no longer consul, Spurius Cassius is im-the burghers knew that their hour of vengeance had arrived.

perghers, bfodemned, Ser. Cornelius and Quintus Fabius”3 were the new consuls; Kaeso and executed. Fabius, the consul’s brother, and Lucius Valerius, were the inquisitors of blood, qusestores parricidii, who, as they tried all capital offences subject to an appeal to the burghers or commons, were also empowered to bring any offender at once before those supreme tribunals, instead of taking cognizance of his case themselves.

Cassius was charged with a treasonable attempt to make himself king, and the burghers, assembled in their curiae, found him guilty. He shared the fate of Agis and of Marino Falieri; he was sentenced to die as a traitor, and was, according to the usage of the Roman law, scourged and beheaded, and his house razed to the ground. CHAPTER X. ASCENDENCY OF THE

ARISTOCRACY-THE FABII AND THEIR SEVEN CONSIULSHIPS-THE PUBLILIAN LAW.-A.

U. C. 269-2838.‘HvutiaV EJXv b #ios Kaa Karra’t Xltv romaVr afsTly i5ars Kp5os 5 i t 7rdaxv rL [tasov,, el Kai amyp,, 4v6ts;,. -THUCYD. VIII. 66. “

Les abus r6cens avaient bravy la force et d6pass6 la prevoyance des anciennes lois: il fallait des garanties nouvelles, explicites, revatnes de la sanction du parlement tout entier. C’(tait ne rion faire que de renouveler vaguement des promesses tant de fois violdes, des statuts si longtemps oublids.”-GuIZOT, Revolution d’Angleterre, Livre I. p. 45. THE
release of all existing debts by the covenant concluded at the Sacred Hill, and the appointment of the tribunes to prevent any tyrannical enThe burghers claim the exclusive appoint-forcement of the law of debtor and creditor for the time to come, meat of the0 consls. had relieved the Roman commons from the extreme of personal degradation and misery. But their political condition had made no perceptible advances; their election of their own tribunes was subject to the approval of the burghers; and their choice of consuls, subject also to the same approval, was further limited to such candidates as belonged to the burghers’ order. Even this, however, did not satisfy the burghers; the death of Spurius Cassius enabled them to dare any usurpation; while on the other hand, they needed a more absolute power than ever, in order to evade their own concession in consenting to his agrarian law. Accordingly, they proposed to elect’ the consuls themselves, ” Livy, II. 41. ation then made in the constitution. And Zo1

See Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 202, et seqq. Dio-naras, who copies Dion Cassius, says expressly nysius and Livy both ascribe the election of that the commons, in the year 273, insisted on tEmilius and Fabius to the influence of the pa-electing one of the consuls, for at that time both tricians; but Dionysius (VIII. 83) further noti-were chosen by the patricians. It seems, thereces their coming into office as a marked period fore, probable that the period from 270 to 273 in the Roman history, and mentions the date, was marked by a decided usurpation on the part and the name of the archon at Athens for that of the burghers, and that durinn that time they year; as if there had been some important alter-alone elected both consuls.

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CHAP. X.] ASCENDENCY OF THE ARISTOCRACY. 63 and only to require the confirmation of them by the centuries; a form which would be as unessential as the crowd’s acceptance of the king at an English coronation, inasmuch as it was always by the vote of the burghers in their curie that the imperium or sovereignty was conferred; and when a consul was already in possession of this, it mattered little whether the centuries acknowledged his title or not. In this manner were Lucius JEmilius, and Koeso Fabius, A U. 20. the prosecutor of Spurius Cassius, chosen consuls by the burghers; and it was in vain that the commons demanded the execution of the agrarian law; the consuls satisfied the object of those who had elected them, and the law remained a dead letter.

The same spirit was manifested in the elections of the following year, and was attended with the same result; the other prosecutor of Cassius, L.

Valerius, was now chosen by the burghers, and with him another member of the Fabian house, Marcus, the brother of Kaeso and of Quintus. But the complete usurpation of the consulship by the burghers served to call into action the hitherto untried powers of the tribuneship. In the The tribunes protect year 271, the tribune Caius Mmenius2 set the first example of ex-tefosuo t.seto ni tending the protection of his sacred office to those of the com-soldiers. mons, who on public grounds resisted the sovereignty of the consuls, by refusing to serve as soldiers. This was the weapon so often’sed from this time forwards in defence of the popular cause: the Roman commons, like those of England, sought to obtain a redress of grievances by refusing to aid the government in its wars; they refused to furnish men, as our fathers refused to furnish money. But the first exercise of this privilege was overborne with a high hand; the consuls held their enlistment of soldiers without the city; there the tribunes’

protection had no force; and if any man refused to appear, and kept his person safe within the range of the tribunes’ aid, the consuls proceeded to lay waste his land, and to burn and destroy his stock and buildings, by virtue of that sovereign power which, except within the walls of the city, was altogether unlimited. Accordingly the tribunes’ opposition totally failed, and the consuls obtained the army which they wanted. But there is an undying power in justice which no oppression can altogether put down.

Caius Maenius had failed, but his attempt was not The centuries recover entirely fruitless; a spirit was excited amongst the commons,ng oneout of thpotiwo which induced the burghers the next year, after long disputes and onsuls. delays, to choose for one oi the consuls a man well affected to the cause of the commons; and the year afterwards it was agreed by both orders that the election should be divided between them; that one consul should be chosen by the burghers in their curie, and the other by the whole people in their centuries. Still, however, it must not be forgotten, that the votes of the burghers’ clients were at this time so numerous in the centuries, as to give to their patrons no small influence even in the election of that consul who was particularly to be the representative of the commons. Yet the commons regarded the change as a triumph, and it was marked as a memorable events in the annals, that in the year 273, Kmeso Fabius was again chosen consul by the burghers, and that Spurius Furius was elected as his colleague by the people in their centuries. The refusal of the burghers to execute the agrarian law still rankled in the minds of the commons; and when men were again wanted to A.U.C. 273. The Ro4Tman soldiers suffer serve against the iEquians and Veientians, Spurius Licinius,4 one thenmlves itohbebeaten of the tribunes, again offered his protection to those who refused inbattloe; rtherb than to enlist. But his colleagues betrayed him, and either as being a.re. majority of the college overruled the opposition of Licinius, or by an abuse of their peculiar power, offered their protection to the consuls in enforcing their’Dionysius, VIII. 87. 4 Livy, II. 43.’ Zonaras, VII. 17. Dionysius, IX. 1.

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64 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. HX orders against the refractory. Thus an army was raised; but the soldiers who followed KCeso Fabius into the field, regarded him and the burghers as more their enemies than the Veientians, and according to the Roman annalists, they refused to conquer, and retreated before an enemy whom they could have vanquished if they would.

This is merely the habitual style of Roman arrogance; but that brave men may be found capable of allowing themselves to be slaughtered by the enemy rather than risk the possibility of winning a victory for a commander whom they detest, we know, not merely from the suspicious accounts of the Roman writers, but from the experience of our own naval service in the last war, in one memorable instance as melancholy as it was notorious. Marcus Fabius was again chosen as the burghers’ consul for the next year, and A. U. C.

274. The On. Manlius5 was elected by the centuries. Another attempt to hotse f the FbaSu sef Stop the raising of an army was made by the tribune Tiberius co.mmons. Pontificius,6 and was again baffled by the opposition of his colleagues. But this year witnessed an accession to the cause of the commons, of importance more than enough to compensate for the defection of the majority of the tribunes. The Fabian house had now been in possession of one place in the consulship for six years without interruption, a clear proof that no other house among the burghers could compare with them in credit and in power. Standing at the head of their order, they had been most zealous in its cause, and had incurred proportionably the hatred of the commons. But they had men amongst them of a noble spirit, who could not bear to be so hated by their countrymen, as that their own soldiers should rather allow themselves to be slaughtered by the enemy than conquer under the command of a Fabius. Thus the new consul, Marcus Fabius, was resolved to conciliate the commons; he succeeded so far as to venture to give battle to the Veientians; in the battleS. he and his brothers fought as men who cared for nothing else than to recover their countrymen’s love; Quintus Fabius, the consul of the year 272, was killed; but the Romans gained the victory. Then the Fabii, to show that they were in earnest, persuaded the burghers to divide amongst their houses the care of the wounded soldiers; they themselves took charge of a greater number than any other house, and discharged the duty which they had undertaken with all kindness and liberality. Thus, when the burghers named Kaeso Fabius to be again their consul, he was as acceptable to the centuries as his colleague whom they themselves appointed, Titus Virginius. Kaso did not delay an instant in showing that his sense of the wrongs of the AU. c. 275. Mi-commons was sincere; he immediately9
required that the agrarian tionof the Fabii toth law of Spurius Cassius should be duly carried into effect. But Cremera,where they are ot off by the Veien the burghers treated him with scorn; the consul, they said, had tians. forgotten himself, and the applause of the commons had intoxicated him. Then KIeso and all his house, finding themselves reproached for having deserted their former cause, resolved to quit Rome altogether. The war with the Veientians showed them how they might still be useful to their old country: they established themselves on the Cremera, a little stream that runs into the Tiber from the west, a few miles above Rome.

Here they settled with their wives and families,‘0 with a large train of clients,l1 and with some of the burghers also who were connected with them by personal ties, and who resolved to share their fortune. The Fabii left Rome as the Claudii had left Regillus a few years before; they wished to establish themselves as a Latin colony in Etruria, serving the cause of Rome even while they had renounced her. But two 5 Patres M. Fabium consulem creant: Fabio 9 Livy, II. 48. colleg COn. Manlius datur. Livy, II. 43. 10 See Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 219. Aulus Gel6 Livy, II. 44. lius says, Sex et trecenti Fabii cum familiis suis 7 Neque immemor ejus, quod initio consula- -curcumventi perierunt. tus imbiberat, reconciliandi animos plebis, &c.’ HeaXdsras re TOrs reVTrv raytlevoz Ksa tiXovs’ Livy, II, 17. ad fin. and again, a little below, Tr EyI rXAe&v 7rXaTwP 8 Livy, II. 45-47. rs ecat fratpwv bv. Dionysius, IX. 15.

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CHAP. X.] THE PUBLILIAN LAW. 65 years afterwards they fell victims to the Veientians, who surprised A. U. C. c. them, put them all to the sword, and destroyed their settlement. The commons had gained strength and confidence from the coming over of the Fabii to their cause; they gratefully honored the spirit which The commons impeach had made them leave Rome, and when they heard of their overthe consols for allowing throw, they at once accused the burghers of having treacherously t Frb to be ut o betrayed them. Titus Menenius, one of the consuls, had been quietly lying encamped”2 near the Cremera when the Fabii were cut off. He was accused, therefore, in the following year of treason, and was condemned; A. U. C.

28. but the tribunes themselves pressed for no heavier sentence than a fine, although he actually died from vexation and shame at having been subjected to such a sentence. In the next year13 another consul was A c.

29. accused by the tribunes, because he had been defeated in battle by the Veientians, but he defended himself manfully, and was acquitted. This habit of acting on the offensive for two successive years emboldened the commons, and they now began again to call for the execution of Genucius impenchesthe the agrarian law of Cassius. The ccnsuls L. Furius and C.

Man-e oxfecutift.fhe ara lius resisted this demand during their year of office, but as soon cianlaw. as that was expired, Cn. Genucius,l4 one of the tribunes, impeached them both before the commons for the wrong done to that order. A..9.9 The burghers were now alarmed, for they saw that the commons were learning their own strength, and putting it in practice. They desired, at A U. 281. He is any risk, to produce a reaction, and they acted at Rome as the found dead in his bed Spartans some years afterwards treated their Helots, or as the bthe trial. Venetian nobles in modern times silenced those bold spirits whom they dreaded. On the night before the day fixed for the trial of the consuls, Genucius the tribune was found dead in his bed.15 The secrecy and treachery of assassination are always terrifying to a popular party, who have neither the organization among themselves to be Other assassinations tb~ able to concert reprisals, nor wealth enough to bribe an assassin, tribune Volero Publili even if no better feeling restrained them from seeking such aid. forward Besides, the burghers were not satisfied with a single murder; others whom they dreaded were put out of the way by the same means as Genucius; and like the Athenian aristocratical conspirators in thle Peloponnesian war, they freely used the assassin’s dagger to secure their ascendency.16 Thus the tribunes for awhile were silenced, and the consuls proceeded to enlist soldiers to serve against the.zEquians and Volscians. Amongst the rest was one Volero Publilius,17 who had served before as a centurion, and who was now called on to serve as a common soldier; he refused to obey, and being a man of great vigor and activity, he excited the commons to support him, and the consuls and their lictors were driven from the Forum. Here the disturbance rested for the time, but Volero was chosen to be one of the tribunes for the year ensuing. Volero was a man equal to the need. The tribunitian power might be crippled by the influence of the burghers at the elections; the burgh-A. U. C. 82. The Pub ers’ clients were so numerous in the centuries, that they could lilianlaw. elect whom they would; and thus, in ordinary times, the college of tribunes might, perhaps, contain a majority who were the mere tools of the burghers, and who could utterly baffle the efforts of their colleagues. This Volero was impatient to prevent, and taking advantage of the excitement of the moment, when the commons were enraged by the murder of Genucius, he proposed a law that the tribunes, for the time to come,s8 should be chosen by the votes of the commons in their tribes, and not by those of the whole people in their centuries. 12 Livy, II. 52. 16 Zonaras, VII. 17. Dion Cass. Fragm. Vai l Livy, II. 52. tic. XXII. 14 Livy, II. 54. 17 Livy, II.

55. 16 Livy, II. 54. 18 Livy, II. 56. 5

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66 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. X. No tribune could be persuaded to betray the cause of his order and of public It is violently opposed freedom by opposing Volero on this occasion; but the year passed bythe brghers. away, and the burghers were thus long successful in obstructing the further progress of the law. It should be remembered that Volero could but propose his measure to the commons assembled in their tribes, and that even if accepted by them, it did not, therefore, become a law, but rather resembled the old petitions of the house of commons, which required the sanction of the king and the house of lords before they could become the law of the land. So any resolution of the tribes was no more than a petition addressed to the senate and burghers; but there is a moral power in such petitions which is generally irresistible, and the burghers well understood the policy of an aristocracy, to fight its battle in the assembly of the commons themselves, rather than to commit their order in an open contest with the whole order of the commons. Accordingly, the burghers labored to prevent Volero from carrying his petition in the assembly of the tribes. With this view, their method was delay: the tribes met to transact business only once in eight days, once, that is, in a Roman week;19 and no measure could be proposed unless notice had bctn given of it two full weeks beforehand, while any measure that was not carried on the day that it was brought forward, was held to be lost, and could not be again put to the vote till after the lapse of two full weeks more. The object, therefore, of the burghers was so to obstruct the course of business, whenever the tribes met, as to spin it out to sunset without a division; then the measure was lost, and could not be brought on again till after a fortnight’s interval. And they interrupted and delayed the business of the tribes, by appearing with their clients in the Forum, and purposely exciting a disturbance with the commons. Besides, we are told that Rome was this year visited with a severe epidemic disorder, which, though it lasted only a little while, was exceedingly fatal. This was an interruption to ordinary business, and this, together with the arts of the burghers, prevented the commons from coming to a resolution in favor of their measure throughout the whole course of the year. Volero was reelected tribune;“0 Appius Claudius was chosen consul by the A. U. C.

283. But at burghers, and T. Quintius was elected as his colleague by the last carried. centuries. With Volero there was chosen also another tribune more active than himself, Caius Loetorius;21 the oldest of all the tribunes, but a man endowed with a resolute spirit, and well aware of the duty of maintaining the contest vigorously. Fresh demands were added to those contained in Volero’s first law: the ediles were to be chosen by the tribes as well as the tribunes, and the tribes were to be competent22 to consider all questions affecting the whole nation, and not such only as might concern the commons. Thus the proposed law was rendered more unwelcome to the burghers than ever, and Appius determined to resist it by force. Lsetorius was provoked by the insulting language of the consul, and he swore that on the next day on which the law could be brought forward, he would either get it passed by the commons before evening, or would lay down his life upon the place.23 Accordingly, when the tribes assembled, Appius stationed himself in the Forum, surrounded by a multitude of the younger burghers and of his own clients, ready to interrupt the proceedings of the commons. Luetorius called the tribes to vote, and gave the usual order that all strangers, that is, all who did not belong to any tribe, should withdraw from the Forum. Appius refused to stir;24 the tribune sent his officer to enforce obedience, but the consul’s lictors beat off the officer, and a general fray ensued, in 19 In the Roman Kalendars which have been elusive manner of reckoning, common to all the preserved to us, eight letters are used to mark nations of antiquity. the several clays of the month, just as seven are 20 Livy, II. 56. used by us.

Thus, the nones of the month fell 21 Dionysius, IX. 46. always one Roman week before the ides; the 22 Dionysius, IX. 43. Zonaras, VII. 17. term noUne, like that of nundine to express the 23 Livy, II. 56. weekly market-day, having reference to the in-24 Livy, II. 56.

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CHAP. X.] THE PUBLILIAN LAW. 67 which Lmetorius received some blows; and matters would have come to extremity, it is said, had not T. Quintius interposed, and with great difficulty parted the combatants. This, however, appears to be one of the usual softenings of the annals, which delighted to invest these early times with a character of romantic forbearance and innocence. Both parties were thoroughly in earnest; Lvetorius had received such injuries as to rouse the fury of the commons to the utmost; again had the sacred persons of the tribunes been profaned by violence, and Laetorius might soon share the fate of Genucius.

Accordingly, the commons acted this time on the offensive: they neither withdrew to the Sacred Hill, nor shut themselves up in their own quarter on the Aventine, but they attacked and occupied25 the Capitol, and held it for some time as a fortress, keeping regular guard, under the command of their tribunes, both night and day. The occupation of the citadel in the ancient commonwealths implied an attempt to effect a revolution; and a popular tribune, thus holding the Capitol with his partisans, might, at any instant, make himself absolute, and establish his tyranny, like so many of the popular leaders in Greece, upon the ruins of the old aristocracy. The senate, therefore, and the wiser consul, T. Quintius, resisted the violent counsels of Appius and the mass of the burghers; it was resolved that the law, which we must suppose had been passed by the commons immediately before they took possession of the Capitol, should be immediately laid before the senate, to receive the assent of that body. It received the senate’s sanction,2” and with this double authority it was brought before the burghers in their curiae, to receive their consent also; the only form wanting to give it the force of a law. But the decision of the wisest and most illustrious members of their own body overcame the obstinacy of the burghers: they yielded to necessity; and the second great charter of Roman liberties, the Publilian law, was finally carried, and became the law of the land. Some said that even the number of tribunes was now, for the first time, raised to five, having consisted hitherto of two only. At any rate, the names of the first five tribunes, freely chosen by their own order, were handed down to posterity; they were C. Siccius,27 L. Numitorius, -M. Duilius, Sp. Icilius, and L. Maecilius.

In this list we meet with neither Volero nor Letorius. Volero, as having been already tribune for two years together, and having been less prominent in the final struggle, may naturally have been passed over; but Loetorius,. like Sextius at a later period, would surely have been the first choice of the commons, when they came to exercise a power which they owed mainly to his exertions. Was it, then, that his own words had been prophetic; that he had, in fact, given up his life in the Forum on the day when he brought forward the law; that the blows of Appius’ burghers were as deadly as those of Kceso Quinctius, or of the murderers of Genucius, and that Luetorius was not only the founder of the greatness of his order, but its martyr also? Thus, after a period of extreme depression and danger, the comnmons had again begun to advance, and the Publilian law, going beyond any former charter, was a sure warrant for a more complete enfranchisement yet to come. The commons could now elect their tribunes freely, and they had formally obtained the right of discussing all, national questions in their own assembly. Thus their power spread itself out on every side, and tried its strength, against that time when, from being independent, it aspired to become sovereign, and swallowed up in itself all the powers of the rest of the community. 25 Dionysius, IX. 48.

27 Livy, II. 58. He borrows the names from DionysiJs, IX. 49. the annals of Piso.

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CHAPTER XI, WARS WITH THE AEQUIANS AND VOLSCIANS-LEGENDS CONNECTED WITfl THESE WARS-STORIES OF CORIOLANUS, AND OF CINCINNATUS. “Pandite nune Helicona Dene, caltusque movete: Qui bello exciti reges; qum quemque secutze Complerint campos acies; quibus Itala jam turnm Floruerit terra alma viris, quibus arserit armis.” VIPmIL, En. VII. 641. NOTHING conveys a juster notion of the greatness of Roman history than those Introduction to the for-chapters in Gibbon’s work, in which he brings before us the state eign history of Rome. f the east and of the north, of Persia and of Germany, and is led unavoidably to write a universal history, because all nations were mixed up with the; greatness and the decline of Rome. This, indeed, is the peculiar magnificence of our subject, that the history of Rome must be in some sort the history of the world; no nation, no language, no country of the ancient world, can altogether escape our researches, if we follow on steadily the progress of the Roman dominion till it reached its greatest extent. On this vast field we are now beginning to enter; our view must be carried a little beyond the valley of the Tiber, and the plain of the Campagna; we must go as far as the mountains which divide Latium from Campagna, which look down upon the level of the Pontine marshes, and even command the island summits of the Alban hills: we must cross the Tiber, and enter upon a people of foreign extraction and language, a mighty people, whose southern cities were almost within sight of Rome, while their most northern settlements were planted beyond the Apennines, and, from the great plain of the Eridanus, looked up to that enormous Alpine barrier which divided them from the unknown wildernesses watered by the Ister and his thousand tributary rivers. In the days of Thucydides, the Greek city of Cuma’ is described as situated The Opicnn or Ansoni-in the land of the Opicans. The Opicans, Oscans, or Ausonians, canna’ tions, the ~rqni for the three names all express the same people, occupied all the ans and Volseians. country between CEnotria and Tyrrhenia, that is to say, between the Silarus and the Tiber; but the seacoast of this district was full of towns belonging to people of other nations, such as the Greek cities of Cuma and Neapolis, and those belonging to the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians, such as Tarracina, Circeii, Antium, and Ardea. The Opicans were an inland people, and it was only by conquest that they at last came down to the seacoast, and established themselves in some of-the Tyrrhenian towns. They had various subdivisions; but the two nations of them with whom the Romans had most to do, and whose encroachments on Latium we are now to notice, are known to us under the name of the.Equians and Volscians. It is absolutely impossible to offer any thing like a connected history of the Volscian and.AEquian wars with Rome during the first half century from the beginning of the commonwealth. But in order to give some clearness to the following sketch, I must first describe the position of the two nations, and class their contests with Rome, whether carried on singly or jointly, under the names respectively of the AEquian and Volscian wars, according to the quarter which was the principal field of action. Thucyd. VI. 4.

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(CHAP. XI.] WAlS WITH THE AEQUIANS AND VOLSOIANS. The Voiscians, when they first appear in Roman history, are found partly settled on the line of highlands overlooking the plain of Latium, Theirgeographical pofrom near Praeneste to Tarracina, and partly at the foot of the sition. hills, in the plain itself. It has been already noticed, that just to the south of Pr~eneste a remarkable break occurs in this mountain wall, so that only its mere base has been left standing, a tract of grounds barely of sufficient elevation to turn the waters in different directions, and to separate the source of the Trerus, which feeds the Liris, from the streams of the Campagna of Rome. This breach or gap in the mountains forms the head of the country of the Hernicans, who occupied the higher part of the valley of the Trerus, and the hills on its left bank downward as far as its confluence with the Liris. But at Praeneste the mountain wall rises again to its full height, and continues stretching to the northward in an unbroken line, till it is again interrupted at Tibur or Tivoli by the deep valley of the Anio. Thus from the Anio.to the sea at Tarracina, the line of hills is interrupted only at a single point, immediately to the south of Przaneste, and is by this breach divided into two parts of unequal length, the shorter one extending from Tibur to Praeneste, the longer one reaching from the point where the hills again rise opposite to Prueneste as far as Tarracina and the sea. Of this mountain wall the longer portion was held by the Volscians, the shorter by the _Equians. But it is not to be understood that the whole of this highland country was possessed by these two Opican nations. Latin towns were scat-seat of the wars with tered along the edge of it overlooking the plain of Latium, such the Equians; as Tibur and PraEneste in the AEquian portion of it, and in the Volscian, Ortona, Cora, Norba, and Setia. The ~quians dwelt rather in the interior of the mountain country; their oldest seats were in the heart of the Apennines, on the lake of Fucinus, from whence they had advanced towards the west, till they had reached the edge overhanging the plain.

Nor is it possible to state at what time the several Latin cities of the Apennines were first conquered, or how often they recovered their independence. Tibur and Proeneste never fell into the hands of the AEquians, their natural strength helping, probably, to secure them from the invaders. The ~Equians seem rather to have directed their efforts in another direction, against the Latin towns of the Alban hills, pouring out readily through the breach in the mountain line already noticed, and gaining thus an advanced position from which to command the plain of Rome itself. The Volscian conquests, on the other hand, were effected either in their own portion of the mountain line, or in the plain nearer the sea, or with the Vocians. finally, on the southern and western parts of the cluster of the volocia connquests ia Alban hills, as the Equians attacked their eastern and northern Ltium. parts. Tarracina3 appears to have fallen into their hands very soon after the overthrow of the Roman monarchy; and Antium4 was also an early conquest. In the year 261, Boville, Circeii, Corioli, Lavinium, Satricum, and Velitrse, were still Latin cities; but all5 these were conquered at one time or other by the Vol2 Taking a parallel case from English geogra-seems, therefore, to have fallen soon after the phy, the gap in the oolitic limestone chain of date of the treaty with Carthage, in which it is hills which occurs in Warwickshire, between spoken of as a Latin city. Farnborough and Edge Hill, may be compared It belonged to the Volscians in the year 261, to the gap at Praneste; the line of hills north-the year in which the Roman league with the ward and southward from this point, overlook-Latins was concluded.

Livy, II. 33. ing the lias plain of Warwickshire, may repre-6 The present text of Dionysius has BoXisg or sent respectively the countries of the AEquians Beasd (VIII. 20). Plutarch has BaXlag (Coriand Volscians; whilst Banbury and the valley olanus, 29); but it appears that Bovillae, and not of the Cherwell answer to the country of the Bola, is meant, because the conquest of Bola is Hernicans. - mentioned separately by both writers, and bea It is mentioned as a Volscian town.under cause Plutarch gives the distance of B6XXai from the name of Anxur in the year 349. (Livy, IV. Rome at one hundred stadia, which suits Bo59.) Its capture by the Volscians is nowhere villse, but is too little for Bola. The conquest recorded; but in the earliest Volscian wars, af-of Circeii, Corioli, Lavinium, and Satricum, is ter the expulsion of the Tarquins, the scat of noticed by Livy, II. 39. Velitrae was taken by war lies always on the Roman side of it. It the Romans from the Volscians in the year 260,

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70 HISTORY OF ROME, [CHAP. X1 scians, so that at the period of their greatest success they must have advanced within twelve miles of the gates of Rome. The legend of Coriolanus represents these towns, with the exception of Velitrge, as having been taken between the years 263 and.

266, in the great invasion conducted jointly by Coriolanus and by Attius Tullius. But INiebuhr has given reasons for believing that these conquests were not made till some years later, and that they were effected not all at once, but in the course of several years. Be this as it may, it is certain that some of the towns thus taken, Satricum, for instance, Cerceii, and Velitre, remained for many years in possession of the Volscians. Corioli was destroyed, and is no more heard of in history, while Bovillee and Lavinium were in all probability soon recovered either by the Romans or by the Latins. Whilst the Volscians were thus tearing Latium to pieces on one side, the AEquiquian conquests. ans were assailing it with equal success on the other. Their conquests also are assigned by the legend of Coriolanus to his famous invasion, when he is said to have taken Corbio,g Vitellia, Trebia, Lavici, and Pedum. All these places, with the exception of Trebia, stood either on the Alban hills, or close to them, and three of them, Corbio, Lavici, and Pedum, are amongst tlhe thirty Latin cities which concluded the treaty with Spurius Cassius in the year 261. They were retained for many years’ by their conquerors; and thus Tibur and Prmeneste were isolated from the rest of Latium, and the ~Equians had established themselves on the Alban hills above and around Tusculum, which remained the only unconquered Latin city in that quarter, and was so thrown more than ever into the arms of Rome. Now, had all these conquests been indeed achieved as early as the year 266, These conquests were and within the space of one or two years, what could have preitg aperioed of syveral vented the.]Equians and Volscians from effecting the total conyhars.h th century of quest of Rome, or what could their armies have been doing in Rome. the years from 273 to 278, when the Romans were struggling so hardly against the Veientians? Or how comes it, as Niebuhr well observes, if the,Equians had taken Pedum, and Corbio, and Lavici, in 266, that their armies are mentioned as encamping on Algidus for the first time in the year 289; a spot which from that time forwards they continued to occupy, year after year, till Rome regained the ascendency? It is much more probable that the first years of the war after 263 were marked by no decisive events; that the league with the Hernicans in 268 opposed an additional obstacle to the progress of the Opican nations; but that subsequently, the wars with the Veientians, and the domestic disputes which raged with more or less violence from the death of Spurius Cassius to the passing of the Publilian law, distracted the attention of the Romans, and enabled the A2Equians and Volscians to press with more effect upon the Latins and Hernicans. But Antium was wrested from the Volscians by the three confederate nations in 286; and the great period of the Roman disasters is to be placed in the ten years following that event, unless we choose to separate the date of the Volscian conquests from those of the iEquians. We must, then, suppose that Corioli, Satricum, Laviniumr, and the towns in that quarter, had been taken by the Volscians between 266 and 286, that some of these were afterwards recovered, and that the Romans during the latter part of the period but it must afterwards have been lost again; pretended revolts of Roman colonies to have for we find it in arms withthe Volscians against been properly a revolt of the old inhabitants, in Rome, and afterwards with the Latins; and al-which the Roman colonists, as a matter of course, though this is spoken of as the revolt of a Ro-were expelled or massacred. See Vol. II. p. 44, man colony, as if the descendants of the colo-45. Engl. Transl. nists, sent there after its first conquest in 260, 6 Livy, II. 39. had always continued in possession of it, yet 7 Lavci was conqueredby the Romans in 336. the wellknown inscription found there, known (Livy, IV. 47.) Corbio in 297. (Livy, III.

30.) by the name of “La Lamina Volsca,” or “Bor-No recapture of Pedum is mentioned; but the giana,” is written in the Oscan language, and town probably joined the Latin confederacy contains the Oscan title “Medix.”

See Lanzi, again, when it shook offthe Volscian yoke: it Saggio di Lingua Etrusca, Vol. III. p. 616. I is mentioned in the time of the great Latin war believe Tiebuhr is right in considering such as taking an active part on the Latin side.

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CHAP. XL.] WARS WITH THE iEQUIANS AND VOLSCIANS. 71 had been regaining their lost ground, till in 286 they becamne, in their turn, the assailants, and conquered Antium. Then the IEquians united their arms more zealously with the Volscians; the seat of the war was removed to the frontier of Latium, bordering on the LEquians, and then followed the invasion of that frontier, the establishment of the iEquians on Algidus, and the repeated ravages of the Roman territory between Tusculum and Rome.

The period between tlie year 286 and the end of the century was marked by the visitations of pestilence as well as by those of war. A short That period was as but most severe epidemic had raged in the year 282;8 it broke.marked by the ~viit. out again in 288,9 and then in 291,10 when its ravages were most tionofpetilence. fearful. It carried off both the consuls, two out of the four augurs, the Curio Maximus, with a great number of other persons of all ages and conditions; and this sickness, like the plague of Athens, was aggravated by the inroads of the.Equians and Volscians, which had driven the country people to fly with their cattle into Rome, and thus crowded a large population into a narrow space with deficient accommodations, while the state of the atmosphere wae in itself pestilential, even had it been met under circumstances the most favorable. It is manifest that at this time the Romans were in possession of no fortified towns between Rome and the.{Equian frontier; when the Roman armies could not keep the field, the enemy might march without obstacle up to the very walls of Rome itself; and there was nothing for them to win, except the plunder of the Roman territory, and the possession of the capital. Perhaps, too, these disastrous times were further aggravated by another evil, which the Roman annals were unwilling openly to avow. When And by internal dismatters came to such a crisis that the commons occupied the Cap-mnsy Romans tin exile, who jomsind thearmies itol in arms, as was the case immediately before the passing of the’fthie no uoe tan ld Publilian law, when we read of dissensions so violent, that the volscians. consuls of three successive years were impeached by the tribunes, and a tribune was on the other hand murdered by the aristocracy; when again, at a somewhat later period, we read of the disputes about the Terentilian law, and hear of the banishment of Keso Quinctius for his violences towards the commons on that occasion, we may suspect that the whole truth has not been revealed to us, and that the factions of Rome, like those of Greece, were attended by the banishment of a considerable number of the vanquished party, so that Roman exiles were often to be found in the neighboring cities, as eager to return as the Tarquinii had been formerly, and as little scrupulous as they of effecting that retur’

through foreign aid. That this was actually the case, is shown by the surprise of the Capitol, in the year 294, when a body of men, consisting, as it is expressly said, of e.xiles and slaves,” and headed by Appius Herdonius, a Sabine, made 8 Dionysins, IX. 42. admit of no doubt. VI1v R
av-roT yvtri7 ierTa rTa Iivy, III. 2. Dionysius, IX. 60. KpaT-raa TWv torLcKatpoTdTarv rT6rcv (of Rome, name10 Livy, III. 6, 7. Dionysius, IX.

67. ly) rots re ivydeaas el TXreOal, Kea TOUs &o6XovU Eir 11 It is not, indeed, expressly said that the AXevOepiav xaXeiv. These can certainly be no exiles were Roman exiles; and Livy, who, in other than the exiles and the slaves of Rome. his whole narrative of the transaction, says The supposition in the text receives further nothing of Kssso, or of his connection with the confirmation from a remarkable statement in conspiracy, uses language which might be ap-Dionysius, that in the year 262, just before the plicable to the case of exiles of other countries.

banishment of Coriolanus, many Roman citizens He makes Herdonius say (III.

15), “Se miser-were invited by the neighboring cities to leave rimi cujusque suscepisse causam, ut exuies intheir country and to come and live with them juria pulsos in patriam reduceret; id malle and enjoy their franchise of citizenship. And populo Romano auctore fieri: si ibi spes non a great many ro:Xoi rdrv left Rome with their sit, Volscos et AEquos, et omnia extrema ten-families, he says, on these terms; some ofwhom taturum et concitaturunm.” Still even these returned afterwards, when better times arrived, words, especially the expression ” in patriam,” but others continued to live in their new coulinstead of “in patrias,” are most naturally to tries. See Dionys. VII. 18. This undoubtedly be understood of Roman exiles; if they had must mean that many Romans were obliged to been all Sabines, or zEquians, or Volscians, the go into banishment, and these availed themattempt would have been made on the citadel selves of the treaty with the Latins, which of Cures, or Lavici, or Anxur; not on the Capi-established an interchange of citizenship betol at Rome. But Dionysius’ words (X. 14) tween Rome and Latium, and became citizens

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72 HISTORY OF ROME. [CnAP. XI themselves masters of the citadel of Rome.

There is, therefore, in all probability, a foundation in truth for the famous story of Coriolanus, but it must be referred to a period much later than the year 263, the date assigned to it in the common annals; and the circumstances are so disguised, that it is impossible to guess from what reality they have been corrupted. It would be a beautiful story, could we believe that Coriolanus joined the conquering iquians and Volscians with a body of Roman exiles; that the victories of foreigners put it in his power to procure his own recall and that of his companions, but that, overcome by the prayers of his mother, he refrained from doing such violence to the laws of his country; and, contented with the conquests of his protectors, he refused to turn them to his own personal benefit, and chose rather to live and die an exile than to owe his restoration to the swords of strangers. Be this as it may, the common story is so famous and so striking that it must not be suppressed; and the life and death of Coriolanus are no unworthy sequel to the story of the life and death of the last king Tarquinius. CAIUS MARCIUSs2 was a noble Roman, of tke race of that worthy king, Ancus Story of Coriolanus. Marcius;‘3 his father died when he was a child, but his mother, the battle by the lake whose name was Volukmnia, performed to him the part both of Regilus. father and of mother; and Caius loved her exceedingly, and when he gained glory by his feats of arms, it was his greatest joy that his mother should hear his praises; and when he was rewarded for his noble deeds, it was his greatest joy that his mother should see him receive his crown. And ale fought at the battle by the lake Regillus,‘4 against king Tarquinius and the Latins, and he was then a youth of seventeen years of age; and in the heat of the battle he saw a Roman beaten to the ground, and his foe was rushing on him to slay him, but Caius stepped before him, and covered him, and slew the enemy, and saved the life of his fellow-soldier. So Aulus, the general, rewarded him with an oaken wreath, for such was the reward given to those who saved the life of a comrade in battle. And this was his first crown, but after this he won many in many battles, for he was strong and valiant, and none of the Romans could compare with him. After this there was a war between the Romans and the Volscians; and the w e took e Romans attacked the city of Corioli.‘5 The citizens of Corioli of Corioli, and won opened their gates and made a sally, and drove the Romans back to their camp.

Then Caius ran forwards with a few brave men, and called back the runaways, and he stayed the enemy, and turned the tide of the battle, so that the Volscians fled back into the city. But Caius followed them, and when he saw the gates still open, for the Volscians were flying into the city, then he called to the Romans, and said, ” For us are yon gates-set wide rather than for the Volscians; why are we afraid to rush in?” He himself followed the fugitives into the town, and the enemy fled before.him; but when they saw that he was but one man they turned against him, but Caius held his ground, for he was strong of hand, and light of foot, and stout of heart, and he drove the Volscians to the farthest side of the town, and all was clear behind him; so that the lRomans came in after him without any trouble, and took the city. Then all of some Latin city. And this is the simplest respect, as well as in calling the mother of the way of accounting for the name Coriolanus, to hero Volumnia, and his wife Virgilia, I have resuppose that he settled at Corioli, and became garded Shakspeare’s authority as decisive. a citizen there; and afterwards, when Corioli 13 Plutarch, Coriolanus, I. 4. was conquered by the Volscians, joined their 14 Plutarch, Coriolanus, 3. army in order to prosecute his revenge against 15 Plutarch, Coriolanus, VIII. The story repRome. resents Corioli as a Volscian town, and as taken 12 Zonaras, copying Dion Cassius, and most by the Romans in the consulship of Postumus of the MSS. of Livy, give the prtenomen of Co-Cominius, A. U. C. 261. The authentic monuriolanus as Cnweus, and not Caius. Historically ment of these times, the treaty between the Rothe point is of no consequence; but the richest malls and Latins concluded in this very same poetry in which the story of Coriolanus was ever year, shows that Corioli was then not a Volscian recorded, Shakspeare’s tragedy on that subject, but a Latin town, and one of the thirty states aas conecrated the name of Caius; and in this which made the alliance with Rome.

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CHAP. XI.] STOtRY OF CORIOLANUS. 73 men said, ” Caius and none else has won Corioli;” and Cominius the general said, “Let him be called after the name of the city.” So they called him Caius Marcius Coriolanus.’? After this there was a great scarcity of corn, and the commons were much distressed for want, and the king”7 of the Greeks in Sicily sent C,os offends the on. ships laden with corn to Rome: so the senate resolved to sell the mons,“dis.bh. corn to the poor commons, lest they should die of hunger. But Caius hated the commons, and he was angry that they had got tribunes to be their leaders, and he said, ” If they want corn, let them show themselves obedient to the burghers as their fathers did, and let them give up their tribunes; and then will we let them have corn to eat, and will take care of them.” The commons, when they heard this, were quite furious, and they would have set upon Caius as he came out of the senate-house and torn him to pieces, but the tribunes said, “Nay, ye shall judge him yourselves in your comitia, and we will be his accusers.” So they accused Caius before the commons; and Caius knew tha’ they would show him no mercy, therefore he stayed not for the day of his trial,’” but fled from Rome, and took refuge among the Volscians. They and Attiu es go to the VolTullius, their chief, received him kindly, and he lived among them scians: a banished man. Attius said to himself, “Caius, who used to fight against us, is now on our side; we will make war again upon the Romans.”

But the Vol-Attios Tollius stirs up scians were afraid; so that Attius was forced to practice craftily, War btw… the o-i to make them do what he wished, whether they would or no. Howl he contrived to Now the manner of his practice was as follows:‘9 The great bring this about. games at Rome were finished, but they were going to be celebrated over again with great pomp and cost, to appease the wrath of Jupiter. For Jupiter had spoken in a dream to Titus Latinius, a man of the commons, and said, ” Go and bid the consuls to celebrate the games over again with great pomp, for one danced at the opening of the games‘0 but now, whom I liked not; and vengeance is coming therefore upon this city.” But Titus feared to go to the consuls, for he thought that every one would laugh at him, and so he did not obey the god. A few days after his son fell sick and died; and again the vision appeared to him in his sleep, and said, ” Wilt thou still despise what I tell thee? Thy son is dead, but if thou go not quickly, and do my bidding, it shall be yet worse for thee.” But Titus still lingered, so he was himself stricken with a palsy; and he could not walk, but they carried him in a litter. Then he delayed no longer, but said to his kinsmen, ” Carry me into the forum, to the consuls.” And they carried him in his litter, and he told the consuls the bidding of the god, and all that had befallen himself. When he had finished his story, the consuls remembered how that on the morning of the first day of the games, a burgher had taken his slave and scourged him in the midst of the circus where the games were to 16 The story of the taking of Corioli was an at-nology as little as Shakspeare did about that of tempt to explain the name of Coriolanus, which Rome; and as he makes Titus Lartius talk of in reality merely showed that Marcius had been Cato the censor, so they made Dionysius the tysettled at Corioli, and had become a citizen of rant contemporary with the battle of Marathon, that place after his banishment from Rome. and said that it was he who relieved the scarciThe same explanation will serve, perhaps, for ty at Rome in the year 262. some other Latin surnames, such as Medullinus, 8 Livy, II. 85. Ipse quum die dicta non.Regillensis, Malventanus, and others, recording adesset, perseveratum in irh est. Dionysils, the connection of Roman families at some period whom Plutarch follows, says that the tribunes or other with the towns from which they took fixed perpetual banishment as the penalty which their names. See note 11. the accused should suffer if found guilty; that 17 Plutarch names Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse. he was found guilty by the votes of twelve tribes Livy merely says that the corn camne from Sici-out of twenty-one, and banished accordingly. ly Dionysius calls Gelon “the most distin-Dionysius and Plutarch seem to have forgotten guished of the tyrants of Sicily at that time,” that exile as a punishment was unknown to tho without specifying whether, at the time of the ll a much later period.

- famine at Rome, he was tyrant of Gela or of 19 Livy, II. 36. Syracuse.

The old Roman annalists, Licinius 20 Visus Jupiter dicere, ” Sibi ldics prnesultalMacer and Cln. Gellius, cared about Greek chro-torem displicuisse.” Livy, II. 36.

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74 HISTORY OF ROME. [0CAP. Xi be held; and the burgher regarded it not, but Jupiter saw it and was wroth: for it was a holy day, and a day for mirth and gladness, and not for crying and for torment. So the consuls believed what Titus said, and brought him into the senate, and he told the story again to the senators. When lo! so soon as he had ended his story, the palsy left him, and his limbs became strong as before, and he needed no more to be carried in his litter, but walked home on his feet. Thus the great games2’ were celebrated over again at Rome, and many of the The Volscians are driv-Volscians went to Rome to see the sight. Then Attius went to cenleubat Roof R thegretat the consuls privately, and said to them: “A great multitude of games. Volscians are now in Rome. I remember now on a like occasion, not many years since, the Sabines made a riot in this city, and great mischief was like to come of it; loth were I that my people should do aught of the same kind: but it becomes your wisdom rather to hinder evil than to mend it.” When the consuls told this to the senate, the senate was afraid; and it was thought best to send the criers round the city, to give notice that every Volscian should be gone from Rome before the setting of the sun. The Volscians were very angry at this, for they said to one another, “Do these men then hold us to be so profane and unholy, that our presence is an offence to the blessed gods?” So they left Rome in haste, and went home towards their own country, full of indignation at the shame which was put upon them. Their way home was over the hills of Alba,0 by the well-head of the water of Ferentina, where the councils of the Latins had been used to Attius meets them, and excites them to go to meet of old. Attius knew that the Volscians would be driven war with the Romans. from Rome, and would pass that way, so he waited there to meet them. At last they came up in a long train, each as he cbuld go, and Attius spoke to them, and asked them what was the matter, that they had so suddenly left Rome. When they told him, he called them to follow him from the road, down to the grass which was by the side of the stream, and there they gathered round him, and he made a speech to them, and said, ” What is it that these men have done to you? They have made a show of you at their games before all the neighboring nations. Ye, and your wives, and your children, were cast out at the voice of the crier, as though ye were profane and unholy, and as if your presence before the sight of the gods were a sacrilege. Do ye not count them for your enemies already, seeing if ye had not made such good haste in coming away ye would have been all dead men ere now? They have made war upon us: see to it, if ye be men, that ye make them rue their deed.” So the Volscians eagerly listened to his words, and all their tribes made it a common quarrel, and they raised a great army, and chose Attius and Caius Marcius, the Roman, to command it. When this great host took the field, the Romans feared to go out to battle How Cai.s and Attius against it. So Caius and Attius attacked the cities of the Latins, marchedagainst Rome. and they first took Circeii,23 and afterwards Satricum, and Longula, and Polusca, and Corioli; and then they took Lavinium, which was to the Romans a sacred city, because Yneas was its founder, and because the holy things of the gods of their fathers were kept there. After this Caius and Attius took Corbio, and Vitellia, and Trebia, and Lavici, and Pedum; and from Pedum they went towards Rome, and they encamped by the Cluilian dyke, which was no more than five miles from the city; and they laid waste the lands of the commons of Rome, but they spared those of the burghers; Caius, for his part, thinking that his quarrel was with the commons only, and that the burghers were his friends; and Attius, thinking that it would cause the Romans to be jealous of each other, and so make Rome the easier to be conquered. So the host of the Volscians lay encamped near Rome. m Livy, II. 27. 2 Livy, II. 38. 23 Livy, II. 39.

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CHAP. XI.] STORY OF CORIOLANUS. 75 Within the city, meanwhile, there was a great tumult; the women ran to the temples of the gods to pray for mercy, the poorer peop.e cried The Romans sue for out in the streets that they would have peace, and that the senate peace, but it is not should send deputies to Caius and to Attius. So deputies were grated. sent,24 five men of the chief of the burghers; but Caius answered them, “We will give you no peace, till ye restore to the Volscians all the land and all the cities which ye or your fathers have ever taken from them; and till25 ye make them your citizens, and give them all the rights which ye have yourselves, as ye have done to the Latins.” The deputies could not accept such hard conditions, so thev went back to Rome. And when the senate sent them again to ask for gentler terms, Caius would not suffer them to enter the camp.

After this26 the senate sent all the priests of the gods, and the augurs, all clothed in their sacred garments, and bearing in their hands the The pr,iestsof the gods tokens of the gods whom they served. But neither would Caius g~ito…su fr er….y it listen to these; so they too went back again to Rome. henr them. Yet, when the help of man had failed the Romans, the help of the gods delivered them; for among the women who were sitting as suppli-b loay, uled ants in the temple of Jupiter in the Capitol, was Valeria,27 the alueia, perasundes the mother and wife oa sister of that Publius Valerius who had been called Poplicola, a “Cuals to go and sue to virtuous and noble lady, whom all held in honor. As she was sit-imforme y. ting in the temple as a suppliant before the image of Jupiter, Jupiter seemed to inspire her with a sudden thought, and she immediately rose, and called upon all the other noble ladies who were with her to arise also, and she led them to the house of Volumnia, the mother of Caius. There she found Virgilia, the wife of Caius, with his mother, and also his little children. Valeria then addressed Volumnia and Virgilia, and said, “Our coming here to you is our own doing; neither the senate nor any other mortal man have sent us; but the god in whose temple we were sitting as suppliants put it into our hearts, that we should come and ask you to join with us, women with women, without any aid of men, to win for our country a great deliverance, and for ourselves a name glorious above all women, even above those Sabine wives in the old time, who stopped the battle between their husbands and their fathers. Come then with us to the camp of Caius, and let us pray to him to show us mercy.” Volumnia said, “We will go with you:” and Virgilia took her young children with her, and they all went to the camp of the enemy. It vwan a sad and solemn sight2s to see this train of: noble ladies, and the very Volscian soldiers stood in silence as they passed by, and pitied How his wife nd them and honored them. They found Caius sitting on the gen-ealeother prevailed with eral’s seat in the midst of the camp, and the Volscian chiefs were awayhis army.

standing round him. When he first saw them he wondered what it could be; but presently he knew his mother, who was walking at the head of the train; and then he could not contain himself, but leaped down from his seat, and ran to meet her, and was going to kiss her. But she stopped him and said,29 “Ere thou kiss me, let me know whether I am speaking to an enemy or to my son; whether I stand in thy camp as thy prisoner or as thy mother.” Caius could not answer. her, and then she: went on and said, “

Must it be, then, that had I never borne a son, Rome never should have seen the camp of an enemy; that had I remained childless, I should have died a free woman in a free city? But I am too old to bear much longer either thy shame or my misery. Rather look to thy wife and children, whom if thou persistest thou art dooming to an untimely death, or a long life of bondage.”’ Then Virgilia and his children came up to him and kissed him, and all the noble ladies wept, and bemoaned their own fate and the fate of their country. At last Caius cried: out,: 0 mother, what hast 4

Dionysius, VIII. 22. 27 Plutarch, ICorioin. 32, 3 25 Dionysius, VIII. 35.

Plutarch, Coriolan. 30. 2s Plutarch, Coriolan. 34. 26 Livy, II. 39.

Plutarch, Coriolan. 32. 29 Livy, II. 40.

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qgr6 t HISTOIiY OF ROME. [Cna. XI. thou done to me?” and he wrung her hand vehemently, and said, ” Mother, thine is the victory; a happy victory for thee and for Rome, but shame and ruin to thy son.” Then he fell on her neck and embraced her, and he embraced his wife and his children, and sent them back to Rome; and led away the army of the Volscians, and never afterwards attacked Rome any more; and he lived on a banished man amongst the Volscians, and when he was very old, and had neither wife nor children around him, he was wont to say,’ That now in old age30 he knew the full bitterness of banishment.” So Caius lived and died amongst the Vol.

scians. The Romans, as was right, honored Volumnia and Valeria for their deed, and Howthe Roma.ns hon-a temple was built and dedicated to “Woman’s Fortune,“3’ just ored the noble ladies on the spot where Caius had yielded to his mother’s words; and fortheir deed. the first priestess of the temple was Valeria, into whose heart Jupiter had first put the thought to go to Volumnia, and to call upon her to go out to the enemy’s camp and entreat her son. Such is the famous story which has rendered the Volscian wars with Rome so memorable; the wars with the ~Equians are marked by a name and a story not less celebrated, those of L. Quinctius Cincinnatus.

There had been peace between the Romans and the ~Equians: but the,Equians and Gracchus Clcelius,32 their chief, broke the peace, and Story of Cinpnnatun. ~TheEqufians breakthe plundered the lands of the people of Lavici and of the people of peace with Rome, and peaco the complaints of Tusculum. They then pitched their camp on the top of Algidus; thl Romans.

and the Romans sent deputies to them to complain of the wrong which they had done. It happened that the tent of Gracchus was pitched under the shade of a great evergreen oak, and he was sitting in his tent when the deputies came to him. His answer was full of mockery: ” I, for my part,”

said he, ” am busy with other matters; I cannot hear you; you had better tell your message to the oak yonder.” Immediately one of the deputies answered, ” Yea, let this sacred oak hear, and let all the gods hear likewise, how treacherously you have broken the peace! They shall hear it now, and shall soon avenge it; for you have scorned alike the laws of the gods and of men.” Then they went back to Rome, and the senate resolved upon war: and Lucius Minucius, the consul, led his legions towards Algidus, to fight with the proud enemy. But Gracchus was a skilful soldier,33 and he pretended to be afraid of the Roow the army of the mans, and retreated before them, and they followed him, without onsul Minuciu fell heeding where they were going. So they came into a narrow valley, with hills on either side, high, and steep, and bare; and then Gracchus sent men secretly, who closed up the way by which they had entered into the valley, so that they could not get back; and the hills34 closed round the valley in front of them, and on the right and left, and on the top of these hills Gracchus lay with his army, while the Romans were shut up in the valley below. In this valley there was neither grass for the horses, nor food for the men; but 80 Multo miserius seni exilium esse.” Fa-99

Dionysius, X. 28. bins, quoted by Livy, II. 40. 4 This is just the description of the famous Livy, II. 40. Dionysius, VIII. 55. It is one Furcee Caudinac, in which the Romans were of Niebuhr’s most ingenious conjectures that blockaded by C. Pontius. It suits the characthe foundation of this temple, and the fact that ter of the Apennine valleys, but I never saw Valeria was the first priestess of it, gave occa-any such spots on the Alban hills, where the sion to the date assigned to the story of Corio-scene of Cincinnatus’ victory is laid. It is likely lanus, and to the introduction of Valeria into enough, however, that Dionysius, or the annalit, as the first suggester of the step which saved ist whom he followed, did actually take their Rome. Niebuhr observes that Fortuna Mulie-description from that of the Caudine Forks, and bris had nothing to do with the successful em-that it made no part of the old legend. Livy’s bassy of Volumnia and Valeria, but correspond-account says nothing of any natural disadvaned to Fortuna Virilis; and that both were antages of position: he merely says that the Roeiently worshipped; the one as influencing the mans kept within their camp through fear and fortunes of men, the other those of women. that this encouraged the Equians to blockado Vol. II. p. 115. 2d edit. them. ” Livy, I[I. 25.

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CHAP. XI.] STORY OF CINCINNATUS. 77 five horsemen had broken out, before the road in the rear of the Romans was quite closed up, and these rode to Rome, and told the senate of the great danger of the consul and of the army. Upon this Quintus Fabius,35 the warden of the city, sent in haste for Caius Nautius, the other consul, who was with his army in the country The Romans at Rome of the Sabines. When he came, they consulted together, and the were in great alarm. senate said, ” There is only one man who can deliver us; we must make Lucius Quinctius Master of the people.” So Caius, as the manner was, named Lucius to, be Master of the people; and then he hastened back to his army before the sun was risen. This Lucius Quinctius let his hair grow,36 and tended it carefully: and was so famous for his curled and crisped locks that men called him Cin-They appoint Lucius cinnatus, or the “crisp-haired.” He was a frugal man,37 and did Qounetius to be MIster not care to be rich; and his land was on the other side of the Ti-of the people. ber, a plot of four jugera, where he dwelt with his wife Racilia, and busied himself in the tilling of his ground. So in the morning early the senate sent deputies to Lucius to tell him that he was chosen to be Master of the people. The deDuties went over the river, and came to his house, and found him in his field at work without his toga or cloak, and digging with his spade in his ground. They saluted him and said, “We bring thee a message from the senate, so thou must put on thy cloak that thou mayest receive it as is fitting.” Then he said, ” Hath aught of evil befallen the state?” and he bade his wife to bring his cloak, and when he had put it on he went out to meet the deputies. Then they said, “Hail to thee, Lucius Quinctius, the senate declares thee Master of the people, and calls thee to the city; for the consul and the army in the country of the _/Equians are in great danger.” There was then a boat made ready to carry him over the Tiber, and when he stepped out of the boat his three sons came to meet him, and his kinsmen and his friends, and the greater part of the senators. He was thus led home in great state to his house, and the four-and-twenty lictors, with their rods and axes, walked before him. As for the multitude, they crowded round to see him, but they feared his four-and-twenty lictors; for they were a sign that the power of the Master of the people was as sovereign as that of the kings of old. Lucius chose Lucius Tarquitius38 to be Master of the horse, a brave man, and of a burgher’s house; but so poor withal that he had been used Lcioe marches out to to serve among the foot soldiers instead of among the horse. deliver the econsul’ Then the Master of the people and the Master of the horse went army. ~together into the Forum, and bade every man to shut up his booth, and stopped all causes at law, and gave an order that none should look to his own affairs till the consul and his army were delivered from the enemy. They ordered also that every man, who was of an age to go out to battle, should be ready in the Field of Mars before sunset, and should have with him victuals for five days, and twelve stakes; and the older men dressed the victuals for the soldiers, whilst the soldiers went about everywhere to get their stakes; and they cut them where they would, without any hinderance. So the army was ready in the Field ot Mars at the time appointed, and they set forth from the city, and made such haste, that ere the night was half spent they came to Algidus; and when they perceived that they were near the enemy, they made a halt.

Then Lucius rode on, and saw39 how the camp of the enemy lay; and he or35

Dionysius, X. 23. more than distance; and as it had brought the 36

Zonaras, VII. p. 346. Ed. Paris. p. 260. Roman army from Rome to Algidus between Ed. Venet. sunset and midnight, though each soldier had 37 Livy, III. 26. to carry his baggage and twelve stakes besides, ” Livy, III. 27.

so it made Cincinnatus reconnoitre the enemy 39 ” Quantum nocte prospici poterat” is Livy’s as soon as he arrived in their neighborhood, qualification of the story; but the original le-without considering that on its own showing gend, in all probability, regarded darkness no his arrival took place at midnight.

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78 HISTORY OF ROME. [mor. XI He conquers the squi, dered his soldiers to throw down all their baggage into one place, ans. but to keep each man his arms and his twelve stakes. Then they set out again in their order of march as they had come from Rome, and they spread themselves round the camp of the enemy on every side. When this was done, upon a signal given they raised a great shout, and directly every man began to dig a ditch just where he stood, and to set in his stakes. The shout rang through the camp of the enemy, and filled them with fear; and it sounded even to the’camp of the Romans who were shut up in the valley, and the consul’s men said one to another, ” Rescue is surely at hand, for that is the shout of Romans.” They themselves shouted in answer, and sallied to attack the camp of the enemy; and they fought so fiercely, that they hindered the enemy from interrupting the work of the Romans without their camp; and this went on all the night, till when it was morning, the Romans who were without had drawn a ditch all round the enemy, and had fenced it with their stakes; and now they left their work, and began to take part in the battle. Then the EcEquians saw that there was no hope, and they began to ask for mercy. Lucius answered, “Give me Gracchus and your other chiefs bound, and then I will set two spears upright in the ground, and I will put a third spear across, and you shall give up your arms, and your cloaks, and shall pass, every man of you, under the spear bound across as under a yoke, and then you may go away free.” This was done accordingly; Gracchus and the other chiefs were bound, and the AEquians left their camp to the Romans, with all its spoil, and put off their cloaks, and passed each man under the yoke, and then went home full of shame. But Lucius would not suffer40 the consul’s army to have any share of the spoil, nor did he let the consul keep his power, but made him his own under-officer, and then marched back to Rome. Nor did the consul’s soldiers complain; but they were rather full of thankfulness to Lucius for having rescued them from the enemy, and they agreed to give him a golden crown; as he returned to Rome, they shouted after him, and called him their protector and their father. Great was now the joy in Rome, and the senate decreed that Lucius should Lucius marchesbackto enter the city in triumph, in the order in which the army was re. Rome in triumph. turning from Algidus, and he rode in his chariot, while Gracchus and the chiefs of the lEquians were led bound before him; and the standards were borne before him, and all the soldiers, laden with their spoil, followed behind. And tables were set out at the door of every house, with meat and drink for the soldiers, and they and the people feasted together, and followed the chariot of Lucius, with singing and great rejoicings. Thus the gods took vengeance upsn Gracchus and the Equians; and thus Lucius delivered the consul and his army; and all was done so quickly, that he went out on one evening, and came home the next day at evening victorious and triumphant. This famous story is placed by the annalists in the year of Rome 296, thirteen General state of the years after the passing of the Publilian law. In such a warfare wars between the Rop -as that of the Romans with the Equians and Volscians, there are theiLird thentury of always sufficient alternations of success to furnish the annalists on home. either side with matter of triumph; and by exaggerating every victory, and omitting or slightly noticing every defeat, they form a picture such as national vanity most delights in. But we neither can, nor need we desire to correct and supply the omissions of the details of the Roman historians: it is enough to say, that at the close of the third century of Rome, the warfare which the Romans had to maintain against the Opican nations was generally defensive; that the.AEquians and Volscians had advanced from the line of the Apennines and established themselves on the Alban hills, in the heart of Latium; that of the thirty Latin states which had formed the league with Rome in the year 261, thirteen4’ were now either destroyed, or were in the possession of the Opicans; 4u Livy, III. 29. - Fortona (if it be the same with Ortona), Lavici l’ Carventum, Circeii, Corioli, Corbio, Cora, Norba, Pedum, Satricum, Setia, Tolina, and

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CHAP. XII.] WARS WITH THE ETRUSCANS. 79 that on the Alban hills themselves, Tusculum alone remained independent; and that there was no other friendly city to obstruct the irruptions of the enemy into the territory of Rome, Accordingly, that territory was plundered year after year, and whatever defeats the plunderers may at times have sustained, yet they were never deterred from renewing a contest which they found in the main profitable and glorious. So greatly had the power and dominion of Rome fallen since the overthrow of the monarchy. We have now to notice her wars with another enemy, the Etruscans; and to trace on this side also an equal decline in glory and greatness since the reigns of the later kings.

CHAPTER XII. WARS WITH THE ETRUSCANS-VEII LEGEND OF THE SLAUGHTER OF THE

FABII AT THE RIVER CREMERA. ” Our hands alone Suffice for this;-take ye no thought for it. While the mole breaks the waves, and bides the tempest, The ship within rides safe: while on the mountain The wind is battling with the adventurous pines, He stirs no leaf in the valley. So your state We standing thus in guard lpon the border, Shall feel no ruffling of the rudest blast That sweeps from Veil.” AFTER the great war of king Porsenna, the Etruscans, for several years, ap. pear to have lived in peace with the Romans; and in the famine Beginning of hostilitis of the year 262, when the enmity of the Volscians would allow ith Vei. no supplies of corn to be sent to Rome from the country on the left bank of the Tiber, the Etruscan cities, we are told,’ allowed the Romans to purchase what thetr wanted, and the corn thus obtained was the principal support of the people. But nine years afterwards, in 271, a war broke out, not with the Etruscans generally, but with the people of the neighboring city of Veii. The quarrel is said’ to have arisen out of some plundering inroads made by the Veientian borderers upon the Roman territory; but it suited the Roman aristocracy at this period to involve the nation in foreign contests,3 in order to prevent the commons from insisting on the due execution of Cassius’ agrarian law; and quarrels, which at another time might easily have been settled, were now gladly allowed to end in open war. Veii4 lay about ten miles from Rome, between two small streams which meet a little below the city, and run down into the Tiber, falling into Sitnation and size of it nearly opposite to Castel Giubileo, the ancient Fidenae. Insig-eiiVolitrac. Carventum seems to have been one Cora. Another supposition, as Mr. Bunsen inof the towns of the Alban hills, and Niebuhr forms me, places it on Monte Ariano, the highBuggests that we should read Kopuevravos instead est eastern point of that volcanic range of of KoptoXavo in Dionysius, VIII. 19, as the peo-mountains of which Monte Cavo is the most pie conquered by Coriolanus, for they are placed western point. But nothing is really known in the neighborhood of Corbia and Pedum; on the question. whereas the conquest of the real Coriolani is I Livy, II. 34. mentioned in another place (VIII. 86), and in 2 Dionysius, VIII. 81, 91. their proper neighborhood. Sir W. Gell sup-s Dionysius, VIII. 81. Dion Cassius, Fragm, poses Carventum to have been at Roca Massi-Vatican, XX. mi, a high point on the Volscian highlands near 4 See Sir W.

Gell’s Map of the Campagna.

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80 HISTORY OF ROMEA [CHAP. XII. nificant in point of size, these little streams, however, like those of the Campagna generally, are edged by precipitous rocky cliffs, and thus are capable of affording a natural defence to a town built on the tableland above and between them. The space inclosed by the walls of Veii was equal to the extent5 of Rome itself, so long as the walls of Servius Tullius were the boundary of the city: the citadel stood on a distinct eminence, divided by one of the little streams from the rest of the town, and defended by another similar valley on the other side. In the magnificence of its public and private buildings, Veii is said to have been preferred by the Roman commons -to Rome;6 and we know enough of the great works of the Etruscans to render this not impossible; but the language is too vague to be insisted on; and the Etruscan Veii was as unknown to the Roman annalists as to us. On the other hand, Rome had itself been embellished by Etruscan art, and had been under its kings the seat of a far mightier power than Veii. The government of Veii, like that of the other Etruscan cities, was in the hands of an aristocracy of birth, one or more of whom were elected annually by the whole body to command in war and administer justice. There were no free commons; but a large population of serfs or vassals, who cultivated the lands of the ruling class. In wars of peculiar importance,7 we read from time to time’of the appointment of a king, but his office was for life only, and was not perpetuated in his family. The hereditary principle prevailed, however, in the priesthoods; none but members of one particular family could be priests of Juno,8 the goddess especially honored at Veii.

The Veientians, like the other Etruscans, fought in the close order9 of the phaCharacterof its militi-lanx; their arms being the small round shield, and the long pike. ry force. We know not whether they ventured, like the Parthians, to trust their serfs with arms equal to their own, and to enrol them in the phalanx; but we may more probably suppose that they employed them only as lightarmed troops; and if this were so, their armies must have encountered the Romans at a disadvantage, their regular infantry being probably inferior in numbers to the legions, and their light troops, except for desultory warfare, still more inferior in quality. To make up for this, they employed the services of mercenaries, who were generally to be hired from one or other of the states of Etruria, even when their respective countries refused to take part publicly in the quarrel. The war between the Romans and Veientians, which began in the year 271, 5 Dionysius compares the size both of Rome bitionis regem creavbre,” imply that the governand Veii with that of Athens, II. 54. IV.

13. ment was commonly exercised by one or more Sir W. Gell told me that the traces of the walls magistrates annually chosen, like the consuls at of Veil, which he had clearly made out, quite Rome. Niebuhr refers to the case of Lars Tojustified the comparison of Vei ill point of extent lumnius, who had been king of Veil thirtywith Rome. And his map shows the same thing. four years before the time of which Livy is speaka Livy, V.

24. Urbem quoque urbi Romme vei ing; and he thinks that Livy is mistaken, in situ vel magnificentiU publicorum privatorum-supposing the appointment of a king in the last que tectorum ac locorum prteponebant. This war with Rome to have been any thing unusual. being no more than an expression of opinion (Vol. I. p. 128. 2d ed. note 344.) But we read ascrbed to the commons, we cannot be sure of no king after Lars Tolumnius till the period that Livy had any authority for it at all, any of the last war, nor of any before him in the more than for the language of his speeches. earlier wars with Rome. And as the lucumo, But suppose that he found it in some one of or chief magistrate of a single Etruscan city, was the older annalists, still it can hardly be more appointed sometimes chief over the whole conthan the expression of that annalist’s opinion, federacy, when any general war broke out; so grounded possibly upon some tradition of the the annual lucumo may have been made lucumo splendor of Veii, but possibly also upon noth-for life in times of danger, if he were a man of ing more than the fact that the Roman com-commanding character and ability. mons were at one time anxious to remove to 8 Livy, V. 22. Veil. And if the Roman commons had actually 9 Diodorus. Fragm. Vatican. Lib. XXIII. said that Veil was a finer city than Rome, when Tvpbp7voi xaX)KaiS dol;iar faXayyoslaxovre-;, for so they were extolling its advantages, is such an we must correct the reading pdXayya laaXoivrgs, assertion to be taken as an historical fact, to just as a little below in the same passage we read justify us in passing a judgment as to the com-arretpais, i. e.

cohortibus, or manipulis, instead parative magnificence of the two cities?

of,repeoaTi, which Mai absurdly renders ”’ eus-‘ Livy, V. 1. His words, “Tiadioe annum am-pidibus.”

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CHAP. XII.] LEGEND OF THE FABII. 81 lasted nine years. It is difficult to say what portion of the events Outline of the war from recorded of it is deserving of credit; nor would the details,‘0 at any 271 to 280. rate, be worth repeating now. But it seems to have been carried on with equal fortune on both sides, and to have been ended by a perfectly equal treaty.

The Romans established themselves on the Cremera, within the Veientian territory, built a sort of town there, and, after having maintained their post for some time, to the great annoyance of the enemy, they were at last surprised, and their whole force slaughtered, and the post abandoned. Then the Veientians, in their turn, established themselves on the hill Janiculum, within the Roman territory; retaliated, by their plundering excursions across the Tiber, the damage which their own lands had sustained from the post on the Cremera; held their ground for more than a year, and then were, in their turn, defeated and obliged to evacuate their conquest. Two years afterwards, in 280, a peace was concluded between the two nations, to last for forty years; and, as the Roman historians name no other stipulations, we may safely believe that the treaty” merely placed matters on the footing on which they had been before the war; the Romans gave up all pretensions to the town which they had founded on the Cremera; the Veientians equally resigned their claim to the settlement which they had made on the hill Janiculum. But whatever may be thought of the history of this war, it has been the subject of one memorable legend, the story of the selfdevotion of the Fabii, and of their slaughter by the river Cremera. The truth of Stoy ofth Fabi. domestic events, no less than of foreign, has been, probably, disregarded by this legend; and what seems a more real account of the origin of the settlement on the Cremera, has been given in a former chapter. The story itself, however, I shall now, according to my usual plan, proceed to offer in its own form. The Veientians dared not meet the Romans‘2 in the open field, but they troubled them exceedingly with their incursions to plunder the country.

And The Fabian house ofon the other side, the.4]quians and the Volscians were making fei to takev teent w. g with the Veientians war upon the Romans year after year; and while one consul went wholly upon itself. to fight with the _/Equians and the other with the Volscians, there was no one to stop the plunderings of the Veientians. So the men of the Fabian house consulted together, and when they were resolved what to do, they all went to the senate-house. And Kreso Fabius, who was consul for that year, went into the senate and said, ” We of the house of the Fabii take upon us to fight with the Veientians. We ask neither men nor money from the commonwealth, but we will wage the war with our own bodies, at our own cost.” The senate heard him joyfully; and then he went home, and the other men of his house followed him; and he told them to come to him the next day, each man in his full arms; and so they departed. The house of Kdeso was on the Quirinal Hill; and thither all the Fabii came to him the next day, as he had desired them; and there they stood in array in the outer court of his house. Koeso then put on his vest, themselves on the rivsuch as the Roman generals were used to wear in battle, and came out to the men of his house, and led them forth on their way. As they went, a 10 The Roman accounts of the war may be Porsenna, were at this time recovered.

But if found in Livy, II. 42-54, and in Dionysius, VIII. so, the annalist would surely have boasted of 81. 91. IX. 1-36. I imagine both the post on the cessions ofterritory made by the Veientians, the Cremera and that on the Janiculum to have even if they had been consistent enough not to been designed for permanent cities; the one, describe the country recovered as the very same probably, being as near to Veii as the other was which they had made Porsenna restore out of to Rome. These were exactly the irrtrdExtapara generosity more than thirty years before. Is of the Greeks, when executed on a larger scale there any reason to believe that the Romans adas rival cities, and not mere forts. I may, per-vanced their frontier on the right bank of the haps, be allowed to refer to my note on Thu-Tiber opposite Rome, beyond the hills which cydides, I. 142, where the two kinds of ErdrtT-bound the valley of the river, previously to their Xw#a are distinguished. conquest of Veii? 11 Niebuhr supposes that the septem pagi, 12 Livy, II. 48. et seqq. which the Romans had lost in the war with

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82 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHEP. XII. great crowd followed after them and blessed them, and prayed the gods for their prosperity. They were, in all, three hundred and six men, and they went down from the Quirinal Hill and passed along by the Capitol, and went out of the city by the gate Carmentalis, by the right-hand passage of the gate. Then they came to the Tiber, and went over the bridge, and entered into the country of the Veientians, and pitched their camp by the river Cremera; for there it was their purpose to dwell, and to make it a stronghold, from which they might lay waste the lands of the Veientians, and carry off their cattle. So they built their fortress by the river Cremera, and held it for more than a year; and the Veientians were greatly distressed, for their cattle and all their goods became the spoil of the Fabians. But there was a certain day”3
on which the men of the house of the Fabians The vetentian lay an were accustomed to offer sacrifice and to keep festival together to ambush for them, and the gods of their race, in the seat of their fathers, on the hill Quirinal. So when the day drew near, the Fabians set out from the river Cremera, three hundred and six -men in all, and went towards Rome; for they thought that as they were going to sacrifice to their gods, and as it was a holy time, and a time of peace, no enemy would set upon them.

But the Veientians knew of their going, and laid an ambush for them on their way, and followed them with a great army. So when the Fabians came to the place where the ambush was, behold the enemy attacked them on the right and on the left, and the army of the Veientians that followed them fell upon them from behind; and they threw their darts and shot their arrows against the Fabians, without daring to come within reach of spear or sword, till they slew them every man. Three hundred and six men of the house of the Fabians were there killed, and there was not a grown man of the house left alive: one boy only, on account of his youth, had been left behind in Rome, and he lived and became a man, and preserved the race of the Fabians; for it was the pleasure of the gods that great deeds should be done for the Romans by the house of the Fabians in aftertimes. 13 This latter part of the story is one of the The devotion of the Fabians to the sacrifices of versions of it given by Dionysius, which he re-their house on the Quirinal was a part of their jects as improbable. Of course I am not main-traditional character; a similar story was told taminig its probability, but I agree with Nie-of C. Fabius Dorso, who broke out from the buhr in thinking it a far more striking story Capitol while the Gauls were besieging it, and than that which Dionysius -prefers to it, and made his way to the Quirinal Hill to perform the which has been adopted by ]Livy and by Ovid. appointed sacrifice of his house.

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CHAPTER XIII., INTERNAL HISTORY-THE TERENTILIAN LAW-APPOINTMENT OF THE TEN

HIGH1 COMMISSIONERS TO FRAME A CODE OF WRITTEN LAWS. A. U. C.

284-8303.‘OXtXapxia 6E T5v pvy Kvv’oUWV rois; roXo? Zsra 8Pi6Ta, TLL, 7v’

b0XcIWv ob:rXovTrKTE r pb6oV, aXX;a Kal i’ura~v de Xop a iv E SXet’ a mtaviv o’l re hVYdivot Ka’ ot:VIOL rpodvJyoSvrac, &dUvata 1v psyday 7rdAXt saras-,sEiv.-THUCYDIDES, VI. 39. Tg’aprov eidgS dALyapXias, orav iray ac vr rarpos la[ip,, Kab a’pXp pi i v6 po akXX’ ol a’pXovrsr. Ka? Z(rTv avrTarpooos avrn’v ra?; dXtyap%[atl, Wo7rEp i rTvpavvm’ Ev rats plovapcXias, Ka 7repi t i 7eXurUTatag &Txrrsv aJt pOKPpariag Iv Tag JintOKPrtatLa.-A1USTOTLE, Politic. IV. 5. NOTHING is more unjust than the vague charge sometimes brought against Niebuhr, that he has denied the reality of all the early history of Rome. On the contrary, he has rescued from the dominion of skepticism much which less profound inquirers had before too hastily givren up to it; he has restored and established far more than he has overthrown. Ferguson finds no sure ground to rest on till he comes to the second Punic war. In his view, not only the period of the kings and the first years of the commonwealth, but the whole of two additional centuries,-not only the wars with the Azquians and Volscians, but those with the Gauls, the Samnites, and even with Pyrrhus,-are involved in considerable uncertainty. The progress of the constitution he is content to trace in the merest outline: particular events, and still more particular characters, appear to him to belong to poetry or romance, rather than to history. Whereas Niebuhr maintains that a true history of Rome, with many details of dates, places, events, and characters, may be recovered from the beginning of the commonwealth. It has been greatly corrupted and disguised by ignorant and uncritical writers, but there exist, he thinks, sufficient materials to enable us, not only to get rid of these corruptions, but to restore that genuine and original edifice, which they have so long overgrown and hidden from our view. And accordingly, far from passing over hastily, like Ferguson, the period from the expulsion of Tarquinius to the first Punic war, he has devoted to it somewhat more than two large volumes; and from much, that to former writers seemed a hopeless chaos, he has drawn a living picture of events and institutions, as rich in its coloring, as perfect in its composition, as it is faithful to the truth of nature. Were I, indeed, to venture to criticise the work of this great man, I should be inclined to charge him with having overvalued, rather than undervalued, the possible certainty of the early history of the Roman commonwealth. He may seem, in some instances, rather to lean too confidently on the authority of the ancient writers, than to reject it too indiscriminately. But let no man judge him hastily, till, by long experience in similar researches, he has learnt to estimate sufficiently the instinctive power of discerning truth, which even ordinary minds acquire by constant practice. In Niebuhr, practice, combined with the natural acuteness of his mind, brought this power to a perfection which has never been surpassed. It is not caprice, but a most sure instinct, which has led him to seize on some particular passage of a careless and ill-informed writer, and to perceive in it the marks of most important truth; while, on other occasions, he has set aside the statements of this same writer, with no deference to his authority whatever. To say that his instinct is not absolutely infallible, is only to say that he was a man; but he who follows him most carefully, and thinks over the subject of his ret

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84 HISTORY OF ROME. [CiHAP. XII, searches most deeply, will find the feeling of respect for his judgment continually increasing, and will be more unwilling to believe what Niebuhr doubted, or to doubt what he believed. I have said thus much as a preface to the ensuing chapter, in which I am to trace the internal history of Rome, from the passing of the Publilian law to the appointment of the decemvirs. The detail itself will show how little Niebuhr has deserved to be charged with overthrowing the Roman history; while, on the other hand, if I have followed him even on ground on which, had he not pronounced it to be firm, I might myself have feared to venture, I have done it, not in blind or servile imitation, but in the reasonable confidence inspired by experience. For many years I had doubted and disputed Niebuhr’s views on several points of importance, but having had reason at last to be convinced that they were right, I feel for him now a deference the more unhesitating, as it was not hastily given, nor without inquiry. Immediately after the passing of the Publilian law,’

the consuls took the field A. U. c. 28. A. c. against the zquians and Volscians. It was now the period when 469. Caompaignof Ap-those two nations were pressing most dangerously upon Latium, Pius Claudius against i theai.ns..a o~o-not only overrunning the territory both of the Latins and Romans with their plundering incursions, but taking or destroying the cities of the Latin confederacy. There was no choice, therefore, but to oppose them; and thus the hated Appius Claudius, as well as his colleague, T. Quinctius, led out an army from the city. But the mutual suspicion and hatred between him and the commons was so great that they could not act together. He was tyrannical, and his soldiers became discontented and disobedient. In this temper they met the Volscians and were beaten; and Appius, finding it hopeless to continue the campaign, began to retreat towards Rome. On his retreat he was again attacked and again beaten; the soldiers, it is said, throwing away their arms and flying at the first onset. Thus doubly embittered by the shame of his defeats, and having obtained some color for his vengeance, Appius, as soon as he had rallied his army on ground out of the reach of the enemy, proceeded to indulge his old feelings of hatred to the commons. By the aid of the Latin and Hernican troops who were present in the army, and, above all, of the Roman burghers, who formed the best armed and best trained part of his own forces, he was enabled to seize and execute every centurion whose century had fled, and every standard-bearer who had lost his standard, and then to put to death one out of every ten men of the whole multitude of legionary soldiers. The maintenance of military discipline, by whatever degree of severity it was Appius is brought to effected, was regarded by the Romans, not as a crime, but as a trial. Different ac-. counts Dof isub sacred duty; nor would even the commons have complained of quent fate. Appius for simply punishing with rigor his cowardly or mutinous soldiers. But when new consuls were come into office, L. Valerius and T. EmlilA. U. C. 248.

A. C. ius,2 and both showed themselves inclined to carry into effect the 468. agrarian law of Sp. Cassius, while Appius still opposed it, and was most forward in defeating the measure, then two of the tribunes, M.

Duilius and C. Sicinius,’ brought him to trial before the commons as the perpetual enemly of their order; accusing him of giving evil counsels to the senate, of having laid violent hands on the sacred person of a tribune in the disputes about the Publilian law, and lastly, of having brought loss and shame on the commonwealth, by his ill conduct in his late expedition against the Volscians. His bloody executions were not charged as a crime against him; but every friend or relation of his victims would feel, that he who had dealt such severe justice to 1 Livy, II. 58, 59.

Dionysius, IX. 50. the consuls at this period began their year on a Livy, II. 61. Dionysius, IX. 51-54. the first of August (Livy, III. 6); when the s These were two of the tribunes elected tribunes began theirs, before the decemvirate when the Publilian law was passed. The trib-is uncertain. See Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 227, anri anes and consuls came into office, it should note 492, 2d edit. le remembered, at different times of the year;

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CHAP. XIII.] PERIOD OF PESTILENCE. 85 others, could claim no mitigation of justice towards himself; and Appius felt this also, and neither expected mercy from the commons, nor would yield to ask it. A most extraordinary difference prevails, however, in the accounts of his subsequent fate. The common story says that he died in prison before his trial, implying that he killed himself to escape his sentence; but, according to the Fasti Capitolini,4 it was this same Appius who, twenty years afterwards, became decemvir; and we must suppose, therefore, that he now fled from Rome, and lived for some years in exile at Regillus, till circumstances enabled him to return, and to take part in public affairs once more. The two following years were marked’ by continued contests about the agrarian law of Cassius, which still led to no result. The fortune of A. u. C. 285. A. c.

war, however, gave some relief to the necessities of the poorer po6rt taken by thet i commons: for, in the year 285, the port6 of Antium was taken, maca. and a quantity of merchandise was found there, which was all given up to the soldiers; and the year following Antium itself fell into the hands of the Romans; and on this occasion, also, the soldiers derived some profit from their conquest. In the year 287, Ti.’ Ermilius, one of the consuls, supported the demand of the tribunes for the execution of the agrarian law; and we are A. U. C. C28. A. C. told that the senate,7 in order to pacify the commons by a partial 466. compliance, proposed to send a colony to Antium, and: to allow the commons, as well as the burghers, to enrol themselves amongst the colonists. But as the colony was to consist equally of Romans,s Latins, and Hernicans, and would be placed in a position of great insecurity, being, in fact, no other than a garrison, which would have at once to keep down the old population of the city within, and to defend itself against enemies without, the relief thus offered to the commons was neither very considerable in its amount, nor in its nature very desirable. The next year began a period of distress and suffering so severe, and arising from such various causes, that political disputes were of necessity Severe viitations ox suspended, and for four years no mention is made of any demands pestilence. for the agrarian law, or of any other proceeding of the tribunes. The middle of the fifth century before the Christian era was one of those periods in the history of mankind which, from causes to us unknown, have been marked by the ravages of pestilence; when a disease of unusual virulence has, in a manner, travelled up and down over the habitable world during the space of twenty, thirty, or even fifty years; returning often to the same place after a certain interval; pausing sometimes in its fury, and appearing to sleep, but again breaking out on some point or other within its range, till, at the end of its appointed period, it disappears altogether. Rome was first visited by one of these pestilences, as has been already mentioned, in the year 282, when it caused a very great mortality; it now returned again in 288,9 and crippled the operations of the Roman army against the,IEquians. Whether it continued in the following year A. U. C.

289. A. C. is uncertain, but the.iEquians plundered the Roman territory with 466. great success; and although the Roman annalists pretend that, towards the end of the year, the consul, Q. Fabius, cut off the main body of the plunderers, and then in turn ravaged the lands of the enemy, yet it is manifest that the campaign was on the whole unfavorable to the Romans.

So it was the next year 4 It had been long known that the Fasti 8 Livy calls this place Ceno; the Antiates, it called Appius the clecemrvir,’ Ap.

F. M. N.” seems, already had begun the piracies, of which “Appii Filius, Marci Nepos;” whereas the Demetrius Poliorcetes complained long aftercommon story makes him the grandson, as well wards to the Romans; and the merchandise as the son of an Appius. But one of the re-‘taken by the Romans was partly, it is said, obcently discovered fragments of the Fasti calls tained in this manner, probably from the Carthe decemvir, under the year 302, ” Appis thaginians. The situation of Ceno is unknown: Claudius, Ap. F. M. N. Crassin. Regill. Sabi-Strabo speaks of Antium itself as being withnus, II.,” clearly showing that by calling the out a harbor, as standing high upon cliffs. consulship of 302 his second consulship, the 7

Livy, III. 1. author of the Fasti considered him to be the 8 Dionysis, IX.

59. same man who had been consul in 283. Livy, III. 2. 6 Livy, II. 63-65.

Dionysius, IX. 56-58.

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86 HISTORY OF ROME. [oCn. XIII also: the united forces of the Romans, Latins, and Hernicans, could not preveht the total ravaging of the Roman territory; and the crowding’~ of the fugitives from the country into the city was a cause or an aggravation of the return of the pestilence, which broke out again in the autumn, soon after the appointment of the consuls for the year 291, with unparalleled fury. During the whole of this fatal year, the Romans were dying by thousands within the city, while the /Equians and Volscians were ravaging the whole country without opposition, and defeated with great loss the Latins and Hernicans, who vainly attempted to defend A. C. 460. the territory of their allies and their own. At last the pestilence abated, and the new consuls, in the autumn of 292,“1 took the field, and made head against the enemy with some effect.: Immediately on this first gleam of better times, the political grievances of the commons began again to excite attention and to claim redress. We are told that one of the tribunes‘2 again brought forward the question of First proposal of the the agrarian law; but that the commons themselves refused to Terentilianlaw. entertain it, and resolved to put it cft till a more favorable opportunity. This is ascribed by Dionysius to the zeal which all orders felt to take vengeance on their foreign enemies; but he forgets that another measure, no less obnoxious to the burghers, was brought forward in this year, and readily received by the commons: and the better explanation is, that the leaders of the commons began to see that they must vary their course of proceeding; that to contend for the agrarian law under the actual constitution, was expecting fresh and pure water from a defiled spring; the real evil lay deeper, and the commons must obtain equal rights and equal power with the burghers, before they could hope to carry such measures as most concerned their welfare.

Accordingly, Caius Terentilius‘3 Harsa, one of the tribunes, proposed a law for a complete reform of the existing state of things. Its purport was, that‘4 ten commissioners should be chosen, five by the commons and five by the burghers, and that those so chosen should draw up a constitution, which should define all points of constitutional, civil, and criminal law; and should thus determine, on just and fixed principles, all the political, social, and civil relations of all orders of the Roman people. Now, as a popular cry of reform has never originated in the love of abstract Atualgrievancesof the justice, or in the mere desire of establishing a perfect form of goveollunollns. ernment, but has been always provoked by actual grievances, and has looked especially for some definite and particular relief, so the Roman commons, in supporting the Terentilian law, were moved by certain practical evils, which lay so deep in the existing state of things, that nothing else than a total reform of the constitution could remove them. These were, the extreme separation and unequal rights of the burghers and the commons, the arbitrary powers of the consuls, and the uncertainty and variety of the law; evils which affected every part of men’s daily life; and the first of them, in particular, was a direct obstacle to that execution of Cassius’ agrarian law, on which the actual subsist10 Livy, III. 6. Terentilian law, EKca,vpas /eoOasL vyypatias 11 Livy, III. 8. anroKpdropaS-Ksa’ O 7t aipcr6a /) raXtg olKterat. 12 Dionysius, IX. 69. The name of the trib-We are so accustomed to distinguish between a une is corrupt, Vxfrov TIrov.

Gelenius propo-constitution and a code of laws, that we have ne ses to read TrLov. % one word which will express both, or convey a 13 Livy, III.

9. Niebuhr writes the tribune’s full idea of the wide range of the commissionname ” Terentilius,” according to some of the er’s powers; which embraced at once the worl best MSS. of Livy. Dionysius calls him’” Te-of the French constituent assembly, and that of rentius.” Napoleon when he drew up his code. But this 14 Livy speaks only of five Dionysinus of ten: comprehensiveness belonged to the character of Niebuhr reconciles the two statements in the the ancient lawgi/vers; a far higher term than manner given in the text. legislators, although etymologically the same; These “high commissioners “Decemviri they provided for the whole life of their citizens legibus scribendis,” were like the Greek voyo0e-in all its relations, social, civil, political, moral, ras, or, in the language of Thucydides (VIII. and religious. 67), which exactly expresses the object of the

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CHAP. XIII.] THE TERENTILIAN LAW. 87 ence of the poorer commons after the late times of misery and ruin might be said to depend. Society has almost always begun in inequality, and its tendency is towards equality. This is a sure progress; but the inequality of its first Their original political stage is neither unnatural nor unjust; it is only the error of pre-ontditioni.waslnot iritaserving instead of improving which has led to injustice; the folly cumstances. of thinking that men’s institutions can be perpetual when every thing else in the world is continually changing.

When the conquered Latins were first brought to Rome by those who were then the only Roman citizens, when they were allowed to retain their personal liberty, to enjoy landed property, and to become so far a part of the Roman people, it was not required that they should at once pass from the condition of foreigners to that of perfect citizens; the condition of commons was a fit state of transition from the one rank to the other. But after years had passed away, and both they and their original conquerors were, in fact, become one people; above all, when this truth had been already practically acknowledged by the constitution of Servius Tulli-s, to continue the old distinctions was but provoking a renewal of the old hostility: if the burghers and the commons were still to be like two nations, the one sovereign and the other subject, the commons must retain the natural right of asserting their independence on the first opportunity, of wholly dissolving their connection with those who refused to carry it out to its full completion. That their desire was for complete union, rather than for independence, arose, over and above all other particular causes, from that innate fondness for remaining as we are, which nothing but the most intolerable misery can wholly eradicate. The burghers resolved to resist the Terentilian law, but they wished, apparently, as in the case of the Publilian laws, to prevent its being passed Mleans dopted by the by the commons in their tribes, rather than to throw it out in their burgh.r.. to opooe the own assembly of the curiae or in the senate. Accordingly, they Pret…nt of K-eso again proceeded by an organized system of violence; the younger burghers were accustomed to have their brotherhoods or clubs, like the young men of the aristocratical party in Athens; the members of these clubs were ready to dare any thing for the support of their order, and being far more practised in martial exercises than the commons, were superior in activity, if not in actual strength, and, by acting in a body, repeatedly interrupted all business, and drove their antagonists from the Forum. At the head of these systematic rioters was Kieso Quinctius, I the son of the famous L.

Quinctius Cincinnatus; and he made himself so conspicuous, that A.

Virginius, one of the tribunes, impeached him before the assemby of the tribes, and named a day on which he was to appear to answer to the charge.

This is the fifth instance of impeachment by the tribunes, which we have met with in the course of fifteen years, besides the famous case of Co-Of the teilfan l.w, ol riolanus. The right in the present case was grounded on the Icil-whtehtotisimpeaehmeat ian law, brought forward by a tribune, Sp. Icilius, which I have g not noticed before, because the time at which it passed is doubted. Dionysius, who alone mentions it, placesl6 it as early as the year 262, in the year after the first appointment of the tribunes; while Niebuhr thinks that it could not have been earlier than the year 284, and that it was one of the consequences of the success of the Publilian laws. It established the important point, that if any burgher interrupted a tribune when speaking to the commons in their own assembly, the tribune might impeach him before the commons, and might require him to give sureties to such an amount as the accuser should think proper; if he refused to give security, he was to be put to death and his property confiscated; if he demurred to the amount of the sum required, this question also was to be tried by the commons. The great object in this law was to assert the jurisdicI’ Livy, III. 11. Dionysius, X. 4, 5.

16 Dionysius, VII. 17.

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88 -HISTORY OF ROME [CHAP. XII tion of the commons over a burgher; hence the severity of the punishment if the accused refused to give the required security; he was then to be put to death as an open enemy; but if he complied, and appeared to answer to the charge, the ordinary sentence for a mere interruption of the business of the assembly of the tribes, would probably be no more than a fine; and this seems to have caused the confusion of Dionysius’ statement, for he represents the sureties as required, not for the accused person’s appearance at his trial, but for his payment of such a fine as the tribunes might impose, as if the sentence could, in no case, exceed a fine. Whereas the case of Appius Claudius, as well as that of KTeso, proved the contrary; and of Keeso, Livy says”l expressly that the tribune impeached him for a capital offence, before the alleged charge of murder was brought against him. In fact, where there is no fixed criminal law, awarding certain punishments for certain offences, the relation of judge implies a power of deciding not only as to the guilt or innocence of the prisoner, but also as to the degree of his guilt, and the nature of the punishment to be inflicted. And much more would this be the case when the judgment was exercised, not by an individual magistrate, but by the sovereign society itself. According to the Icilian law, the tribune called upon Kaeso Quinctius to give Kweso goes into exile sureties for his appearance, and the amount of the security required beforeistrial. was heavy; he was to find ten sureties,‘8
at three tho:usand ases each. But in the mean time a witness, M. Volscius Fictor, who had Tbeen tribune some years before, came forward to charge Keeso with another and a totally distinct crime. “During the time of the plague,” he said, “he and his brother, a man advanced in years, and not completely recovered from an attack of the pestilence, had fallen in with Kueso and a party of his club in all the license of riot in the Suburra.

An affray had followed, and his brother had been knocked down by Kaeso: the old man had been carried home, and died, as he thought, from the injury; but the consuls had every year refused to listen to his complaint, and try the offender.” Outrages of this sort on the part of the young aristocracy were common even at Athens;19 in aristocratical states they must have been far more frequent; and in all ordinary cases there is a sympathy with youth and birth, even amongst the people themselves, which is against any severe dealing with such excesses. But Keeso’s offence was gross, and seemed to belong to his general character; the commons were indignant to the highest degree at this new crime, and could scarcely be prevented from tearing the offender to pieces. Even the tribune thought that no money security was sufficient when the charge was so serious; the body of the accused must be kept safe in prison, that he might abide the sentence of the law. But some of the other tribunes were prevailed on by the powerful friends of the criminal to extend to him their protection; they forbade the attachment of his person. Being thus left at large, he withdrew from justice, and fled across the Tiber into Etruria before his trial came on.20 His relations, by whose’ influence justice had been thus defrauded, paid the. poor compensation of their forfeited bail; and even here the punishment would not fall on the guilty, for when a burgher was fined, his clients were bound to contribute to discharge it for him.

Kmeso’s flight provoked his associates to dare the last extremities. From mere Conepiracyto effecthis rioters they -became conspirators; and they played their game return. deeply. Still continuing their riots whenever the assembly of the tribes met, but taking care that no one of their body should be especially conspicucus, they, on all other occasions,2’

endeavored to maker themselves popular: they M ould speak civilly to the commons, would talk with them, and ask them to their 1 “A. Virginius Ksesoni capitis diem dicit.” non. See, too, the stories told in Plutarch oi II. 11.: the manifold excesses of Alcibiades. “e Livv, III. 13. 20

Livy, III. 13. 1’ Seethie wellknown speech of Demosthenes 21 Livy, III.

14. Vahmit Midias, and also the speech against Co

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CHAP. XIII.] KESO QUINCTIUS. 89 houses, well knowing how readily the poor and the humble are won by a little attention and liberality on the part of the rich and noble. Meanwhile, a darker plot was in agitation: Kaeso held frequent communication with them; he had joined himself to a band of exiles and runaway slaves from various quarters, such as abounded in Italy then no less than in the middle ages: with this aid he would surprise the Capitol by night, his associates would rise and massacre the tribunes and the most obnoxious of the commons, and thus the old ascendency of the burghers would be restored, such as it had been before the fatal concessions made at the Sacred Hill. Such was the information which the tribunes, according to Dionysius,22 laid before the senate, soon after KIeso’s flight from Rome. From what A party of exiles and annalist he copied this statement does not appear; but Livy, who slaves surprise the Capitol by night; but it ia has followed some author far more partial to the Quinctian family, leove.rendthe next day, and the partywho had makes no mention of it, although it is really essential t tohe right eidzet it arte cut to understanding of his own subsequent narrative. For in the next pieces. year, according to the account of both Livy and Dionysius,23 the Capitol was surprised by night by a body of slaves and exiles, and the leader of the party made it his first demand that all Roman exiles should be restored to their country. The burghers had great difficulty in persuading the commons to take up arms; till at last the consul, P.

Valerius, prevailed with them, and relying on his word that he would not only allow the tribunes to hold their assembly for the consideration of the Terentilian law, but would do his best to induce the senate and the curike to give their consent to it, the commons followed him to the assault of the Capitol. He himself was killed in the onset; but the Capitol was carried, and all its defenders either slain on the spot, or afterwards executed. The leader of this desperate band is said to have been a Sabine, Appius Herdonius; and in the story of the actual attempt, the name of Kmeso Kees’s share in the enis not mentioned. But we hear, in general terms,24 of Roman ex-terpese sent openly aciles, whom it was the especial object of the enterprise to restore to wledged. their country; and we may be sure that KIeso was one of them. Appius Herdonius was, probably, a Sabine adventurer in circumstances like his own, whom he persuaded to aid him in his attempt. Had we the real history of these times, we should find, in all likelihood, that the truth in the stories of Kmso and Coriolanus has been exactly inverted; that the share of the Roman exile in the surprise of the Capitol has been as unduly suppressed as that of the Roman exile in the great Volscian war has been unduly magnified; that K(eso’s treason has been transferred te Appius Herdonius, while the glory of the Volscian leader, Attius Tullius, has been bestowed on Coriolanus. The burghers, as a body, would certainly be opposed, both from patriotic and selfish motives, to the attempt of Kaeso; an exile forcing his return,. Quincties, the fatlher by the swords of other exiles, and seizing the citadel, was likely to Terentilian jaw.veheset himself up as a tyrant alike over the burghers and the com-m.ently. mons; and even his own father, L. Quinctius, would have been the first to resist him. But when he had fallen, and this danger was at an end, other feelings returned; and L. Quinctius would then hate the commons with.a deeper hatred, as he would ascribe to them the miserable fate of his son; Kaeso’s guilt, no less than his misfortune, would appear the consequence of their persecution. So when he was elected consul in the room of P. Valerius, he seemed to set no bounds to his thirst for vengeance. The promise by which Valerius had prevailed on the commons to follow him to the recovery of the Capitol was utterly disregarded; L. Quinctius25 openly set the tribunes at defiance, told them that they should never pass their law while he was consul, and declared that he would instantly lead forth the legions into the field against the iEquians and Volscians. 09 Dionysius, X. 10, 11. 24

See chap. XI. note 11. 2I Livy, III. 15. Dionysius, X. 14-16. 25 Livy, III. 19.

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90 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIII The tribunes26 represented that they would not allow him to enlist any as soldiers: but Quinctius replied, that he needed no enlistment; *” the Hi violent measures. men who took up arms under P. Valerius swore to assemble at the consul’s bidding, and not to disband without his orders. The consul never dis. banded them; and I, the consul,” he said, ” command you to meet me in arms A. U. C. 294. A. C.

to-morrow at the lake Regillus.” But more was said to be de458. signed than a simple postponement of the Terentilian law: the augurs were to attend,27 in order to inaugurate the ground where the soldielr were to meet, and thus convert it into a lawful place of assembly; then the army, in its centuries, would be called upon to repeal all the laws which had been passed at Rome under the influence of the tribunes; and none would dare to oppose the consul’s will, for, beyond the distance of one mile from the city, the tribunes’ protection would be of no avail, nor did there exist any right of appeal. More than all, Quinctius repeatedly declared that, when his year of office was expired, he would name a dictator, that the tribunes might be awed by the power of a magistrate from whom there lay no appeal, even within the walls of Rome. The Roman annalists who recorded these events28 loved to believe that, in spite He is prevailed upon to of all their provocations, the commons so respected the sacredness of an oath, that they would have kept the letter of it to their own hurt, even when its spirit in no way bound them to obedience.

They say that the tribunes and the commons felt that they could not resist as a matter of right; that they appealed29 to the mercy of the senate, and that the senate only prevailed with the consuls to abandon their purpose of taking the field, on condition that the tribunes would promise not to bring forward the question of the law again during that year. It may be, however, that the senate knew how far they could safely tempt the patience of the tribunes; threats might be held out, in order to claim a merit in abandoning them; but an actual attempt to march the legions out of the city, with the avowed purpose of making them the helpless instruments in the destruction of their own liberties, would be too bold a venture; at the last excess of insolent tyranny, NTemesis would surely awake to vengeance. At any rate,“0 it appeared that neither the tribunes nor the commons were disA. U C295. A.C. 45. posed to let the Terentilian law be forgotten; for when the elecThe law is delayed by tions came on, the same tribunes who had already been in office foi foreigrn war. foreign war. two years were reelected for:a third year, and again began to bring forward the disputed question. But again they gave way to the pressure of foreign war; for the danger from the LEquians and Yolscians was imminent: the former had surprised the citadel of Tusculum; the latter had expelled the Roman colony from Antium, and recovered that important city. After a series of operations, which lasted for several months, the _Equians were dislodged from Tusculum, but Antium still remained in the possession of the Volscians. Thus the Terentilian law was again delayed:“1 but, in the mean time, the burghers, who retained a lively resentment for the fate of Kaeso, were trying Cius for faalse wtitness to establish a charge of false witness against M. Volscius, by whose in the trial of Kso…2 testimony, as to his brother’s murder, the event of Keeso’s trial had been chiefly decided. The two queestores parricidii, or chief criminal judges, proposed to impeach VoIscius before the curiva; but the tribunes refused to allow the trial to come on till the question of the law had been first decided.

Thus the year passed away: but the tribunes were again, for the fourth time, reelected. In the following year is placed the story already related of the dictatorship of A. U. C. 296. A. C. L. Quinctius Cincinnatus, and his deliverance of the consul and his 416. army, when they were blockaded by the 1zEquians. The continued 28 Livy, III. 20.

aptas faciebat, sed suos potius mores ad ea ae27 Livy, III. 20.

commodabat. 28 Livy, III. 20. Nondum hec, qune nunc te-2Y Livy, III. 21.

net sneculum, negligentia Deum venerat: nec in-90 Livy, III. 21-28.

terpretando sibi quisque jusjurandum et leges 91 Livy, III. 24.

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CHAP. XIII.] NUMBER OF TRIBUNES INCREASED TO TEN. 91 absence”3 of the legions, which kept the field nearly the whole year, afforded the burghers a pretence for opposing the introduction of the law; but Dictatorship of L. Quinctius availed himself of his dictatorial power to hold the Quhistius. Volsciu, comitia for the trial of Volscius, in defiance of the tribunes; and goes into exile. the accused, feeling his condemnation to be certain, left Rome, and availed himself of the interchange of citizenship between the Romans and Latins, to become a citizen of Lanuvium. The tribunes were again reelected for a fifth time. The year 29733 was marked by the same dangers from the AEquians; and the Sabines are said, in this and in the former year, to have joined A. U. C. 297. A. C. them, and to have carried alarm and devastation into a new part 455. Incfase o theti of the Roman territory, that which lay between the Tiber and the u.eS. Anio.

Thus the law made no progress: but the tribunes obtained an important point, that their number should henceforth be doubled. Ten tribunes were from this time forward annually elected; two from each of the five classes. There can be no doubt that the annals of this period, as we now have them in Livy and Dioiiysius, present a very incomplete picture of these The annals have not dissensions. The original source of the details must have been the gi.vef aufll rpcture.of the disorders of these memorials of the several great families; each successive version of times.

these, as men’s notions of their early history became more and more romantic, would omit whatever seemed inconsistent with the supposed purity and nobleness of the times of their forefathers; and acts of bloody vengeance, which the actors themselves, and their immediate descendants, regarded with pride rather than compunction, as Sulla gloried in his proscriptions and recorded them on his monument, were carefully suppressed by historians of a later age. The burghers of the third and fourth centuries thought it no dishonor that their own daggers,34 or those of their faithful clients, should have punished with death the insolence and turbulence of the most obstinate of the commons; they would glory in breaking up the assemblies of their adversaries by main force, and in treating them, on other occasions, with all possible scorn and contumely; ejecting them from their houses35 with a strong hand, insulting them and their families in their nightly revels, or in open day; abusing them in the streets, or besetting their doors36 with armed slaves, and carrying off their wives and daughters.37 Their own houses, built mostly on the hills of Rome, which were so many separate fortresses, and always, by their style of building, secure at once from public notice and from attack, favored the perpetration of all acts of violence. Others, besides insolvent debtors, might be shut up in their dungeons; and if hatred or fear prompted them to consign their victims to a yet surer keeping, the dungeon might readily become a grave,38 and who would dare to search for those whom it contained, whether alive or dead? One act in particular, in which its authors doubtless gloried as in a signal example of public justice, has been so concealed by the later annalists, that from the faint and confused notices of it which alone re-burning of nie men os main to us, we can neither discover its date, nor its cause, nor any 32 Livy, III.

29. 3 Livy, IlI. 80. wealth, we may judge of that shown to the 34 Zonaras, VII. 17, who, as we now find, commons at an earlier period. orreowed his statement frorm Dion Cassius. 37 The famous story of Virginia cannot have Dion’s words are, o[ 7rarnpitanL avepios pv ob been a solitary instance.

Virginia was the wrdvv, rXriv fpaJov, 7rtEOedlovrTS YuJva, vrirpar-daughter of a centurion, and betrothed to no rev, sdOpa Rl (rvXvoii 7rvs Opaavrdrav 64venvov. less a man than L. Icilius, the famous proposer Fragm. Vatic. XXII. of the law, “de Aventino publicando.” If 35 This is implied in the “forcible occupa-such an outrage could be ventured against a tion” noticed in the law, “de Aventino publi-woman of such birth, and so connected, we cando.” may conceive what those of humbler condition “3

Such outrages must be alluded to in the were exposed to. speech ascribed to L. Quinctius, Livy, III. 19. 98 The body of a murdered man was discovi”Si quis ex plebe domum suam obsessam a fa-ered to have been buried in the house of P. milia armat& nunciaret, ferendum auxilium pu-Sestius, a burgher, in the first year of the detsretis.” The conduct of Verres at Lampsa-cemvirate. Livy, III. 33. The discovery of eus illustrates this; from the treatment of the one such case implies that there were many provincials in the later times of the common-others which were not discovered.

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92 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIII of its particulars. We only know, that at some time or other during the latter half of the third century of Rome, nine eminent men,39 who advocated the cause of the commons, were burned alive in the Circus, such being the old punishment of the worst traitors.

It appears, however, from the fragment of Festus, which undoubtedly relates to this event, that some of the victims in this execution were of patrician houses; and there is an obscure and corrupt passage of Dion Cassius in the Vatican fragments, which seems to indicate that some of the burghers did take part with the commons, whether from a sense of justice or from personal ambition. The year 298, to return to our annals, was marked, on the part of the tribA. U C 298. A. C. unes, by an important measure. First of all,40 to prevent their in454. LawofL. Icillus. creased number from being a source of weakness, by making diffor allotting out the Aventine to the.conferences amongst themselves more likely, they bound themselves to each other by solemn oaths, that no tribune should oppose the decisions of the majority of his colleagues, nor act without their consent. Then Lucius Icilius, one of their number, brought forward his famous law for allotting v’EvEva or rl4papXoot wvpi ~r roV 64ptov 6_d-nine colleagues. We can thus explain the poinhav. Dion Cassius, Frag.

Vatic. XXII., and sition of the name of Sicinius, if we read, ” nocopied by Zonaras, VII. 17. A confused ves-vemn collegme T. Sicinii Volsci,” and ” cum contige of the same story may be found in Valerius jurationem” (or “
consilia”) ” inissent acdverMaximus (VI. 38, 2); and the mutilated pas-sus Remp.” But what are we to call the office sage in Festus, beginning, in the common ecldi-in which these ten men were colleagues totions, with “Nauti consulatu,” must clearly gether? Can it really have been the tribunerefer to it. Niebuhr’s restoration and explana-ship? and are we to take Cicero’s statement, tion of this last fragment may be found in his -
in the fragments of his speech for Cornelius, note 265 to the 2d volume of his History, p. that the number of tribunes was increased from 144, 2d edition. Both are highly ingenious, two to ten in the very year after the first instiand that the fragment begaan with the word tution of the office? and is it possible that the “novem,” and not with “nauti,” seems cer-patricians named in Festus’ Fragments were tain; inasmuch as the article before it begins the very persons whom Dion Cassius had in with the word “novalis,” and that which fol-, his mind, when he said that “many of the lows it begins with “novendiales.” All the highest patricians renounced their nobility from words now to be found in the MS. of Festus, being ambitious of the great power of the office, half of the page having been accidentally de-and became tribunes?” If this were so, T. stroyed by fire, are the following, and ranged Sicinius Volscus would be a member of the in the following order as to lines: house of the plebeian Sicinii, and not the patrician who was consul in the year 267. The T. Sicini Volsci time of the execution I should place about the inissent adversus same time as the death of Cassius; and it is co combusti feruntur not incredible that even the people in their ne quae est proxime cir-centuries may have believed that accusation of pide albo constratus. a conspiracy against the common liberty which Opiter Verginius was brought against Cassius, and may have uLvinus, Postumus, Col-sentenced nine of the tribunes to death as his lius Tolerinus, P. Ve-accomplices, especially if one of their own colonius Atratinus, Ver-leagues, and a genuine plebeian, had denounced tius Scacvola, Sex. Fu-them as being really enemies to liberty, -under the mask of opposing the aristocracy. And Who can profess to fill up such a fragment with such a circumstance as the alleged treason of certainty.

But I observe that Mutius Scoevola nine out of ten of the tribunes would have afbelonged to a house which, so far as we know, forded a good pretence for again reducing their was never patrician; and the preceding namne, number to two or five, from which it was again of which only the first syllable remains, Ver-, finally raised to ten in the year 297. It must may also have denoted a plebeian, as-we meet be remembered, that the whole period between with a Virginius amongst the tribunes as early the first institution of the tribuneship and the as the year 293. (Livy 11.) But as all the death of Cassius is one of the greatest obscuothers are patrician names, how can they have rity, and that the remaining accounts are full been tribunes; or how can there have been of variations.

Sempronius Atratinus is mennine tribunes earlier than the year 297; or how tioned by Dyonisius as speaking in favor of the can we find a place for such an event between appointment of a commission of ten men to 297 and the appointment of the decemviri; carry into effect the proposed agrarian law of after which time it becomes wholly inconceiva-Cassius, at least in a modified form;’ this was ble The words “aclversarii” and “adversus in the year 268. (Dionysius, VIII, 74.) I have eum,” seem to me the most unlikely parts of sometimes thought whether the nine men may Niebuhr’s conjectural addition. The criminals not have been members of this commission, would hardly have been described simply as and accused by their tenth colleague, T. Sicinthe adversaries of T. Sicinius, nor their crime ius, the patrician, of abusing their powers to called a conspiracy against him. The story in favor the tyranny of Cassius. Valerius Maximus represents one tribune as 40 Dionysius, X. 31. being a principal agent in the execution of his

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CHAP. XIII.] LAW DE AVENTINO PUBLICANDO. 93 the whole of the Aventine Hill to the commons forever, to be their exclusive quarter and stronghold. This hill was not, as we have seen, a part of the original city, nor was it even yet included within the pomserium, or religious boundary, although it was now within the walls; much of it was public or demesne land, having neither been divided out among the original citizens, the burghers, nor having in later times been assigned in portions to any of the commons. The ground, which was thus still public, was occupied, according to custom, by individual burghers; some had built on it, but parts of it were still in their natural state, and overgrown with wood. Yet this hill was the principal quarter in which the commons lived, and large parts of it had doubtless been assigned to them in the time of the kings, as the freeholds of those to whom they were granted. It appears that encroachments were made on these freeholds by the burghers; that the landmarks, which, according to Roman usage, always distinguished private property from common, were from time to time forcibly or fraudulently removed; the ground was then claimed as public, and, as such, occupied only by burghers; and in this way the ejectment of the commons, from what they considered as their own hill, seemed likely to be accomplished. Again, the Aventine is one of the steepest and strongest of the hills of Rome; if wholly in the hands of the commons, it would give them a stronghold of their own, such as the burghers enjoyed in the other hills; and this, In such stormy times, when the dissensions between the orders might at any instant break out into open war, was a consideration of the highest importance. Such were the reasons which induced the tribunes to suspend for a time the question of the Terentilian law, and to endeavor to obtain at once for their order the secure and exclusive property of the Aventine.

A new course41 was also adopted in the conduct of this measure. Instead of bringing it forward first before the commons, where its considerNew mode of proceedation might be indefinitely delayed by the violent interruptions of ing to p.oc.lre ptass the burghers, L. Icilius called upon the consuls to bring it in the go first instance before the senate, and he claimed himself to spcak as counsel in its behalf. This was asserting not merely the right of petitioning, but the still higher right, that the petition should not be laid on the table, but that counsel should be heard in defence of it, and its prayer immediately taken into consideration. A story is told that the consuls’ lictor42 insolently beat away the tribunes’ officer who was going to carry to them his message; that immediately Icilius and his colleagues seized the lictor, and dragged him off with their own hands, intending to throw him from the rock for his treason against the sacred laws. They spared his life only at the intercession of some of the oldest of the senators, but they insisted that the consuls should comply with the demands of Icilius; and accordingly the senate was summoned, Icilius laid before them what may be called his petition of right, and they proceeded to vote whether they should accept or reject it.43 The majority voted in its favor, moved, it is said, by the hope that this concession would be accepted by the commons instead of the execution of the agrarian law. Then the measure thus passed by the T
senate was submitted by the consuls to the comitia of centuries, which, as representing the whole nation, might supersede the necessity of bringing it separately before the curiae and the tribes. Introduced in a manner by the government, and supported by the influence of many of the burghers, as well as by the strong feeling of the commons, the bill became a law: its importance, moreover, led to its being confirmed with unusual solemnities; the pontifices and augurs attended; sacrifices were performed, and solemn oaths were taken to observe it; and, as a further security, it was engraved on a pillar of brass, and then set up in the temple of Diana on the Avcentine, where it remained till the time of Dio, nysius. 41

Dionysius, X. 31. 42 Dionysius, X. 81. 4’ Dionysius, X. 82.

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94 HISTORY OF ROME. [LCArP. XII1_ The provisions of the law were, ” that so much44 of the Aventine Hill as was t roviion. public or demesne property, should be allotted out to the commons, to be their freehold forever. That all occupiers of this land should relinquish their occupation of it; that those who had occupied it, forcibly or fraudulently,45 should have no compensation, but that other occupiers should be repaid for the money which they might have laid out in building upon it, at a fair estimate, to be fixed by arbitration.” Probably also, as Niebuhr thinks, there was a clause forbidding any burgher to purchase or inherit property on the hill, that it might be kept exclusively for the commons. It is mentioned that the commons began instantly to take possession of their grant, and the space not sufficing to give each man a separate plot of ground, an allotment was given to two, three, or more persons together, who then built upon it a house, with as many flats or stories46 as their number required, each man having one floor for himself and family as his freehold. The work of building sufficiently employed the commons for the rest of the year; the Terentilian law was allowed to rest; and an unusual rainy season, which was very fatal to the crops,7 may have helped to suspend the usual hostilities with the iEquians and Volscians.

The same tribunes were reelected for the year following, and the Terentilian Fresh disputes about law was now again brought forward, but still, as formerly, before the Te re nlaw. the assembly of the tribes; its rejection by the senate being supposed to be certain, if it were proposed there in the first instance. The consuls48 headed the burghers in their opposition, and in their attempts to interrupt the assembly of the commons by violence; the tribunes, in return, brought some of the offenders to trial for a breach of the sacred laws, and, not wishing to press for the severest punishment, enforced, according to Dionysius, only the confiscation of the criminal’s property to Ceres, whose temple was under the special control of the sediles of the commons, and was the treasury of their order. But the burghers, it is said, advanced money out of their own treasury to buy the confiscated estates from those who had purchased them, and then gave them back to their original owners. The consuls of the year 300, Sp. Tarpeius and A. Aternius, appear to have been moderate men; and not only were the two consuls of the preceding year 44 Dionysius, X. 32.

4s Dionysius, X. 33-42. The events of this 45 In Dionysius’ Greek version, fEltarysvot year are given by Dionysius at great length, an (or with the codex Vaticanus tascdsvot), J fifteen chapters; in Livy they do not occupy as co ) XaldSvrcs: in the original language “vi many lines. The story of L. Siccius, under a aut clam,” as in the wellknown form of the somewhat different form, is given by the former preetor’s interdict, ” eum fundum quem nec vi, under this year; although in its common vernec clam, nec precario alter ab altero possidetis, sion it occurs again in his history in its usual itapossideatis.” See Festus in “Possessio.” place under the decemviri. Whoever was the 4TDionysius, X. 32. Houses thus divided writer from whom Dionysius copied, he must amongst several proprietors, each being the have been one who had no wish to disguise the owner of a single foor, were the rvvostdat of the injustice of the burghers, but rather, perhaps, Greeks; and these were the “insulin” of which to exaggerate it; for they never appear in a we hear at Rome, and which are distinguished more odious light than in the transactions of by TacitLus from ” domus,”

the houses of a sin-this year. One statement, however, is curious; gle proprietor, just as Thucydides speaks of the that the houses most violent against the comrich Corcyrneans setting on fire ris oiKtia Kac raS mons, and most formidable from the strength of vo K4aS, II. 74. Compare Tacituss Annal. XV. their brotherhoods or societies, iratpias, were the 41, 43. The original sense of the word “insu-Postumii, Sempronii, and Clcelii. The former la,” as given by Festus, ” qune non junguntur of these was an unpopular house, as may be communibus parietibus cum vicinis, circuitu-seen from the story of the severity of L. Postuque publico aut privato cinguntur,” seems to mius Tubertus to his son (Livy, IV. 29), and of show that the insula was ordinarily built like the murder of M. Postumius by his soldiers our colleges, or like the inns of court in Lon- (Livy, IV.

49). The Sempronii also appear as don, a complete building in itself, and so large a family of importance during the next fifty as to occupy the whole space from one street to years; but the Clcelii are very little distinguishthe next which ran parallel to it. ed either in the early or in the later Roman his4 Livy, III. 31. AnnonA propter aquarum tory, only four members of this house occurring intemperiem laboratum est. Such notices of in the Fasti, and none of them being personally the weather and seasons come from the oldest remarkable. Their coins, however, are nuaud simplest annals, whether of the pontifices merous. or of private families, and may safely be looked upon as authentic.

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RiEP. XIII.] APPOINTMENT OF TEN COMMISSIONERS 95 accused before the commons by the tribunes, and fined, without The Aternian law,4”d any opposition on the part of the burghers; but the new consuls mult.

Sacramento.” themselves brought forward a law, which was intended probably to meet some of the objects of the Terentilian law, by limiting the arbitrary jurisdiction of the patrician magistrates. The Aternian law,‘9
de multse sacramento, fixed the maximum of the fines, which the consuls could impose for a contempt of their authority, at two sheep and thirty oxen; nor could this whole fine be imposed at once,5~ but the magistrate was to begin with one sheep, and if the offender continued obstinate, he might the next day fine him a second sheep, and the third day he might raise the penalty to the value of’ an ox, and thus go on, day by day, till he had reached the utmost extent allowed by the law. It would appear also by the use of the term sacramentum,5’ which was applied to money deposited in the judge’s hands by two contending parties, to be forfeited or recovered, according to the issue of the suit, that this fine was not absolute, but might be recovered by the party who paid it, either on his subsequent submission, or on his appeal to the judgment of his peers, whether burghers or commons, and on their deciding in his favor. But with regard to the Terentilian law itself, the tribunes could make no progress.

The burghers absolutely refused to allow the com-Three comm.isoionera mons any share in the proposed revision of the constitution; but are senttoGreece. they consented to send three persons beyond the seatt into Greece, to collect such notices of the laws and constitutions of the Greek states as might be serviceable to the Romans. These commissioners were absent for a whole year; and in this year the pestilence53 again broke out at Rome, and car-A. U. c. 301. A. C. ried off so many of the citizens, amongst the rest four out of the 451. ten tribunes, that there was a necessary cessation of political disputes. And as the pestilence spread also amongst the neighboring nations,54 they were in no condition to take advantage of the distressed state of the Romans. In the next year the pestilence55 left Rome free; and on the return of the commissioners from Greece, the disputes again began. After a A. U. C. 309. A. C. long contention, the commons conceded the great point at issue; 452. It is resolved to appoint ten men to reand it was agreed that the revision of the laws and constitution.s..e the tlaw and conshould be committed to a body of ten men, all of the order of the stitution burghers, who should supersede all other patrician magistrates, and each administer the government day by day in succession, as during an interregnum. Two of these were the consuls of the new year, who had been just A. U. c. 303. A.

c. elected, Appius Claudius and T. Genucius; the warden of the 449. city and the two quaestores parricidii, as Niebuhr thinks, were three more; and the remaining five were chosen by the centuries.t6 Such was the end of a contest which had lasted for ten years; and all its circumstances, as well as its final issue, show the inherent strength of an aristocracy in possession of the government, and under what gle about the Ter..til.

manifold disadvantages a popular party ordinarily contends against 1. it.

Nothing less than some extraordinary excitement can ever set on a level two parties so unequal; wealth, power, knowledge, leisure, organization, the influence of birth, of rank, and of benefits, the love of quiet, the dread of exertion and of personal sacrifices, the instinctive clinging to what is old and familiar, and the indifference to abstract principles so characteristic of common minds in every 49 Cicero de Republica, II. 35.

The reading -1 See Varro, Ling. Lat. V. 180, and Festun of the consul’s name, as given in this passage in voce. of Cicero, Aternius, enables us to account for 2 Livy, III. 31. and to correct the corrupt reading in Dionysius, 53 Livy, III. 32. Teptvtos. We find it also correctly given in one 5 Dionysius, X. 53. of the recently discovered fragments of the 5

Dionysius, X. 54. Livy, III. 82. Fasti Capitolini. 56 Vol. II. p. 350, 2d ed. 5o See Varro, de Ling. LatinS, V. 177, and Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 341, 2d ed.

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96 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIV rank of life; all these causes render the triumph of a dominant aristocracy sure, unless some intolerable outrage, or some rare combination of favorable circumstances, exasperate or encourage the people to extraordinary efforts, and so give them a temporary superiority. Otherwise the aristocracy may yield what they will, and retain what they will; if they are really good and wise, and give freely all that justice and reason require, then the lasting greatness and happiness of a country are best secured; if they do much less than this, yielding something to the growing light of truth, but not frankly and fully following it, great good is still done, and great improvements effected; but in the evil which is retained, there are nursed the seeds of destruction, which falls at last upon them and on their country. The irritation of having reasonable demands refused, provokes men to require what is unreasonable; suspicion and jealousy are fostered beyond remedy; and these passions, outliving the causes which excited them, render at last even the most complete concessions thankless; anid when experience has done its work with the aristocracy, and they are disposed to deal justly with their old adversaries, they are met, in their turn, with a spirit of insolence and injustice, and a fresh train of evils is the consequence. So true is it, that nations, like individuals, have their time of trial; and if this be wasted or misused, their future course is inevitably evil; and the efforts of some few good and wise citizens, like the occasional struggles of conscience in the mind of a single man when he has sinned beyond, repentance, are powerless to avert their judgment.

CHAPTER XIV. THE FIRST DECEMVIRS, AND THE LAWS OF THE TWELVE TABLES. ” The laws of a nation form the most instructive portion of its history.”-GIBBON, Chap. XLIV. THE appointment of a commission invested with such extraordinary powers as Appointmentofthe de-those committed to the decemvirs, implies of itself a suspension of cemvirs. Suspensionof all such authorities as could in any degree impede or obstruct its ll other magistrcies. operations. It was natural, therefore, that the tribunate’

should be suspended as well as the patrician mnagistracies; besides, the appointment of the decemvirs was, even in its preseht form, a triumph for the commons, and they would be glad to show their full confidence in the magistrates whom they had so much desired. Again, the tribunes had been needed to protect the commons against the tyranny of the consuls; but now that there were no consuls, why should there be tribunes? And who could dread oppression from men specially appointed to promote the interests of freedom and justice? Yet, to show that 1 This is Dionysius’ statement in the most ex-a question whether the tribuneship was proppress terms (X.

56), ad finem. Livy’s language erly called magistratus or no: and, at any rate, appears to me to admit of a doubt; for he says, it would not in these times be called ” magiswhen speaking of the wish of the commons to tratus populi,” but only ” plebis:” further, Livy have decenmvirs elected for another year, ” Jam expressly adds, that the ” sacratre leges” were plebs ne tribunicium quidem auxilium, ceden-not to be abolished. Niebuhr believes that the tibus in vicem appellationi [codd.’ appellatione’]

tribuneship was not given up till the second dedecemviris querebat.” (III.

34. ad finem.) And cemvirate. I think, on the whole, that Livy although, when mentioning the appointment of meant to agree with Dionysius; and the statethe first decemvirs, he had said, Placet creari ment does not appear to me to possess any indecemviros et ne quis eo anho alius magistra-ternal improbability. tas esset” (III. 32), yet it was sometimes made

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CHAP. XIV.] THE LAWS OF TIIE TWELVE TABLES. 97 the tribuneship was not to be permanently surrendered, the sacred laws were specially exempted from the decemvirs’ power of revision, as was also that other law, scarcely less dear to the commons, or less important, which had secured to them the property of the Aventine. With the ground thus clear before them, and possessing that full confidence and cheerful expectation of the people, which is a government’s The decemvirs begin great encouragement, the ten proceeded to their work. They had their legisltion. before them the unwritten laws and customs of their own country, and the information, partly, we may suppose, in writing, which the commissioners had brought back from Greece. In this there would be much which, to a Roman, would require explanation: but the ten had with them an Ionian sophist,2

Hermodorus of Ephesus, who rendered such important services in explaining the institutions of his countrymen, above all of the Athenians, the great glory of the Ionian race, that a statue was erected to his honor in the comitium. The result of these labors, after a few months, was submitted’o the examination of the people.3 Ten tables were published, and set up in a Th,ey complete ten t conspicuous place for all to read them. Every man was then in-blesnlav.. vited to make known to the ten such corrections as he might think needed; these were considered, and adopted as far as the ten approved of them: and the ten tables, thus amended, were then laid before the senate, the centuries, and the curiae, and received the sanction of both orders of the nation. The laws were then engraved on tablets of brass,4 and the tablets were set up in the comitium, that all men might know and observe them. It cannot be doubted that the ten tables were a complete work, and intended to be so by their authors. All the circumstances of their enactmeat show this; it seems shown also by their number, which had have been preserved to reference to that of the ten commissioners, as if each commissioner s had contributed an equal portion of their joint work. It is clear, also, that they satisfied the expectations of the people, and were drawn up in a spirit of fairness and wisdom; for whatever the Romans found fault with in the laws of the twelve tables, was contained in the two last of them; and the laws, as a whole, are spoken of with high admiration, and remained for centuries as the foundation of all the Roman law. Unhappily, we ourselves know little of them beyond this general character. Some fragmentsi of them have been preserved by ancient writers; but these are far too scanty to allow us to judge either of the substance or the order of the whole code. Still’ we may fitly avail ourselves of the occasion offered by this great period 2

Pomponius, de origine juris, 4, in the Di-l‘“T would lead one to suppose that they were gest or Pandects, 1 Tit. ii. Strabo, XIV. 1, 25, written on wood. p. 642. Hermodorus was the friend of Heracli-5 The authentic remains of the twelve tables tus, the philosopher, who reproached the Ephe-are given by. Haubold in his “Institutionum sians for having banished him from mere jeal-Juris Romani privati Lineamenta,” as repubousy of his superior merit. See the story in lished after his death by Dr. Otto, Leipzig, Strabo, as already quoted, and in Cicero, Tus-1826.

Theyare given also by Dirksen, with an culan. Disputat. V. 36. Diogenes ILaertius says elaborate criticism as to the text and the sources that Heraclitus flourished in the sixty-ninth of each fragment. “Ubersicht der bisherigec Olympiad, but Syncellus makes him contempo-Versuche zur Kritik und Herstellung des Texrary with Anaxagoras, the elder Zenon, and tes der Zwdlf-Tafel-Fragmente.” Leipzig, 1824. Parmenides, which would render it very pos-The earlier collections of them contain clauses sible for his friend Hermodorus to have vis-ascribed to the twelve tables on insufficient auited Rome in the time of the decemvirs. Stra-thority. bo expressly identifies the Hermodorus of whom 6 I am well aware of the difficulty of writing Heraclitus spoke, with the man of that name on legal details without a professional knowlwho helped the decemvirs in drawing up their edge of the subject. But history must embrace laws. And the fact of his having been honored the subject-matter of every profession; and as with a statue in the comitium (Pliny, Hist. Nat. no man can be properly qualified to write on all, XXXIV. 11) would seem to prove that the story the necessity of the case must excuse the preof his having helped the decemvirs was not sumption. It will be proper here to mention without foundation. the works from which the present chapter has L3 Livy, III. 84.

been chiefly compiled. 1st. The Institutes of 4 So Dionysius, art;Xals Xa7ra5s -XxapdaavTeg Gaius. An epitome of the three first books of tutros.

X. 57. Livy’s simple expression ” tabu-this great work had been long, known,, but the 7

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98 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIV Stte of t Roman w in Roman legislation, to give something of a view of the Roman int its earliest known law as it was settled by the twelve tables, or as it existed in the form. oldest form in which it is now possible to trace it. And I shall adopt that division of constitutional law on the one hand, and civil law on the other, which Livy had in his mind when he called the twelve tables “fons omnis publici, privatique juris.” To begin, then, with “Jus privatum,” or the civil law of Rome. This, accordJus Privatum. divided ing to the Roman lawyers, related either to persons, or to things, into the I. Law of Person, II.

Law of Things, or to actions, in the legal senseof theterm. Let us first examine arid I. LaweofActions. some of the principal points in the law as it regarded persons. I. In later times the lawyers had occasion to notice three descriptions of per-. wof Persons. Persons: those born free, those who had been made free, and slaves. T. Law of Persons. Persons born free, persons The distinctions of burghers and commons, patricians and plebemade free, and slaves…. inans, had long since vanished; and all free-born Roman citizens were legally regarded as equal. On the other hand, the condition of slaves admits of little variation so long as they remain slaves; and thus, with regard to these, the lapse of centuries produced little change. But the freedmen of a later age appear to represent the clients of the period of the twelve tables. That the relation of the freedman to his former master very nearly resembled The freedmen ofalater that of the client to his lord, might be conjectured from this, that age rtsembled oflthe when a slave obtained his freedom, his former master, “dominus,” ents of the period of the twelve tables. became his “patronus,”

the very same name which expressed his relation to his clients. Previously to the decemvirate, this class of persons voted indeed in the comitia of centuries, which comprehended the whole Roman people, but they did not belong to any tribe, and therefore had no votes in the separate comitia of the commons. The decemvirs7 procured their enrolment in the tribes, and thus added greatly to the influence of the aistocracy over the popular assemblies; for the tie between a patron and his clients or freedmen seems to have been a very kindly one, and much stronger, as yet, than any sense of the duty of advancing the cause of the great mass of the nation.

Indeed, the freedman was held to belong so much to his patron, that if he died intestate, and without direct whole work, in its genuine state, was first dis-works which I have consulted will be noticed in covered by Niebuhr in 1816, in a palimpsest, or their several places. rewritten manuscript, of some of the works of ” The Fragments of Ulpian discovered and S. Jerome, in the Chapter Library at Verona. published by Mai” are not correctly described, I have used the second edition, publishted by as I had not seen the book when this note was Gdschen, at Berlin, in 1824; andIhave derived written. I have only been able to procure it great assistance from G6sclen’s continued ref-since the completion of the present volume, and erences to parallel passages in the other extant I find that it contains the remains of several works of the Roman lawyers.

2d. The fragment treatises by an unknown’ lawyer, on various of Ulpian from a MS. in the Vatican, published legal subjects; these treatises consisting, for the by Hugo in his ” Jus Civile Antejustinianeum.” *most part, of quotations from the works of the Berlin, 1815. The fragments of Ulpian more most eminent lawyers, arranged in order, as in recently discovered and published by Mai, I have the Pandects. Amongst the rest there are, natnot seen. 3d. I have read the Institutes of Jus-urally, citations from Ulpian, and some of these tinian, and referred continually to the Digest or were not kliown to us before Mai’s discovery; Pandects; but I cannot pretend to have read others had been already preserved in the Panthrough the Digest, or to be deeply acquainted dects. The manuscript in which these treawith its contents. 4th. Hugo’s Geschichte des tises were found was a palimpsest, now in the R6mnischen Rechts. 9th edit. Berlin, 1824. 5th. Vatican library, and marked in the catalogue Haubold’s Institutionurn juris Romani linea-VMDCCCLXVI. Itwas brought to Romefrom menta, and Dirksen’s work on the Twelve Ta-the library of the monastery at Bobi-, near Plnbles, noticed in a preceding note; as also Hau-centia, and these treatises were first published bold’s edition of the well-khnown work of Hei-from it by Mai in 1823: they have been since neccius, “Antiquitt. Romanlar. jurisprudentiam reprinted at Bonn, in 1833, under the superinillustrantium synitagma.” 6th. Savigny, ” Recht tendclence of Bethmann Hollweg; and I know des Besitzes,” Sth-edition; and some articles by them only in this German edition. They do not the same great writer in the ”’ Zeitschrift fur give us any additional information as to the laws geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft.” In point of the Twelve Tables. of excelletnce, I could not;, I suppose, heave con-O7 Ol this point see Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 318. sulted higher authorities than these; but I am Eng. Transl. It is admitted also by Haubold, in perfectly conscious of the insufficiency of a few his Tabulie Chronologicre, as one of the institumonths’ study, even of the best writers, on a tions of the deceinvirs. ubnhject so vast as the Roman law. The other

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CGaUP. XIV.] THE LAWS OF THE TWELVE TABLES. 99 heirs,8 his patron inherited all his property; a law which applied also, as we cannot doubt, though perhaps with some qualification, to the client. Looking at the domestic relations of free citizens, we find that the absolute power of a father over his children was in some slight degree Poer of a father over qualified by the twelve tables; inasmuch as they enacted,” that if his childre.. a father had sold his son three times, he should have no further control over him. Formerly, it appears, the independence of a son during his father’s lifetime had been regarded as monstrous and impossible; he never could become sui juris. The father might transfer., his right to another by selling his son; but if his new master set him free, the father’s right revived, and the son became again in potestate. But by the new law, the father’s right became terminable; and if, after he had thrice sold his son, the last purchaser gave him his freedom, then the son no longer reverted to his father’s power, but remained his own master. Still, as if to show the peculiar sacredness of the father’s power, he could not, by any one act of his own, make his son independent; he could not give him his liberty like a slave, but was obliged, if, he wished to emancipate him, to go through the form of thrice selling him; and it was only when, according to the common practice, the son, after the third sale, was resold to his father, that then, the fatherly power: being extinct, he could give him his freedom by a direct act of manumission. It should be remembered, also, that an emancipated son lost his relationship to his father, and could no longer inherit from him; and further, that by having been sold, and so passed into the state of slavery, he incurred’ that legal degradation which the Roinans called diminutio capitis, and consequently, remained liable, during the remainder of his life, to certain peculiar disqualifications. As the father of a family enjoyed absolute power over his children in his lifetime, so was he equally absolute in his choice of a guardian for His porer of disposing them, and in his disposal of his property after his death.” He of his property by will. might bequeath his whole fortune to any one child, to the exclusion of the rest, or to an absolute stranger, to the exclusion of them all. In this respect the twelve tables gave, probably, a legal sanction to a power which was become common in practice, but, strictly speaking, was as yet only a matter of indulgence, not of right. Hitherto, the will of every citizen had -been read before the comitia,‘2 whether of the curiea or of the centuries; that the former in the case of a 8 Gaius, Institut. III.

40. A man’s direct virilis sexes personas;” such as his father’s heirs, “sui heredes,” were, according to the Ro-brother, or brother’s son, or the son of an unman law,’ his children ” in potestate,” whether cle by the father’s side. These inherited in male or female, by birth, or by adoption; his preference to the cognati, or relations derived son s clhildren; his son’s son’s children; his “per fieminei sexus personas;”

and thus an wife in mann; and his daughter-in-law. See emancipated son could not be heir or guardian Gaius, Institut. III. 2. For the application of to his nephew on his brother’s side, by virtue this law to clients, see Nieuport; Ritt. Romanor. of the jus agnationis, as he had lost that right Sect. I. ch. IV. 3, and the defence of his state-by having gone through the state of mancipatio ment in Reiz’s preface to the 5th edit. of Nieu-during the process of his release from his faport’s work. Niebuhr also is of the same opinther’s authority. ion. Hist. Rom.

Vol. I. p. 320, Eng. Transl. n Uti legassit super pecunia tutelave sum rei, The qualification alluded to is supposed by Reiz ita jus esto. Fragm.

duodec. Tabb. 13, apud to halve consisted hil this, that a client’s agnati Haubol. See Gains; Institut. II. ~ 224. would have inherited before his patron, whereas 12 Testamentorum autem genera initio duo a freedman could have no agnati, his natural re-fuerunt; nam anut.calatis conmitiis faciebant, qua lationships in his state of slavery being reckoned comitia bis in anneo testamentis faeiendis desti as nothing. nata erant, ant in procinctu, id est cum belt Si pater filium ter venum cluit, filius a patre cause ad pnugnam ibalit: procinctus est enr’m liber esto. Fragm. duodec.

Tabb. 12, apud expeditus et-anl iatus exercitus. Gains, InstiHaubold, Institut. jur. Rom. lineamenta. tut. II. ~ 101. Ulpian, Fragm. XX. 2. “

CaMinima capitis diminutic accidit in his qui lata comitia” are defined by Labeo to be those, mlancipio dantur, quique ex mancipatione man- ” qu pro collegio po’ntificum habentur anu amittuntur; adeo quidem ut quotiens quisque regis aut flaminum inaugurandorurm cause..” atancipetur anut }manumittatur, totiens capite,” lisdem comitiis,” says Gellius, by whom the diminnatur. Gains, Institut. I. 162. The passage from Labeo has been preserved, “et disqualifications incurred by a diminutio capi-sacrorum detestatio et testamenta fieri soletis hicluded a forfeiture of the jus agnationis. bant.” Noct. Att. XV. 27, 1, 3. And Labeo A man’s agnati are his relations derived ” per tells us that these calata comitia were either

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100oo HISTORY OF ROM[E. [CAP. XIV burgher, the latter in the case of a plebeian, might confirm or reject it. The confirmation was generally, as we may suppose, become almost a matter of course; still it is evident that it might have been refused. But from this time forward it became a mere formality; the right of the father to dispose of his property as he chose was fully acknowledged; and it was conferred on him with such full sovereignty, that it was only when he died intestate that the next of kin could take the management of his inheritance out of the hands of his sons, if they were squandering it extravagantly; no degree of waste on the part of a son could justify the interference of his relations,‘3 if he had succeeded by virtue of his father’s will. The principle of this distinction is plain: when the father of a family had waived his right of bequeathing his property, it seemed, in some measure, to revert to the community, as a member of which, he or his ancestor had originally received it. This community was the gens in the last resort, and more immediately the family of which he was the representative. As then his property would go to the male representatives of his family in default of his own direct heirs, so they had an interest in preserving it unimpaired, and were allowed to enforce it when the son’s title to his inheritance rested, like theirs, only on the general award of the law. But where the father had disposed of his property by will, then the individual right of ownership passed in full sovereignty to his children, and no one might interfere with their management of what was wholly their own. The later law did away with this distinction; and the preetor was accustomed to deprive an extravagant son of the administration of his inheritance, even when he had succeeded to it by his father’s will. And this is natural, for as society advances in true civilization, its supremacy over all individual rights of property becomes more fully recognized; and it is understood that we are but stewards of our possessions with regard to the commonwealth of which we are members, as well as with respect to God. We shall not be surprised to find that the usages of a rude people paid but w with epe little respect to women. A man could acquire a right over a woLaw with respect to women: as to mar-man by her having lived with him for a year; exactly as a year’s possession gave him a legal title to a slave, or any other article of movable property. Here again the twelve tables so far interfered,‘4 as to give the power to the woman of barring this prescription, by absenting herself from her husband during three nights in each year. By so doing, she avoided passing under her husband’s power, “in. manum viri;” and could not, therefore, like a wife in the fullest sehse, inherit from him as a daughter. Still the connection was recognized as a lawful marriage,‘5 “connubium;” and the children accordingly followed their father’s condition, and were subject to his power, which was the case only with such children as were born in “connubium.” Again, the old Roman law, confirmed in this instance also by the twelve ta2, n to their being - bles, obliged all women, at all times of their lives, and under all ways under guardian-circumstances,‘6 to be under guardianship. If a father died inahip’ testate, his daughters immediately became the wards of their “curiata” or “centuriata;” so that we may scription, “usus,” or by coemptio, because safely conclude that the will of a patrician was then they lost their control over her property, read at the former, that of a plebeian at the and their right of inheriting from her (see tatter. See Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 336, Eng. Cicero pro Flacco, 34); but only her father’s l.rans. refusal of consent hindered her from forming a 13 A prsetore constituitur curator-ingenuis connubium, if her connection was with a Roqui cx testamento parentis hseredes facti male man citizen, ancl one not related to her in any dissipant bona: his enim ex lege (scil. XII.

prohibited degree. See Ulpian, Fragm. V. 2-7. Tabularum) curator dart non poterat. Ulpian, 16 Gaius, I. ~ 144. The vestal virgins were Fragm. XII.

3. alone excepted by the twelve tables, ” in hono14 Gaius, Institut. I. ~

111. rem sacerdotii.” Afterwards, by the later law, 15 The formalities of a marriage, according to a woman obtained the same privilege by acthe Roman law, seem only to have affected tht quiring the “jus trium liberorum ” which did wife’s property, and her power of inheriting not, however, always imply that she had really from her husband, not the legitimacy of the borne three children, but that by the emperor’s children. A woman’s guardians might prevent favor she had acquired the right granted by law aer from passing in manum viri either by pre-to one who had actually been a mother.

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CrAP. XIV.] THE LAWrS OF THE TWELVE TABLES. 101 brothers, or of their nearest male relations on their father’s side;17 nor could they, without their guardian’s sanction, contract any obligation,‘8 or alienate their land, or make a will. If a woman married, she became, in law, her husband’s daughter; he could appoint her guardians by his will, or, if he died intestate, her nearest male relations succeeded by law to the office; so that it was possible, in despite of the laws of nature, that a mother might be under the guardianship of her own son. By these institutions, the apparent liberality of the law, which enabled a man’s daughters to inherit on an equal footing with his sons, was in great measure rendered ineffectual.‘9 A daughter might, indeed, claim an equal share with her brother of her father’s land; but as she could neither alienate it during her lifetime, nor bequeath it by will without his consent, and as he was her legal heir, there was little probability of its passing out of the family. All this was greatly modified by the later law; but there were always found persons who regretted the change, and upheld the old system, with all its selfishness and injustice, as favorable to a wholesome severity of manners, and a proper check upon the weakness or caprice of a woman’s judgment. II. If from persons we now turn to property, or, according to the language of the law, to things, our curiosity as to the provisions of the I. LwofThin,. Intwelve tables, and the state of things which they recognized, can edge of the law of real be but imperfectly gratified. Yet there are few points of more irgP,t on throw ingf importance in the history of a nation: the law of property, of real every people. property especially, and a knowledge of all the circumstances of its tenure and divisions, would throw light upon more than the physical condition of a people; it would furnish the key to some of the main principles prevalent in their society. For instance, the feudal notion that property in land confers jurisdiction, and the derivation of property, either from the owner’s own sword, or from the gift of the stronger chief whose sword he had aided, not from the regular assignment of society, has most deeply affected the political and social state of the nations of modern Europe. At Rome, as elsewhere among the free commonwealths of the ancient world, property was derived from political rights, rather than political rights from property; and the division and assignation of lands to the individual members of the state by the deliberate act of the whole comimunity, was familiarly recognized20 as the manner in which such property was most 17 Quibus testamento quidem tutor datus non to have been rather the rule in theory, and, in sit, iis ex lege XII. agnati sunt tutores. Gaius, the earliest recorded settlement of a people, to I. ~ 155. have been often actually carried into practice. 18 A woman’s agnati, by the old law, were The division of Canaan amongst the Israelites her tutores legitirni. And it was a wellknown is a wellknown example. Let any one comnrule of law that she could make no valid will pare this with the utterly capricious manner in without their consent.

Gains, II. ~ 118. The which the Norman chiefs, from duke William whole right of her agnati to become her guar-downwards, appropriated to themselves, or dians was done away by the emperor Claudius. granted away to their followers, the lands of (Gaius, I. ~ 171.) But her father, and, if she England. Again, a similar equal division is were a freed woman, her patronus, still retained said to have existed at one time in Egypt (Hethe same power; and even in the time of the rodotus, II. 109); and even after the period of Antonines, her will was good for nothing if it the distress, noticed in Genesis, had brought had not their sanction. most of the property into the hands of the lo See Hugo, Geschichte des 1Emischen kings, yet still we finda the principle of regular Rechts, p. 209.

division recognized; for even in the last years 20 This is one of those general statements of the Egyptian monarchy, the class of landed which I think the reader of ancient history will proprietors who received their land as an hereadily admit, although it is not possible to reditary fief, on the tenure of military service, bring any particular passage of an ancient wri-enjoyed each man an equal portion. (Herodoter as the authority for it. Nor is it to be de-tus, II. 164, et seqq.) In all the Greek colonies nied, that conquest, and the lapse of years, inthere was the same system; each citizen had troduced the greatest inequalities of property, his KXipos or portion, and in manl states these qulte as great as those subsisting in modern were not allowed to be alienated.

(Aristotle, Europe. But the notion of an equal division Politic. VI. 4.) Thus the wellknown division of the land of a country amongst its citizens, of Laconia, ascribed to Lycurgus, was nothing which in modern Europe is so without example unprecedented: the remarkable feature in it that it is looked upon as one of the wildest of was, that it was a return to the principle of impossible fancies, seems, in the ancient world, regular assignation, after a long departure from

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102 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIV regularly acquired. This act conveyed the property of the land so granted ill complete sovereignty; no seignorial rights were reserved on it, all on the, soil. and under it, was alike made over to the proprietor; and, as he was the absolute owner of it in his lifetime, so he could dispose of it to whom he would aftei his death. But he must leave it as unfettered as he had himself enjoyed it: hle could not control the rights of his successor by depriving him of his power of disposing of it in his turn according to his pleasure; for this seemed an unjust encroachment on the power of posterity, and an unnatural usurpation on the part of any single generation. And a man’s civil rights and duties were derived, not from his possession of property, but from his being a citizen of that society from whose law his property itself had come to him. He was bound to defend his country, not as the holder of lands, but as a member of the commonwealth; as a master, he had power over his slaves; as a father, over his children; as a magistrate, over his fellowcitizens; as a free-born citizen he had a voice in public affairs; but as a proprietor of land he enjoyed only the direct benefits of property, and no power or privilege, whether social or political. Yet the sword had won no small portion of the actual territory of Rome, no All propertyinland at less than of the feudal kingdoms of a later period. The sword Rnome wo derived ori-won it for the state, but not for individuals.: Slaves, cattle, money, ginally from the grant of the stnte, clothing, and all articles of movable property, might be won by individuals for themselves; and the law”t acknowledged this as a natural method of acquiring wealth; but whatever land22 was conquered belonged immediately to the commonwealth. It could be converted into private property only by purchase or by assignation; and assignation always proceeded on regular principles, and awarded equal portions of land to every man. But the mass of the conquered territory was left as the demesne of the state; and it was out of land similarly,reserved to the kings in the conquests of the German barbarians that fiefs were first created. This system was prevented among the Romans, by the general law, strengthened apparently by the sanctions of religion: the law which prescribed to all grants of land made out of the state demesne the one form of common and equal assignation. The land then was not granted away, its property remained in the state; it was sometimes left as a common pasture, sometimes it; it was the bringing back of an old state to terference, if a citizen having had land, nega new beginning, as it were, of its social existlected it and followed any other calling; it ence. I think, then, it may be stated, as one certainly did not follow that every citizen reof the characteristic points.of the ancient world, ceived a grant of land, much less that his posthat landede property was not merely sanctioned session of land beforehand cjualified him to and maintained by law, but had originally been become a citizen. derived from it; and that even where the peo-a1 Gaius, II. ~ 69. Quae ex hostibus capinnple as a body had gained their country by the tur, naturali ratione nostra fiunt; and in Jussword, yet their individual citizens’ received tinian’s Institutes this is expressly extended to their separate portioni neither from their own slaves; *” adeo quilem, ut et liberi homines in sworcd, nor from the capricious bounty’of their servitutem nostram’deducantur.” II. 1, ~1.

chiefs, but from the deliberate act of society, De rerum divisiones,-&c.

which proceeded, on regular principles, to allot 22 Gais, II. ~ 7.’ In provinciali solo clominia portion of its common property to each of its unm populi Romani est, vel Caesaris; nos autezn members.’ With respect to the statement at possessionem tantum et usum fructum habere the end of this paragraph, that land conferred videnlur.‘Accordingly no land, in provinciali no political power, it may be objected that solo, could be sold by mancipatio. because it power was connected with landed property, was not res mancipii. “Provinciale solum” inasmuch as the commons, it is said, were lia-was opposed to ” Italicum solum,” and. exlressble to be removed from their tribe by the cen-edl the condition of land which remaineda still sors, if they followed’ any other calling but in the state of a conquest, and had not been inagriculture. But thi4= and other such regula-corporated with the territory, “Sager,” of the tions went on the principle, that it was desira-conquerors. But, as is well known, all the land ble that a citizen should live’ by agriculture in the provinces in’the imperial times was not rather than by trade; a principle very general- ” provinciale solum;’ particular spots enjoyed ly admitted inl the ancient world, but founded the privileges of “Italicum solurm,” and this on considerations of what was supposed to be was the famous jus Italine which was so comfor the moral good of the commuility’; and pletely misunderstood by all writers on the Rovery different from the notion that he who had man law and constitution before Savigny. Ha land ought to have jurisdiction and power. first showed that it was a privilege attached to Besides, it was only a ground of censorian in-land, not, as had been supposed, to persons.

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CHAP. XIV.] THE LAWS OF THE TWELVE TABLES. 103 farmed, sometimes occupied by individuals, in the same manner and under the same circumstances as in later times it was granted in fiefs, but with this essential difference, that this occupation was an irregular, and as far as regarded the state, a wholly precarious tenure. The occupiers possessed large tracts of land, and derived as much profit from them as if they had been their property; but they were only tenants at will, and there -was nothing to give to these permitted rather than authorized possessions, the dignity and political importance which were attached to the great fiefs of modern Europe. This occupation of the public land could by no length of prescription be converted into private property; lapse of time could never bar the Property acquired by rights of the commonwealth; and therefore the ” possessions” of rescription. the Roman patricians in early times, within a few miles of Rome, were on the same footing with all land in the provinces afterwards: in neither case could prescription or usucapio23
confer a legal title on the possessor, because in both instances the property of the soil lay in the state. But with respect to the lands of private persons, the early Roman lawv24 allowed possession to become property after a lapse of only two years, provided that the possession had not been obtained in the first instances5 either by force or fraud. The object of this enactment was supposed to have been the speedy settlement of all questions of ownership;26 one year’s possession gave a right of property in a slave, or any other movable, and twice that time was thought sufficient for the owner of the land to establish his right against the occupier in a territory so small as that of Rome, unless through his own neglect. Probably, also, it was judged expedient to prevent the risk of any lands lying long uncultivated, by regarding land thus neglected as returned, in a manner, to a state of nature, and open to the first occupant. Another reason would sometimes operate strongly; the duty of keeping up the religious rites attached to particular places, wxhich would fall into disuse during the absence of an owner. This feeling was so powerful in the case of the religious rites of particular families,27 that if the heir neglected to enter upon his inheritance, another person might step in and take possession, and after the lapse of a single year, he acquired a legal title to the estate. But it cannot be doubted that the effect of this encouragement given to possession was favorable to the burghers, or patricians as we must now begin to call them, at the expense of the commons. The twelve tables28 utterly denied the right of possession to a foreigner; against such a one the owner’s title remained good forever. And although the commons were no longer regarded as altogether foreigners, yet they were still excluded from the right of occupying the public land; and we may be certain that they could neither take possession of the inheritance of a patrician, nor of any portion of his land on which there was any temple or altar; for it would have been a direct profanation, had a stranger ventured to perform the religious rites peculiar to his family and race. Besides, in point of fact, the patricians’ lands were far less likely to be left open to occupation. A plebeian, whose land 23 Provincialia prm dia usucapionem non reci-quired the possession of any thing bona fide, piunt. Gaius, II. 46. It need not be repeated yet he could not acquire the property of it by that the provinciale solum of Gaius’ time, of prescription or usucapio, if it had been originwhich the property was vested only in the Ro-ally obtaine by force or fraud; “si quis rem man people or the emperor, while individuals furtivam ant vi possessam possideat.” Gaius, could only have the occupation and usufruct of II. 45. it, was exactly in the condition of the ager pub-20 No rerum dominia diutius in incerto eslicus of the time of the XII. tables. Afterwards sent. Gails, II. 44. the distinction between provinciale and Itali-27 Gaius, II. 53, 55. Voluerunt veteres macum solum was done away. by Justinian, and turius hereditates adiri ut essent qui sacra fausucapio was admitted alikee in each; but it cerent, quxorum illis temporibus summa obsercould be completed not in two years, but, ac-vatio fuit. cording to various circumstances, in ten, twenty, 2d ” LAdversus hostem uterna auctoritas.rr or thirty. See Justinian’s Code, VII. Tit. 31. Fragm. XII. Tabular. 19, apuLd Haubold. “AucDe usucapione transformandt. toritas” is the right of claiming our own prop24 Gais II.

4. Ulpi, Frm XIX. ~ 42. erty, to pirevent another from acquiring it by “2

Si modo eas bona fide acceperimus. Gains, prescription. II. ~ 43. But even if the actual possessor ac

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104 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP XIV had been laid waste by the enemy, whose house had been burnt, and his sons killed or swept off by the plague, might often be actually unable to cultivate his property again, and might leave it in despair, to be possessed by the first person who chose to occupy it. Or if he were detained prisoner for debt in some patrician’s prison, the same result might happen; his wife and children might seek protection with some relation or friend, and their home might thus be abandoned. And supposing justice to have been fairly administered, yet the delays of legal business, or the want of friends to undertake the cause, or the fear of provoking a powerful enemy, might often hinder the owner from making good his claim within two years, and so the property might be lost forever. As the Roman law attached no political power to landed property, so neither Distnctions as to vari-did it make a distinction between it and all other kinds of property, R esinn,,P pery.i a a as to the formalities required in conveying it to another. Yet Ilantipit. there was a distinction recognized; some things might be conveyed by bare delivery, a title to others could only be given by selling them with certain solemn formalities, known by the names of mancipatio and in jure cessio. This latter class”5 included not only land and houses, but also slaves, and all tame animals of draught or burden, and all these were classed under one common name, as res mancipii or mancipi; every other article of property was nec mancipii. The formality of mancipatio was one of the peculiar rights of Roman citizens;30 no magistrate’s presence was required, nor was there need of any written instrument: but five Roman citizens of an adult age were to be present as witnesses, and a sixth, called the weigher, or scalesman, was to produce a pair of scales to weigh the copper, which was, at this time, the only money in circulation. Then the purchaser laid his hand upon the thing which he was buying, and said, “This thing I declare to be mine according to the law of the Quirites; and I have bought it with this money duly weighed in these scales.” In later times, when this form was still preserved, only slaves and animals were required to be literally seized by the purchaser; land might be disposed of at a distance.3 But in the days of the. decemviri, we cannot doubt that every sale of land by mancipatio was transacted on the spot, and that the purchaser laid his hand upon the house or ground which he was buying, no less than on the slave or the ox. The form called ” in jure cessio” took place before a magistrate:2 the purchaser claimed, “vindicavit,” the purchase as his property; the seller, when asked by the magistrate if he disputed the claim, answered ” that he did not;” and then the magistrate awarded the article in question to the purchaser or claimant. These transactions, by word of mouth only, without writing, were especially saneMancipi res sunt preclia in Italico solo-conveyance, and thus gratified the commons by item jura pruediorum rusticorum, velut via, iter, recognizing their custom as law, we can underactus, aqumeductus; item servi et quadrupedes stand why there should have been afterwards quTe dorso collove domantur, velut boves, muli, a sort of pride felt in the exercise of this right equi, asini. Cieterm res nec mancipi sunt. U1l-of mancipatio, and why it should have been plan, Fragm. XIX. 1. It has been doubted kept as one of the peculiar rights of Roman whether this distinction was as old as the citizens. And if it were originally the mode of Twelve Tables (see Hugo, Geschichte des conveyance practised by the plebeian landownRom. Rechts, p. 425); but it is, at any rate, rec-ers, we can account for its being restricted to.ognized by the Cincian law, passed in the year land, and to what constituted the most valuai550 (see Hugo, p.

321), and was, in all probable part of the live stock of land, slaves, horses, bility, coeval with the earliest state of the Romules, asses, and oxenl. In particular, we can manl law, except as far as regards the jura prae-thus understand why ships were res nec mandiorum; for these, being res incorporales, coulcl cipii, because foreign commerce was wholly unnot pass by actual bodily seizure, and mancipa-known to the agricultural commons, and ships tio no doubt always in its original meaning im-were neither bought nor sold amongst them. plied this. It may be conjectured that manci-I may observe that in the MS. published by patio was at first a matter of usage amongst the Mai, entitled ” De donationibus, ad legem Cinciplebeian landowners, a method of effecting a am,” we have the true form’res mancipii,” purchase in the country before a manll’s imme-instead of ” mancipi.” See Hugo, p. 321, and diate neighbors, without the necessity of his Niebuhr, Vol. I. p. 447. Note 1044. going up to Rome and transacting the business 30 Gaius, I. ~ 119.

before a magistrate. If the law of the Twelve 31 Gaius, I. ~ 121. Tables gave a legal sanction to this mode of 32 Gaius, II. ~ 24. Ulpian, Fragm.

XIX. 9.

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CHAP. XIV.] THE LAWS OF THE TWELVE TABLES. 105 tioned by the twelve tables, which declared, that in buying and selling, “even as the tongue had spoken, so should be the law.“33 The principle of the law of descent was that of qualified male succession without primogeniture.34 All children who had not been emanci-Law of succeosion pated5 inherited their father’s estate in equal portions, without distinction of sex or eldership. A man’s wife, if she had fully come under his power (in manum convenerat), inherited as a daughter; and his son’s children, if the son were’ dead, or had been emancipated,36 succeeded to that son’s share, and divided it equally amongst them; even the children of his son’s son inherited on the same condition, if their father had ceased to be in his grandfather’s power,,either by death or by emancipation; but daughters’

children, as belonging to another family, had no right of succession. All these were called a man’s own heirs, “sui heredes;” and in default of these, his agnati,31 or relations by the father’s side, succeeded; the nearer excluding the more remote, and those in the same degree of relationship receiving equal shares. In default of agnati,35 a man’s inheritance went to the members of his gens. III. The last division of the Roman private law relates to actions. “Legis actio” signifies, ” the course of proceeding which the law prescribes II. Law’ actions. to a man, in order to settle a dispute with his neighbor, or to ob-ive sorts of tion.. tain the redress of an injury.” It stands opposed to all those acts of superstition or violence, by which the ignorance or passion of man has sought to obtain the same end; to the lot or the ordeal on the one hand, to the dagger of the assassin or the sword of the duellist on the other.

But a proceeding at law, according to the notion of the decemvirs, was bound to follow the law to the very letter; nothing was understood of construction or of deductions, insomuch that he who brought an action against, another for cutting down his vineso was held to have lost his cause, because the twelve tables forbade only the cutting down of fruit trees generally, without any particular mention of vines. The modes of action were five:40 1. Sacramento; 2. Per judicis postu33 Qluum nexum faciet, mancipiumque, uti in the MS. It was to be found in his first book, lingua nuncupassit itsa jus esto. Fragm. XII. between the 164th and 165th sections of the Tabular. 17, apud. Haubold. See Dirksen, p. present division. There is no more difficult 897-406. question in Roman law than to ascertain when 34 I call it “qualified male succession,” be-and to what extent the plebeians acquired ” jura cause although a man’s daughters inherited gentilitatis.” The whole institution of the along with his sons, yet his daughters’ sons gentes seems to have been essentially patriwere altogether excluded, and his daughters, clan; and il was the boast of the patricians, being under their brothers’ guardianship, could “se solos gentema habere,” Livy, X. 8. Who not dispose of or devise their inheritance with-then, in the succession to the property of anll out their consent. By the Athenian law the intestate plebeian, stood in a positionl analogous sons alone inherited, but they were obliged to to that of the members of his gens in the 6ucportion out their sisters, and public opinion cessiontothe property of a patrician? For the would not allow this to be done niggardly. noblest of the plebeian families, the CQcilii, for “5 Gaiuns, III. ~ 2. instance, or the Decii, could have had no con36 The reason of this restriction was, that if nection with any patrician gens such as subsistthe son were in his father’s power, he was him-ed between the plebeian and patrician Claudii, self his father’s heir, and his children were, of so that it does not appear who would have succourse, excluded; if he had lost his succession, ceeded to the property of an intestate Cecilius, either by death or by emancipation, then his in default of sui heredes and agnati. Was it, children succeeded to his share as his repreas in the Athenian law, that cognati, a term sentatives.

which included relations by the mother’s side 37 Gaius, III. 9, 10. By the law of the XII. as well as by the father’s, were capable of intables, all relations by the father’s side, wheth-heriting. And if no relations at all were to be er male or female, were alike included under found, had the tribe any claim to the succession, the title of agnati; but afterwards the meaning or was the property considleed to be wholly of the term was more limited, and female rela-without an heir, and thus capable of being actions were excluded beyond the degree of a quired by a stranger by occupation, possessio, sister. A man’s mother, if she had passed ” in and two years’ prescription, usucapio In this manum mariti,” acquired the rights ofa daugh-case there would be a possibility of’the property ter, as regarded her husband, and thus was of a plebeian being acquired by a patrician, considered in the light of a sister to her son. whereas, so long as there existed a single memSee Justinian, Institutes, III. Tit. 2, 3. ber of his gens, the property of a patrician coeuli S (raius, III.

17. It is provoking that the never be without a patrician heir. part of Gaius’ work, in which he had defined, Gaius, IV. 11. who were a man’s “gentiles,” is whollyillegible 40 Gaius, IV. 12.

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106 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIV lationem; 3. Per condictionem; 4. Per manus injectionem; 5. Per pignoris captionem. 1. The first4l of these was the most generally adopted where no other specific 1st Aetion: sacramen-action was prescribed by law. The contending parties each staked to. a certain sum of money, “sacramentum,” on the issue of their suit, five hundred ases, if the value of the disputed property amounted to one thousand ases or more; and fifty, if it fell below that sum. Only if the suit related to the establishing of the freedom of any one claimed as a slave,42 the sacramentum was fixed at the lower sum of fifty ases, lest his friends might be deterred from asserting his liberty, by the greatness of the sum they would have to forfeit if they failed in proving it. For the party who lost his cause forfeited his stake besides, and it went not to the other party, but to the state. Accordingly, the magistrate having named a judge to try the cause, the parties appeared before him, and first briefly stated to him the nature of their respective claims. Then the object in dispute, if it were any thing capable of moving or being moved, was brought into court also, and the plaintiff, holding a rod or wand in one hand,43 and laying hold of the object which he claimed with the other, asserted that it belonged to him according to the law of the Quirites, and then laid his rod upon it. The defendant did the same, and asserted his own right to it in the same form of words. Then the judge, bade them both to loose their hold, and this being done, the plaintiff turned to the defendant, and said, ” Wilt thou tell me wherefore thou hast claimed this thing as thine?” The other answered, ” I have fulfilled what right, requires, even as I have made my claim.” Then the plaintiff rejoined, “

Since thou hast made thy claim wrongfully, I defy thee at law; and I stake five hundred ases on the issue.” To which the defendant replied, “In like manner, and with a like stake, do I also defy thee.” Then the judge awarded possession of the object in dispute to one or other of the parties till the cause should be decided, and called upon him to give security to his adversary, “litis et vindiciarum,” that is, that he would make good to him both the thing itself, ” litem,” and the benefit arising from his temporary possession of it, “vindicias,” if the cause were finally decided against him. Both parties also gave security to the judge that their stake, or sacramentum, should be duly paid. But if the dispute related to the personal freedom of any man, whether he were to be adjudged to be a slave or a freeman, the twelve tables expressly ordered that the vindicize, or temporary possession,44 should be awarded in favor of freedom, that the man should remain at liberty, till it were proved that he was lawfully a slave. I have given all these details, partly from their affording so curious an illustration of the legal proceedings of the fourth century of Rome, partly from the light which they throw on the famous story of Virginia, presently to be related, and partly also from their novelty; our whole knowledge of the old actions at law being derived from the Institutes of Gaius, which in their entire and original form were first discovered by Niebuhr at Verona, in the year 1816. 2. 3. The account of the second and third modes of action has been lost out 2d and 3d Actions: of the MS. of Gains, so that we can neither fully understand their neaPer judis postictio-nature, nor how they differed from one another. So far as we nem. can judge, the latter, actio per condictionem, appears to have been a sort of serving a notice on the adversary, calling on him to appear at the end of thirty days, to submit his cause to the judge. The former, per postula41 Gains, IV. 13-17. 4a “, Festucam tenebat.” This was apparent42 In the case of a slave’s liberty, it was not ly a rod or wand, as Gaius says afterwards, necessary that the person who brought the “Festuca autern utebantur quasi haste loco, question to issue should have any connection signo quodam justi dominii,” 16. It cannot, with the slave, or any personalinterest for him: therefore, signify the wisp of straw or chaff, it was the duty, or rather the privilege, of ev-which Plutarch says was thrown on a slavm ery man to save a freeman from the perpetual when he received his liberty. Sc-a Facciolati in loss of his liberty. ” In his qun asserantur in Festucl. libertatem, quivis lege agere potest.” Livy, 44Vindici!e secundum libertatem. See Livy, U1. 45. III. 44, 45.

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CHAP. XIV.] THE LAWS OF THE TWELVE TABLES. 107 tionem judicis, was an application to the magistrate that he would name a judge to try the matter in dispute. 4. The summary process, per manus injectionem, was allowed by the twelve tables45 as a method of enforcing the fulfilment of the judge’s sen-4th Action: Per mn. tence. If the defendant, after having lost his cause, and having nus injectionem. been sentenced to pay a certain sum to the plaintiff, had neglected to do so, the plaintiff might lay actual hands on him, and unless he could find a vindex, or defender, to plead his cause for him, he being himself not allowed to do it, he was dragged to the plaintiff’s house, and there kept in chains till he had paid all that was due from him. 5. Lastly, the action per pignoris captionem46 was a rude method of distress, in which a man was allowed, in certain cases, to compel his adver-5th Action: Per pig. sary to pay him what he owed him.

by carrying off articles of his oris captioo property as a pledge. In some instances it rested solely on old unwritten custom, such as that which allowed the soldier,47 if his pay were withheld, to distrain in this manner upon the goods of the officer whose business it was to give it him.

The twelve tables allowed it in cases connected with religious worship; as, for instance, it was permitted against him who had bought a sheep or an ox for sacrifice, and had not paid for it; or against him who had not paid for the hire of a beast, which the owner had let for the very purpose of getting money to enable him to offer a sacrifice himself. In the first case, there was an impiety in a man’s offering to the gods that which was not his own; in the second, the gods themselves were defrauded of their sacrifice, inasmuch as their worshipper was deprived of the means to offer it. I have purposely postponed my notice of one part of the law, that which relates to obligations, because it affords an easy transition to another branch of the subject, the criminal law of the twelve tables; in-Law of obligatiols. asmuch as several offences, which we regard as crimes, or public wrongs, were by the Romans classed under the head of private wrongs, and the compensation which the offender was bound to make to the injured party, followed from one species of civil obligation, technically called obligationes ex delicto. Over and above our general duties to our fellowcitizens, we put ourselves often, by our own voluntary act, under certain new and specific Obligations.. ont obligations towards them, either from some particular engage-tuandexdelito. ment contracted with them, or from our having done them some wrong. In the first case, there arises an obligation to fulfil our agreement; in the second, an obligation to repair our injustice. Hence the Roman law48 divided all legal obligations into those arising from engagement, ex contractu, and those arising from a wrong committed, ex delicto. I. It will not be necessary to go minutely into the subdivisions of the former of these two classes of obligations. To the head of obligationes I. Obligations x con. re contractse belonged the law of debtor and creditor: the mere tract,.

Debto, iobtes,e fact of having borrowed money49 constituted the obligation to pay of money. it, without any promise to that effect, verbal or written,50 on the part of the borrower. But as the remarkable provisions of the law of the twelve tables, with regard to debtors, have been already noticed, it will not be needful to state them 45 Gains, IV. ~ 21-25.

tuum,” when the thing, whatever it be, is given 46 Gaius IV. ~ 26-29. With regard to the to another for his use, with the understanding orthograph y of the word, the text of Gains va-that he shall return to us hereafter not that very ries, exhibiting in one passage the form “cap-same thing, but one of the-same nature and tionem,” ~ 12, and in another that of “
capio-quality. “Commodatum” expressed that which near,” ~ 26. If the expression be made one is lent to another, with the understanding that single word, the form would be pignoriscapio. the very same thing shall be restoredto us again. See Cato, as quoted by. Gellius, Noct.. Att. 5O The English law considers an obligatio ro VII. 10. contracts as an implied contract; such a con47 Gaius IV. 27. tract ” as reason and justice dictate, and which, 48 Gainus III. 88. therefore, the law presumes that every man an49 Or any thing else which can be weighed, dertakes to perform.” Blackstone, Comment, counted, or measured. This was called ” mu-Book II.. 0, ~ IX.

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108 HISTORY OF ROME. [rnCAP. XTI again. One part, however, of the engagements of debtors, theil being bound to pay the interest as well as the principal of their debt, belonged to obligations of another class, those contracted by direct words of covenant; for whereas the payment of the principal was an obligation re contracta, the payment of interest was a matter of distinct stipulation, between the contracting parties.5’ Yet although this may seem to be as much a matter of voluntary bargain as any dealing between man and man, still the contracting parties meet often on so unequal a footing, and the weaker is so little in a condition either to gain more favorable terms, or to do without the aid of which they are the price, that legislators have generally interfered either to prohibit such engagements altogether, or at any rate to prevent the stronger party from making an exorbitant use of his advantages; they have either made all interest of money illegal, or have fixed a Anaximum to its amount.

Accordingly, the decemvirs, while they enforced the payment of debts with such fearful severity, thought themselves bound to save the debtor, if possible, from the burden of an extravagant interest; they forbade any thing higher than unciarium foenus,52 an expression which has been variously interpreted as meaning, in our language, either one per cent., or cent, per cent.; but which, according to Niebuhr,53 signifies a yearly interest of one-twelfth, or eight and onethird per cent.; and this, being calculated for the old cyclic year of ten months, would give ten per cent.

for the common year of twelve months, which was in ordinary use in the time of the decemvirs. This, according to our notions, is sufficiently high; yet the common rate of interest at Athens, at this time, was twelve per cent.;14 and Niebuhr observes, that from this period forward for sixty years, till the distress which followed the Gaulish invasion, we hear no more of the misery of insolvent debtors. A third class of obligations,55
ex contractu, contained all promises or covenants Oligatione arisin, froma expressed in a certain form of words; and here the Roman law the force of certain pe-acknowledged such only to be legally binding as were concluded culiar words or forms. in the form of question and answer. The party with whom the covenant was made asked him who made it, “Dost thou engage to do so and so?” And he answered, ” I do engage.” It is a curious circumstance, that as the Romans had a peculiar form of sale, mancipatio, which none but Roman citizens might use, so also they had one peculiar word to express an engagement, which was binding only on Roman citizens, and lost its force even on them if translated into another language. This favorite word was spondeo.56 A Roman might make a binding covenant with a foreigner in any language which both parties understood; if it were drawn up in Latin, the words promitto, dabo, faciam, or any others to the like effect, retained their natural and reasonable force, and constituted an agreement recognized’by law; but if he used the word spondeo, or its supposed equivalent, in any other language, the engagement was null and void. This, undoubtedly, is to be referred to the religious origin of 61 Gibbon, Vol.

VIII. chap. xliv. p. 85, 8vo. Athens we have 74-Ocg 1LItrprTOS, 7dr6ogS

KroS, &C ed. 1807, considers the payment of interest to to express respectively ”’ Interest of a third and follow from an obligation ex consensu, and to of a sixth part of the sum borrowed.” And as come under the general head of letting and hir-the Greek expressions denote the interest for a ing, locatio and conductio, inasmuch as interest year, although interest was, in fact, paid every may be considered as the hire paid for the tem-month, so the unciarium fenus, in like manporary use of money. The view given in the ner, may mean interest of a twelfth part, or text is that of Heineccius, III. 15, ~ 6, and of eight and one third per cent. per annum, alHugo, Geschichte des Rtm. Rechts, p. 230, though a part of it was at Rome also paid Ed. 9. monthly. 52 Tacitus, Annal. VI. 16. “

Duodecim tabu-63 See his chapter ”’ iiber den Unzialzinsfuss,”’ lis sanctum, ne quis unciario benore amplius in the third volume of his history, p. 61. exerceret.” Now, the uncia being the well-64 See Bckh, “

Staatshaushaltung der Atheknown twelfth part of the Roman as, or pound, ner,” Vol. I. p. 143. In Demosthenes’ time, and the heavy copper coinage of the old times twelve per cent. at Athens was considered low. being still the standard at Rome, unciariuum fo  65 Obligationes verbis contract.” Gaius, nus would be a very natural expression for ” in-III.

92. terest of an ounce in the pound,” that is, of a 5 Gaius, III.~ 93.

twelfth part of the sum borrowed. Thus, at

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CmPr. XIV.] THE LAWS OF THE TWELVE TABLES. 109 the term; it is clearly connected with dirsv&w, and denoted, probably, an oath taken with the sanction of certain peculiar rites, such as a stranger could not witness without profanation. We may be sure that spondeo was a word as peculiar to the patricians originally as it was afterwards to the united Roman people of patricians and commoners: there was a time when it could have been no more used in a covenant with a plebeian, than it was afterwards allowed to be addressed to a Greek or an Egyptian. II. The second division of obligations’included those which arise from out having wronged our neighbor, the obligation of making good, or Obliggtiee. x d. making reparation for, the injury which we have done. We may litot. Law of theft and injure either the person, &r the property, or, thirdly, the feelings law of and character of another. 1. Injuries57 to the person were divided by the twelve tables into three classes. a. If a limb or any member were irreparably injured, the law ordered retaliation, “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” unless the injured party chose to accept of any other satisfaction. /. If a bone were broken or crushed, the offender was to pay three hundred ases. y. And all other bodily injuries were compensated by the payment of twentyfive ases. The poverty of the times, says Gaius, made these money penalties seem sufficiently heavy; but twentyfive ases could never have been a very heavy penalty to the majority of the patricians; and such a law was well calculated to encourage the outrages which Kaeso and his associates and imitators were in the habit of committing against the poorer citizens. 2. Injuries58 against property, on the other hand, were visited severely. A thief in the night”5 might be lawfully slain; or by day,60 if he defended himself with a weapon. If a thief was caught in the fact, he was to be scourged and given over,6”

addicebatur, to the man whom he had robbed; and the lawyers doubted whether he was only to be kept in chains by the injured party till he had made restitution, probably fourfold, or whether he was to be his slave forever. Theft not caught in the fact was punished with twofold restitution.62 If a man wanted to search a neighbor’s house for stolen goods, he was to search naked,63 with only a girdle round his loins, and holding a large dish or platter upon his head with both his hands; and if he found his goods, then the, thief was to be punished as one caught in the fact. 3. But in no provision of the.twelve tables does the aristocratical spirit of their authors appear more manifest than in the extreme severity with which they visited attacks upon character, and in the large extent of their definition of a punishable libel. They declared it an offence for which64 a man should be visited with one of their heaviest 6T GaiUs, III. 223. precise penalty awarded to libels in the twelve 68 Gaius, III. 189. tables. The foundation of our knowledge on 59

Sei nox furtum factum esit, sei im occisit this subject, is the passage quoted by Angusjoure caisus esto.” Fragm. XII. Tabular. 10, tine (de Civit. Dei, II. 9), from the fourth book apud Haubold. of Cicero’s treatise, De EepublicA. ” Duodecim 60 Gaius, ad edictum provinciale, quoted in tabulae cum perpaucas res capite sanxissent, in the Digest, XLVII. De furtis, 1. 54, 2. his hane quoque sanciendam putaverunt, si 61

Gaius, III, 189. quis occentavisset, sive carmen condidisset, 62 Gaius, III, 190. quod infamiam faceret flagitiumve alteri.” And 63 Gains, III.

192, 193. The notion of this Augustine in another place, II. 12, referring to strange law was, that the man who searched, this passage, expresses what he supposed to be by being naked, and having his hands occu-its meaning in his own words thus: ” Capite pied, could not conceal any thing about him, plectendum sancientes tale carmen condere si which he might leave secretly in his neighbor’s quis auderet.” Augustine, living in an age house, and then charge him with theft. It is when capital punishments, in our sense of the curious that this extraordinary custom seems to term, were common, understands Cicero’s words have existed also at Athens. See the following as signifying the “punishmentof death.T” But passage from the Clouds of Aristophanes, v. in Cicero’s time, when the punishment of death 197, ed. Dindorf. was, so far as Roman citizens were concerned, unknown to the law, the expressions, capito Z SKPATEZ.-“IsL vv, KaTadov Oolltdreov. sancire, and res capitalis, generally as is well ZTPETIAAHZ.‘iKr/cn7cd ri; known, have a milder meaning, and caput reXEKP.

olV’,,eXia yvplvos ~celaoat rvolJugrat. fers to the civil rather than to the natural life of ZTPET. iXX’ obXiL opdawv zywy’ EiofpXollat. a citizen.

Thus Gaius says expressly, ” Poena manifesti furti ex lege XII. tabularum capitalis‘4 There have been various opinions as to the erat,” III. ~ 189.

And then he goes on, “akina

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110 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XFI punishments, involving a diminutio capitis, if he publicly uttered in word or writing any thing that tende tended to bring disgrace upon his neighbor. Cicero refers to this law, as proving the existence of something of a literature in the times of the decemvirs; and he contrasts it with the license enjoyed by the comic poets at Athens. -No doubt satirical songs are sufficiently ancient, and these were the literature which the decemvirs dreaded; the coarse jests which were uttered in the Fescennine verses, and which were allowed, as at a kind of Saturnalia, to the soldiers who followed their general in his triumph. But the effect of this law was to make the ancient poetry of Rome merely laudatory; and afterwards, when prose compositions began, they caught the same infection. If the poet Neevius could be persecuted by the powerful family of the Metelli, and obliged to leave Rome for no severer satire than his famous line, “Fato Romwe fiunt Metelli consules,” we may readily understand how little an humble writer, in recording the actions of a great patrician house, would dare to speak of them truly. And hence it has happened that the falsehood of the Roman annals is so deeply rooted, and that there is scarcely an eminent person in the Roman history who is spoken of otherwise than in terms of respect. It may be said that the license of Athenian comedy spared neither the innocence of Nicias, nor the pure and heroic virtue of Pericles. But has history, therefore,- done justice to their merit? And how different is the value of praise when given, on the one hand, by the free pens of the great historians of Greece, and on the other, by that uniform adulation which saw, even in Marius and Sulla, more matter for admiration than for abhorrence! All the offences hitherto enumerated were considered as private rather than Penalzlaw. public wrongs; and if they were in any case punished capitally, it was rather that the law allowed the injured party to take into his own hands the extremest measure of vengeance, than that the criminal suffered death in consequence of the deliberate sentence of the judge. But some offences were regarded as crimes, or public wrongs in the strictest sense; they were tried, either by the people in the comitia of centuries, or by judges, like the qumestores parricidii, specially appointed by the people.

Of this sort were’ parricide,6” liber verberatus addicebatur ei cui furtum fece-ment of a libeller involved in it a diminutio carat.” On the other hand, not to insist on Hor-pitis, and was thus, in the Roman sense of the ace’s line, “Vertere modum formidcine fustis,” term, capital. It may be, also, that the senCornutus, the scholiast on Persius, says extence “Lt fuste ferietur,” not being limited with pressly, “Lege XII. tabularum cautum est; ut the careful humanity of the Jewish law, was, fustibus feriretu~r, qui publice invehebatur,” when executed with severity, fatal; and that a &c. Yet still there is another question, for the man who had thus died under his punishment military punishment of the fustuarium was no-was considered as jure cesus.’ It might thus toriously often fatal; and it may be, that the be truly said, that libels were punishedccapitalexpression ”’ fusti felire,” included even a beat-ly, in the later sense of the term, if the punishing to death. Thus we read of Egnatius Metel-merit might, in fact, be made to amount to a lus, “qui uxorem fuste percussam interemit,” sentence of death, at the discretion of those Valer. Max. VI. 3, ~ 9, where the words fuste who inflicted it. But the law meant only, that percussam are, I think, meant to describe the the libeller should be beaten, and incur also a manner of the death, rather than a punishment diminutio capitis and this was sufficiently seinflicted previously to the capital one. And vere, when we find that the most grievous bodyet fustigatio, in the estimate of the later law, ily injuries, although visited by punishment in was a milder punishment than flagellatio; and kind, yet did not involve any forfeiture of civil the Digest calls it” fustigationis admonitio.”- rights. See Heineccius, IV.

18, ~‘7. bO Every one knows the famous punishment If we look to the later law, in order to learn of the parricide, that he should be scourged, what was then the punishment of libel, we then sewn up in a sack, in company with a dog, shall find that, according to Ulpian (Digest. De a viper, and a monkey, and thrown into the injur. et famosis libellis, 1. 5, 9), the libeller sea. But it is not certain that this was’a law was to be intestabilis, that is, he could neither of the twelve tables. Cicero mentions only the give evidence in a court of justice, nor make a sewing up of the parricide in a sack, and throwwill. And in the somewhat vague language of ing him into the river. And he merely says, the Theodosian Code, IX. 34, 10, libellers are ” Majores’ nostri supplicium in parricidas sinto dread ” ultorem suis cervicibus gladium.” gulare excogitaverunt,” pro Roscio Amerino, But “famosi libelli,” in the Theodosian Code, 25. It may have been a traditional punishmeans, perhaps, something different from the ment, older than even the twelve tables. So, libellous carmina of the XII. tables. again, nothing is known of the law of the On the whole, it is certain that the punish-twelve tables respecting murder. Pliny only

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CaAr. XIV.] THE LAWS OF THE TWELVE TABLES. 111 and probably all murder, arson,68 false witness,67 injuring a neighbor’s corn by night,“8
witchcraft,69 and treason.75 The punishment for these crimes was death, either by beheading, hanging, throwing the criminal from the Tarpeian rock, or in some cases by burning alive. This last mode of execution was adjudged by the twelve tables to the crime of arson: but a memorial has been preserved by the lawyers, confirmatory of the story already mentioned of the execution of the nine adversaries of the consul T. Sicinius, that there was a time when burning alive was the punishment of enemies and deserters.”’ The ” enemies” here meant could not have been merely foreigners taken in war, for their punishment could have found nd place in the civil or domestic law of Rome; they must rather have been those Roman traitors who, according to a form preserved till the latest period of the commonwealth, were solemnly declared to be enemies of their country. When we read of capital punishments denounced by the Roman law, and yet hear of the worst criminals remaining at liberty till the very end Lawof bail. of their trial, and being allowed to escape their sentence by going into voluntary banishment, we are inclined to ask whether the law meant to threaten merely, and never to strike an offender. Niebuhr has explained this seeming contradiction with his usual sagacity; it will be enough to say here, that although the Roman law, like the old law of England, did not refuse bail for a man accused of treason or felony,“2 yet it was by no means a matter of course that it should be granted; and ordinary criminals, at least in these early times, were, in the regular course of things, committed to prison to abide their trial, nearly with as much certainty as in England. And now we come to the constitutional law of the twelve tables, a subject almost of greater interest than the common law, but one involved Constitutional law. in much greater obscurity. Four or five enactments alone have been preserved to us: 1. That there should be an appeal to the people”7 from the sentence of every magistrate. 2. That all capital trials74 should be conducted before the comitia of the centuries. 3. That privilegia,75 or acts of pain and penalties against an individual, should be unlawful. 4. That the last decision76 of the people should supersede all former decisions on the same subject. 5. That the debtor whose person and property were pledged to his creditor, nexus,” and says that the turning cattle into a neighbor’s were bailable.” Blackstone, Vol. IV. p. 298. corn by night was punished by the twelve ta-The statute law has greatly restricted this powbles more severely than murder; insomuch as er, so far, at least, as justices of the peace are the offender was hanged up as devoted to Ce-concerned; for ” the court of King’s bench res, and so put to death. Histor. Natur. XVIII. may bail for any crime whatsoever, be it trea8. Of course murder was punished, and prob-son, murder, or any other offence.” Blackably with death; but the criminal was be-stone, IV. p. 299. This last doctrine, however, headed, we may suppose, and this would be was contested by Junius, in his famous letter considered as a less punishment than hanging. to Lord Mansfield, in which he contends, 60 Gaius, IV. ad Leg. XII. tabularum apud agreeably to the notion of the Greek and ReDigest. XLVII. Tit. IX. ~ 9. De incendio, man law, that no power cold bail a thief taken ruinA, naufragio. with the manner, that is, with the thing stolen 67 Aulus Gellius, XX. 1. upon him.

In cases of crimes committed by 68 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XVIII. 3. persons of high birth, like KeRso Quinctius, the 69 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XXVIII. 2.

being allowed to offer bail was a means of 70 Digest. XLVIII. Tit. VI. ~

2. Ad Le-evading justice; and so it was found to be in gem Juliam Majestatis. Englanl, before parliament interfered to amend I’ Digest.

XLVIII. Tit. XIX. De peunis, the common law. But humble and ordinary 1. 8, ~ 2. Hostes autemr item transfugse ea pce-criminals would not equally be allowed to profit nf. afficiuntur, ut vivi exurantur. Godefioy it. remarks that we never read of enemies so pun-by3 Cicero, de Republica, II. 31.

ished, and some have proposed to read hos-74 Cicero, de Legibus, III. 19.

tes, i. e. transfuge,” as if deserters alone were 75 Cicero, de Legibus, III. 19. intended. I believe that the common reading 76 Livy, VII. 17; IX.

34. is light, but that it relates, as I have observed, 77 See Festus in”

“Sanates.”-B’lt it is right to the Romans, who were declared enemies of to say that the sentence has been conjecturally their country. That a foreign enemy, how-restored by Scaliger, all the words actually reever, might be sometimes so treated, is not im-maining in the MS. being these, which I have possible, as is shown by the story of Cyrus’ printed in the Roman character: treatment of Crcesus. in xii nexo soluzto que 72,” By the ancient common law all felonies forti sanatique idemjus to.

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112 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIV he who remained the free master of both, solutus, should be equal in the sight of the law; that is, that the nexus should not be considered to be infamis. And the same legal equality is given, also, to the fortis and the sanas;8 terms which were merely guessed at in the Augustan age, and which it is hopeless to attempt to understand now. A sixth enactment is expressly ascribed to the last two tables, which Cicero described as full of unequal laws,79 namely, that between the burghers and the commons there should be no legal marriages; if a burgher married the daughter of a plebeian, his children followed their mother’s condition, and were not subject to their father, nor could inherit from him if he died intestate. W~ith no further knowledge than of these mere fragments, we can judge but The constittinl little of the tenor of the whole law; but yet, if we had the entire changes effected by the text of the twelve tables before us, we should probably find in decemvirs were proba. bly not contained inthe them0 no direct mention of the great constitutional changes which twelve tables. the decemvirs are, with reason, supposed to have effected. Their code of laws was the expression of their legislative, rather than of their constituent power; it contained the rules hereafter to be observed by the Roman people, but would not notice those previous organic changes by which the very composition, so to speak, of the people itself, was so greatly altered. These changes were wrought by virtue of that particular branch of their sovereign power, which was afterwards perpetuated in the censorship. When we The words in Italics, which complete the lines, ble. But, in the first place, the institution ol were supplied by Sealiger. It has already been the judices selecti, in later times, was intended mentioned, Chap. XIII. note 39, that the only to be a sort of representation of the whole peoexisting MS. of Festus has suffered from a fire, ple for judicial purposes; so that a condemnaby which half of many of the pages has been tion by these judges was final, and could not burnt away vertically from top to bottom, so be appealed against, like the sentence of a that every line is left mutilated. magistrate (Cicero, Philipp. I. c. 9). And, 78 Our whole knowledge of this enactment is again, there was taken out of the jurisdiction derived from the mutilated article in Festus, of the centuries all those cases of flagrant and on the word “Sanates.” The epitome of Pan-. evident guilt, which, according to the Roman lus gives a foolish etymology, and says that the notions, needed no trial at all. The difference Sanates were people dwelling above and below in the penalty affixed to the crimes of furtum Rome, who first revolted, but soon afterwards manifestum and nec manifestum, is very rereturned to their duty, and were called ” Sa-markable: in the former case, the thief was nates:” ” quasi sanata mente.” And the scourged and given over, addictus, to the party “Fortes,” according to Paulus, were “boni whom he had injured; in the latter case he qui nunqnuam defecerant a populo Romano.”

had only to restore twofold. So the man who This is all improbable enough; but Niebuhr attacked his neighbor in satirical songs, the says that the terms sanas and fortis must prob-murderer caught “red hand,” the incendiary ably be understood either of bondmen and free-detected in setting fire to his neighbor’s house men, or of those who had hitherto been vassals or corn, would, like the fur manifestus, be hurin the ancient colonial towns, and the colonists. ried off at once to condign punishment, and all It is impossible, in the present state of our trial would be held unnecessary. And the knowledge, to give any thing more certain on same summary justice would be dealt to the the subject. false witness and to the rioter. It is probable,‘1 Cicero, de Republica, II. 87. also, that the magistrates, using that large dis0o The twelve tables were extant dclown to the cretion which the practice of Rome gave them, latest age of Roman literature, and their con-would punish summarily crimes as to which tents were familiarly known. Had they con-the guilt of the accused was perfectly clear, tained, therefore, many regulations of a coneven though he might not have been caught in stituent cast, such, for instance, as related to the fact. When it is further remembered, that the powers of the several orders in the state, slaves and strangers were wholly subject to the to the enrolment of the burghers and their magistrates’ jurisdiction, and that there are clients in the tribes, the Roman writers could states of society in which crimes of a serious not possibly have showed such great ignorance description are extremely rare, it may be conof the early state of their constitution, as they ceived that the criminal business of the centuhave done actually. On one point, however, ries would not be very engrossing. on which the twelve tables appear to have However, if M.

Manlius was, as Niebuhr spoken expressly, the practice and the law in thinks, tried and condemned by the comitia of after times may seem to have been at variance. curia, and not by the centuries, it would have I allude to the famous provision, ” De capite been a direct violation of the law of the twelve eivis nisi per maximl.um comitiatum ne ferun-tables. But the story of Manlius, as we shall to,” a provision which appears to make the see hereafter, is too uncertain to be argued 2enturies the sole criminal court, and to require upon; and it will not, perhaps, be found nethat every ordinary felon should be tried before cessary to suppose that he was really sentenced them which we know was not the case, and by the curiae.

woudi have been, in fact, absurd and impossi

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CHAP. XIV.] POWERS OF THE DECEMVIRATE. 113 find the censor Q. Maximus”l annihilating at once the political influThey were effected by ence of a great portion of the people, by confining all freedmen to virtue of their censerian four tribes only; when we read of another censor, M. Livius,82
dis-po.wer. franchising the whole Roman people, with the exception of one single tribe, an exercise of power so extravagant indeed as to destroy itself, yet still, so far as appears, perfectly legal, we can scarcely understand how any liberty could be consistent with such an extraordinary prerogative vested in the magistrate. But if common censors in ordinary times possessed such authority, much more would it beenjoyed by the decemviri. They therefore altered the organization of the Roman people at their discretion; the clients of the burghers, and even the burghers themselves, were enrolled in the tribes; and the list of citizens was probably increased by the addition of a great number of freedmen, and of the inhabitants of the oldest Roman colonies, mostly the remains of the times of the monarchy. But whether it was at this time that the comitia of centuries assumed that form in which alone they existed in the historical period of Rome, whether the tribes were now introduced to vote on the Field of Mars as well as in the Forum, is a question not to be answered.

We may be more sure that whilst the patricians were admitted into the tribes of the commons, they still retained their own comitia of curise, and their power of confirming the election of every magistrate by conferring on him the imperium, and of voting upon every law which had been passed by the tribes or centuries. But Niebuhr has further conjectured that the decemvirs were intended to be a perpetual magistracy, like the archons at Athens in their original ConjetureNiebh constitution; that the powers afterwards divided amongst the mili-s tothe permanency of tary tribunes, the censors, and the qusestores parricidii, were to be the decemvirate. united in a college of ten officers, chosen half from the patricians, and half from the plebeians, and to remain in office for five years. And as the plebeians were thus admitted to an equal share in the government, the tribunitian power, intended specially to protect them from the oppression of the government, was no longer needed, and therefore, as Niebuhr supposes, the tribuneship was not to exist in the future constitution. Niebuhr’s conjectures in Roman history are almost like a divination, and must never be passed over without notice. But as the decemvirate, whether intended to be temporary or perpetual, was soon overthrown, it does not seem necessary to enter further into the question; and the common story appears to me to contain in it nothing improbable.

Its details, doubtless, are traditional, and are full of the variations of traditional accounts; still they are not like the mere poetical, stories of Cincinnatus or Coriolanus, and therefore I shall proceed to give the account of the second decemvirate, of the tyranny of Appius and the death of Virginia, not as giving full credit to every circumstance, but as considering it, to use the language of Thucydides, as being in the main sufficiently deserving of belief. Bl Livy, IX. 46. ~ Livy, XXIX. 37.

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CHAPTER XV. THE SECOND DECEMVIRATE-STORY OF VIRGINIA-REVOLUTION OF 305.

MdXcara E)Xa3el?,gSaLt FE rois vt5picacsat vosifsovras, d aorou’s, 4i 3v Ktfl6CtEV&tL rtyXdvov’LV a1 &is yap EaurTwv cXovtLv os ata QvP4v e7rtXELspovreg.-ARISTOTL1E, Politica, V. 11. THE first decemvirs, according to the general traditiont of the Roman annalists,..cem.irs ace elected governed uprightly and well, and their laws of the ten tables for a second year. Ap-were just and good. All parties were so well pleased, that it was pius Claudis. resolved to continue the same government at least for another year; the more so as some of the decemvirs declared that their work was not yet complete, and that two tables still required to be added. And now the most emintent of the patricians,2 L. Quinctius Cincinnatus, T. Quinctius Capitoline s, and C. Claudius, became candidates for the decemvirate; but the commons had little reason to place confidence in any of them; and might well be afraid to trust unlimited power in their hands. Appius Claudius, on the contrary, had been tried,and had been found seemingly trustworthy: he and his colleagues had used their power moderately, and had done their duty as lawgivers impartially; and such men were more to be trusted than the wellknown supporters of the old ascendency of the burghers. Appius availed himself of this feeling, and exerted himself strenuously to procure his re-election. But his colleagues, now becoming jealous of him, contrived3 that he should himself preside at the comitia for the election of the new decemvirs; it being considered one of the duties of the officer who presided at, or, in Roman language, who held the comitia, to prevent the re-election of the same man to the same office two successive years, by refusing to receive votes in his favor if offered: and most of all would he be expected to prevent it, when the man to be reelected was himself. But the people might remember, that within the last few years they had owed to the repeated re-election of the same tribunes some of their greatest privileges; and that then, as now, the patricians had earnestly endeavored to prevent it. They therefore elected Appius Claudius to the decemvirate for the second time, and, passing over all his former colleagues, and all the high aristocratical candidates, they elected with him four patricians, and, as Niebuhr thinks, five plebeians. The patricians4 were M. Cornelius Maluginensis, whose brother had been consul nine years before; M. Sergius, of whom nothing is known; L. Minucius, who had beern consul in the year 296, and Q. Fabius Vibulanus, who had been already thrice consul, in 287, 289, and 295. Kseso Duilius, Sp. Oppius Cornicen, and Q. Poetelius, are expressly said by Dionysius to have been plebeians; and we know of none but plebeian families of the first and last of these names, nor, with one single exception,5 of the second. The remaining two decemvirs were T. Antonius Merenda, and M. Rabulleius, and these we should judge from their names to have Livy, III. 33, 34. the Pcetelii, Antonii, and lRabuleii; and the paLivy, III. 35. trician branches of these families may have beLivy, III.

35. come extinct long before the time when their Livy, III. 35. Dionysius, X. 58. names became famous in history. Livy seems A vestal virgin of the name of Oppia is men-to have regarded the decemviri as all patricians; tioned in the annals of the year 271 (Livy, II. and if their names had presented a manifest 42), and she must have been a patrician. Nor proof of the contrary, he surely must have been is it improbable that there was, in the times of aware of it, the more so as the plebeian Duilius the decemviri, a patrician as well as a plebeian acts an important part in his narrative of this family of Duili, just as there were patrician and very period. plebeian Sicinii. And the same may be said of

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CUAP. XV.] THE SECOND DECEMVIRATE. 115 been plebeians also; but Dionysius distinguishes them from the three preceding them, and classes them with three of the patrician decemvirs, merely as men of no great personal distinction. Experience has shown that even popular leaders, when intrusted with absolute power, have often abused it to the purposes of their own tyranny, yet these have commonly remained so far true to their old principles Thir t ranny. as zealously to abate the mischiefs of aristocracy; and thus they have done scarcely less good in destroying what was evil, than evil in withholding what was good. But to give absolute power to an aristocratical leader is an evil altogether unmixed. An aristocracy is so essentially the strongest part of society, that a despot is always tempted to court its favor; and if he is bound to it by old connections, and has always fought in its cause, this tendency becomes irresistible. So it was with Appius: the instant that he had secured his election, he reconciled himself with his old party,6 and labored to convince the patricians that not their own favorite candidates, the Quinctii, or his own kinsman, C. Claudius, could have served their cause more effectually than himself. Accordingly the decemvirate rested entirely on the support of the patricians. The associations or clubs,7 Kmso’s old accomplices, were the tools and sharers of the tyranny even the better patricians forgave the excessess of their party for joy at its restored ascendency; the consulship, instead of being controlled, as the commons had fondly hoped, by fresh restraints, was released even from those which had formerly held it; instead of two consuls, there were now ten, and these no longer shackled by the Valerian law, nor kept in check by the tribuneship, but absolute, with more than the old kingly sovereignty. Now, indeed, said’ the patricians, the expulsion of the Tarquins was a real gain; hitherto it had been purchased by some painful condescensions to the plebeians, and the growing importance of those half aliens had impaired the majesty of what was truly Rome. But this was at an end; and by a just judgment upon their insolence, the very revolution which they had desired was become their chastisement; and the decemvirate, which had been designed to level all the rights of the patricians, was become the instrument of restoring to them their lawful ascendency. The decemvirate seems, indeed, to have exhibited the perfect model of an aristocratical royalty,9 vested not in one person, but in several; held They add two tables to not for life, but for a single year, and therefore not confined to one complete the tcde of single family of the aristocracy, but fairly shared by the whole order. Towards the commons, however, the decemvirs were, in all respects, ten kings. Each was attended by his twelve lictors, who carried not the rods only, but the axe,”’ the wellknown symbol of sovereignty. The colleges of ordinary magistrates were restrained by the general maxim of Roman law, “melior est conditio prohibentis,” which gave to each member of the college a negative upon the act of his colleagues.

But the decemvirs bound themselves by oath” each to respect his colleagues’ majesty; what one decemvir did, none of the rest might do.

Then followed all the ordinary outrages of the ancient aristocracies and tyrannies; insult, oppression, plunder, and blood; and, worst of all, the license of the patrician youth was let loose without restraint upon the wives and daughters of the plebeians.‘s Meanwhile the legislation of the decemvirs was to complete 6 Livy III. 36. Aliquandcliu equatus inter om-9

Decem regum species erat. Livy, III. 86. nes terror fuit; paullatihn totus vertere in pie-10 Cum fascibus secures illigatas praeferebant. berm ccepit. Abstinebatur a patribus, in hu-Livy, III. 36. miliores libiclinose crudeliterque consulebatur. 11 Intercessionem consensu sustulerant, is Patriclis juvenibus sepserant latera, eorum Livy’s expression, III. 36. Dionysius adds, catervae tribunalia obseclerant.

Livy, III. 837. iPKLa reld6vreg arS ttr7ra r r riXeE) X. 59.

These’Erarpsefav EcKarot auvvyov, ErtiXEy6plEVot roiS Opavv-oaths resembled those which were sometimes rderouv rov viev KatOa ai{tv abrois itrrtr7eLor0droev. taken by the ruling members of the Greek oli-:Dioenysius, X. 60. garcllhics: Kai r7 i1iPW KaK6vovg EOebat, PKa0
fovXsE6a 8 Primnores Patrum-lnec probare quae fierent, o r7r us J’X KaK6V.

Aristotle, Politica, V. 9. et credere baud indignis accidere; avide ruen-12 Dionysius, XI. 2. do acd libertatem in selvitutem elapsos juvare nolle.

I.ivy, III. 37.

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116 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP XV the triumph of their party. The two tables which they added to the former ten are described by Cicero as containing “unequal laws;” the prohibition of marriages between the patricians and plebeians is expressly said to have been amongst the number. Not that we can suppose that such marriages had been hitherto legal, that is to say, they were not connubia: and therefore if a patrician, as I have said, married the daughter of a plebeian, his children became plebeians. Still they were common in fact; and as the object of the first appointment of the decemvirs was, in part, to unite the two orders into one people, so it was expected that they would henceforth be made legal. It was therefore like the loss of an. actual right, when the decemvirs, instead of legalizing these marriages, enacted a positive law to denounce them, as if they intended for the future actually to prohibit them altogether. So passed the second year of the decemvirate. But as it drew near to its he lv to i close, the decemvirs showed no purpose of resigning their offices, They resolve to retain t:7 their power after the or of appointing successors. Whether it was really a usurpaemd of the year. tion, or whether they had been elected for more than a single year,‘3 may be doubtful; but it is conceivable that even in the former case the great body of the patricians, however personally disappointed, should have supported the decemvirs as upholding the ascendency of their order, ratherthan incur the danger of reviving the’power of the plebeians. At any rate, the government of the decemvirs seemed firmly established; and the outrages of themselves and their party became continually more and’ more intolerable, so that numbers of the people are said to have fled from Rome,‘4 and sought a refuge amongst their allies, the Latins and Hernicans. In this state of things, the foreign enemies of Rome proved again her best friends. Since the year 297 external wars seem to have been susThe Sabines and ZEquiansc evade the Roman pended, partly, perhaps, from the wasting effects of the great territory,. plague on the neighboring nations, partly because the Romans themselves were engrossed with their own affairs at home. But now we hear of an invasion both from the Sabines and the zEquians; the former assembled their forces at Eretum, 15 and from thence ravaged the lands along the left bank of the Tiber: the latter encamped as usual on Algidus, and plundered the territory of Tusculum which lay immediately below them. Then the decemvirs called together the senate, which, hitherto, it is said, they had on no occasion thought proper to consult. The high aristocratical party, headed by the Quinctii‘6
and C. Claudius, showed symptoms of discontent with the decemvirs for still retaining their power; L. Valerius Potitus and M. Horatius Barbatus‘7 were celebrated by posterity for following a more decided course, and upholding the general liberty of the Roman people. But the majority of the senate supported the decemvirs, and the citizens were called upon to enlist against the common enemy.18 One army, commanded by three of the decemvirs, was led out to oppose the Sabines at Eretum; another marched towards Algidus to protect the Tusculans; Appius Claudius, with one of his colleagues, Sp. Oppius, remained in Rome to provide for the safety of the city. 18 Nlo ouhr considers it as certain that the de-a magistrate of his office, ” abrogare magistracemvirs were appointed for a longer period than turnm, was accounted a most violent measure; a year.

Vol. II. p. 328. Eng. Transl. Other-it was to be resigned, and not wrested from him wise, he says, they would not have been re-by any other power. The senate ejected Cinna quired to resign their power, but interreges from the consulship; but Paterculus remarks would, immediately on the expiration of their on the act that ” hec injurlia homine quam exoffice, have stepped into their place. This, emplo dignior fuit.” - They were not disposed however, does not seem to follow. In peaceto proceed to such an extremity against the deable times, Appius Claudius the Blind held his cemvirs. censorship beyond the legal term of eighteen 14

Dionysius, XI, 2. months, in defiance of the 21milian law, and it 15

Dionysius, XI. 3. Livy, III. 38. does not appear that the tribunes, or any other 16 Dionysius, XI. 15. power, could actually turn him out of his office; 17 Livy, III. 39. he was only threatened with imprisonment if 1ivy, III. 41. he did not resign.’ Livy, IX. 34. To deprive

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CHAP. XV.] STORY OF VIRGINIA. 117 Both armies, however, were unsuccessful; and both, after having been beaten by the enemy, fled, the one to Tusculum, the other to the neigh-The Roman armies are borhood of Fidenee,‘g within the Roman territory. Here they re-beaten. mained, or here, at least, the story leaves them, till the tidings of the last outrage of the decemvirs’ tyranny aroused them, and showed them plainly that the worst enemies of their country were within the walls of Rome.

Appius Claudius”~ had stayed behind from the war to take care of the city.

He saw a beautiful maiden named Virginia, the daughter of L. Story of Virginia. Virginius,21 who was now serving as a centurion in the army sent Clasudies, clf.Aip against the ALEquians; and her father had betrothed her to L. Icil-Vrginia as his slave. ius, who had been tribune some time since, and had carried the famous law for assigning out the Aventine to the commons. One day as the maiden, attended by her nurse, was going to the Forum to school (for the schools were then kept in booths or stalls round the market-place), Marcus Claudius, a client of Appius, laid hands on her, and claimed her as his slave. Her nurse cried out for help, and a crowd gathered round her, and when they heard who was her father, and to whom she was betrothed, they were the more earnest to defend her from wrong. But M. Claudius said that he meant no violence, he would try his right at law, and he summoned the maiden before the judgmentseat of Appius. So they went before the decemvir, and then Claudius said that the maiden’s real mother had been his slave; and that the wife of Virginius, having no children, had gotten this child from its mother, and had presented it to Virginius as her own. This he would prove to Virginius himself as soon as he should return to Rome; meanwhile it was just and reasonable that the master should, in the interval, keep possession of his slave. The friends of the maiden answered, that her father was now absent in the commonwealth’s service; they would send him word, and within two days he would be in Rome. “Let the cause,” they said, “wait only so long.

The law declares expressly, that in all cases like this, every one shall be considered free till he be proved a slave. Therefore the maiden ought to be left with her friends till the day of trial. Put not her fair fame in peril by giving up a free-born maiden into the hands of a man whom she knows not.” But Appius said, ” Truly, I know the law of which you speak, and I hold it just and good, for it was I myself who enacted it. But this maiden22 cannot in any case be free; she belongs either to her father or to her master. Now as her father is not here, who but her master can have any title to her? Wherefore let M. Claudius keep her till L. Virginius come, and let him give sureties that he will bring her forth before my judgmentseat when the cause shall be tried between them.” But then there came forward the maiden’s uncle, P. Numitorius, and Icilius, to whom she was betrothed; and they spoke so loudly against the sentence, that the multitude began to be roused, and Appius feared a tumult. So he said, that for the sake of L. Virginius, and of the rights of fathers over their children, he would let the cause wait till the next day; “but then,” he said, “if Virginius does not appear, I tell Icilius and his fellows, that I will support the laws which I have made, and their violence shall not prevail over justice.” Thus the. maiden was saved for the time, and her friends sent off in haste to her father, to bid him come with all speed to Rome: and they gave security to Claudius that she should appear before Appius the next day, and then they took her home in safety. The messenger”3 reached the camp that same evening, and Virginius obtained leave of absence on the instant, and set out for Rome at the first Virginius comes to watch of the night. Appius had sent off also to his colleagues, Romefromthe army. praying them not to let Virginius go: but his message came too late. 1” Livy, III. 42. 22 In ea quae in patris manu sit, neminem esse 20 Livy, III. 44, et seqq. alium cui dominus possessione cedat. Livy, 21 Cicero calls him Decimus Virginius. De III. 45. Lepublica, II. 37.‘a Livy, III. 46.

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118 HISTORY OF ROMIE. [CHAr. XV Early in the morning Virginius,24 in mean attire, like a suppliant, led his daughs ter down to the Forum; and some Roman matrons, and a great.warding p.osession of company of friends, went with him. He appealed to all the peotelndeda.ter. Virgin-ple for their aid; “for this,” said he, “is not my cause only, but ikillshis daughter.

the cause of all.” So also spoke Icilius; and the mothers who followed Virginius stood and wept, and their tears moved the people even more than his words. But Appius heeded nothing but his own wicked passion; and before Claudius had done speaking, without suffering Virginius to reply, he hastened to give the sentence. That sentence adjuiged the maiden to be considered as a slave till she should be proved to be free-born; and awarded the possession of her in the mean while to her master Claudius.

Men could scarcely believe that they heard aright, when this monstrous defiance of all law, natural and civil, Was uttered by the very man who had himself enacted the contrary. But when Claudius went to lay hold on the maiden, then the women who stood around her wept aloud, and her friends gathered round her, and kept him off; and Virgininus threatened the decemvir, that he would not tamely endure so great a wrong. Appius, however, had brought down a band of armed patricians with him; and, strong in their support, he ordered his lictors to make the crowd give way. Then the maiden was left alone before his judgmentseat, till* her father, seeing there was no other remedy, prayed to Appius that he might speak but one word with her nurse in the maiden’s hearing, and might learn whether she were really his child or no. ” If I am indeed not her father, I shall bear her loss the lighter.” Leave was given him, and he drew them both aside with him to a spot called afterwards the “new booths,” for tradition kept the place in memory, and there he snatched a knife from a butcher, and said, “This is the only way, my child, to keep thee free,” and plunged it in his daughter’s heart. Then turning to Appius, ” On thee, and on thy head,” he cried, ” be the curse of this blood!” In vain did Appius call out to seize him: he forced his way through the multitude, and still holding the bloody knife in his hand, he made for the gates, and hastened out of the city, and rode to the camp by Tusculum. The rest may be told more briefly. Icilius25 and Numitorius held up the maiden’s body to the people, and bade them see the bloody work of Tumult in the city: the decemvirs are driven the decemvir’s passion. A tumult arose, and the people gathered mthe Forum. in such strength, that the patrician friends of their cause, L. Valerius and M. Horatius, thought that the time for action was come, and put themselves at the head of the multitude. Appius and his lictors, and his patrician satellites, were overborne by force, and Appius, fearing for his life, covered his face with his robe, and fled into a house that was hard by. In vain did’ his colleague, Oppius, hasten to the Forum to support him; he found the people already triumphant, and had nothing else to do but to call together the senate. The senators met, with little feeling for the decemvirs, but with an extreme dread of a new secession of the commons, and a restoration of the sacred laws, and of the hated tribuneship. The secession, however, could not be prevented.

Virginius26 had arrived at the camp, followed by a multitude of citizens in their ordinary.arches to Romo agind dress. His bloody knife, the blood on his own face and body,..cupies theAventi. and the strange sight of so many unarmed citizens in the midst of the camp, instantly drew a crowd about him: he told his story, and called on his fellow-soldiers to avenge him. One common feeling possessed them all: they called to arms, pulled up their standards, and began to march to Rome. The authority of the decemvirs was wholly at an end; the army entered the city; as they passed along the streets, they called upon the commonsto assert their liberties and create their tribunes; they then ascended the Aventine, and there, in their own proper home and city, they established themselves in arms.

LiAvy, III. 47, et seqq.‘1 LiDy, III. 48,49. Livy, III. 50.

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CHAP. XV.] RESTORATION OF THE TRIBUNESHIP. 119 When deputies from the senate were sent to ask them what they wanted, the soldiers shouted that they would give no answer to any one but to L. Valerius and M. Horatius.

Meanwhile, Virginius persuaded them to elect ten tribunes to act as their leaders; and accordingly ten were created, who took the name of tribunes of the soldiers, but designed to change it, ere long, for that of tribunes of the commons. The army near Fidenve was also in motion.7 Icilius and Numitorius had excited it by going to the camp, and spreading the story of the mis-The rmy.yfrom Fidena erable fate of Virginia. The soldiers rose, put aside the decemvirs joins it. who commanded them, and were ready to follow Icilius. He advised them to create ten tribunes, as had been done by the other army; and this having been effected, they marched to Rome, and joined their brethren on the Aventine. The twenty tribunes then deputed two of their number to act for the rest, and waited a while for the message of the senate. Delays, however, were interposed by the jealousy of the patricians. Had the senate chosen, it might, no doubt, in the fulness of its power, have Both armies, followed deposed the decemvirs, whether their term of office was expired th rlei.rdstothe Sade d teple retired to the aor no; as, long afterwards, it declared all the laws of M. Drusus cred Hil. to be null and void, and by its mere decree took away from L. Cinna his consulship, and caused another to be appointed in his room. But the patricians were unwilling to violate the majesty of the imperium merely to give a triumph to the plebeians; and the decemvirs, encouraged by this feeling, refused themselves to* resign. The commons, however, were thoroughly in earnest; and finding that nothing was done to satisfy them, they quitted the Aventine,28 on the suggestion of M.

Duilius, not, however, we may presume, without leaving it guarded by a sufficient garrison, marched in military array through the city, passed out of it by the Colline gate, and established themselves once more on the Sacred Hill. Men, women, and children, all of the plebeians who could find any means to follow them, left Rome also and joined their countrymen.

Again the dissolution of the Roman nation was threatened; again the patricians, their clients, and their slaves, were on the point of becoming the whole Roman people. Then the patricians yielded, and the decemvirs agreed to resign.29 Valerius and Horatius went to the Sacred Hill, and listened to the demands The decemvirs resign, of the commons. These were, the restoration of the tribuneship and the cmo…reand of the right of appeal, together with a full indemnity for the ttoRome. authors and instigators of the secession. All this the deputies acknowledged should have been granted even without the asking; but there was one demand of a fiercer sort. “These decemvirs,” said Icilius in the name of the commons, “are public enemies, and we will have them die the death of such. Give them up to us, that they may be burnt with fire.” The friends of the commons had met this fate within the memory of men still living, and certainly not for greater crimes; but a people, if violent, is seldom unrelenting; twenty-four hours brought the Athenians to repent of their cruel decree against the Mytileneans; and a few words from Valerius and Horatius, men whom they could fully trust, made the Roman commons forego their thirst for sudden and extraordinary vengeance. The demand for the blood of the decemvirs was withdrawn: so the senate acceded to all that was required: the decemvirs solemnly resigned their power, and the commons returned to Rome. They occupied the Aventine as before,30 and thither the pontifex maximus was sent by the senate to hold the comitia for the election of the tribunes; but they occupied more than the Aventine; they required some security that the terms of the peace should be duly kept with them; and accordingly now, as in the disputes about the Publilian law, they were allowed also to take possession of the Capitol.3 27 Livy, III. 51. so Livy, III. 54. 28 Livy, III. 52. 31 Cicero pro Cornelio, I.

Fragment. 29 Livy, III. 52, 53.

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120 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XV In the comitia on the Aventine ten tribunes of the commons were elected, Electionoftribunes and amongst whom were Virginius, Icilius, Numitorius, C. Sicinius, a of consuls. descendant of one of the original tribunes created on the Sacred Hill, and M. Duilius.

Then the commons were assembled on the spot afterwards called the Flaminian Meadows,32 outside of the Porta Carmentalis, and just be, low the Capitol; and there L. Icilius proposed to them the solemn ratification of the indemnity for the secession already agreed to by the senate. The consent of the commons was necessary to give it the force of a law; and so, in like manner, Duilius proposed to the commons that they should accept another measure, already sanctioned by the patricians, the election of two supreme magistrates in the place of the decemvirs, with the right of appeal from their sentence. It is remarkable that now, for the first time, these magistrates were called consuls,3” their old title, up to this period, having been prsetors or captainsgeneral. Consul signifies merely “colleague,” one who acts with others; it does not necessarily imply that he should be one of two only, and, therefore, the name is not equivalent to duumvir. And its indefiniteness seems to confirm Niebuhr’s opinion, that the exact number of these supreme magistrates was not yet fully agreed upon, and that the a6ppointment of two only, in the present instance, was merely a provisional imitation of the old prsetorship, till the future form of the constitution should be finally settled. Thus, as the commons had recovered their tribunes, so the patricians had again their two magistrates with the imperium of the former praetors, limited, as that of the prsetors had been, by the right of appeal; but the final adjustment of the relations of the two orders to each other was reserved for after discussion. Be that as it may, the form of the old government was once again restored, and two patrician magistrates Were elected with supreme power; but an important change was established, that these two were both freely chosen by the centuries, whereas one had hitherto been appointed by the burghers in their curise, and had only been appointed by the centuries afterwards The rei|it of the election sufficiently showed that it was a free one. The new magistrates, the first two consuls, properly speaking, of Roman history, were L. Valerius and M. Horatius; and the executive government, for the first time since the days of Brutus and Poplicola, was wholly in the hands of men devoted to the rights of their country rather than to the ascendency of their order. 82 Livy, III. 64.

and colonies of a later period, whose office was 33 Zonaras, VII. 19. It may be observed that analogous to that of the consuls at Rome, were the two supreme magistrates in the municipia called duumviri.

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CHAPTER XVI, INTERNAL HISTORY-CONSTITUTION OF THE YEAR 306-VALERIAN LAWS, AND TRIALS OF THE DECEMVIRS-REACTION IN FAVOR OF THE PATRICIANS 

CANULEIAN LAW-CONSTITUTION OF 312-COUNTER-REVOLUTION. “The seven years that followed are a revolutionaryperiod, the events of which we do not final satisfactorily explained by the historians of the time.”-HALLAat, Middle Ages, Vol. II. p. 458. WE read in Livy and Dionysius an account of the affairs of Rome from the beginning of the commonwealth, drawn up in the form of annals bscurityfthehoistory political questions, military operations, what was said in the sen-f this period. ate and the Forum, what was done in battle against the BEquians and Volscians, all is related with the full details of contemporary history. It is not wonderful that appearances so imposing should have deceived many; that the Roman history should have been regarded as a subject which might be easily and completely mastered. But if we press on any part this show of knowledge, it yields before us, and comes to nothing. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the story of the period immediately subsequent to the decemvirate.

What is related of these times is indistinct, meagre, and scarcely intelligible; but scattered fragments of information have been preserved along with it, which, when carefully studied, enable us to restore the outline of very important events; and these, when thus brought forward to the light, afford us the means of correcting or completing what may be called the mere surface-view contained in the common narrative. The lines, hitherto invisible, being so made conspicuous, a totally different figure is presented to us; its proportions and character are all altered, and we find that, without this discovery, while we fancied ourselves in possession of the true resemblance, we should, in fact, have been mistaking the unequal pillars of the ruin for the original form of the perfect building. The common narrative of the overthrow of the decemvirs omitted, as we have seen, the important fact that the commons in that revolution occu-constitution of the year pied the Capitol. It mentions,’

however, that the two popular 306leaders, Valerius and Horatius, were appointed the two chief magistrates of the commonwealth, and that they passed several laws for the better confirmation of the public liberty, without experiencing any open opposition on the part of the patricians. In fact, the popular cause was so triumphant that all, and more than all, of the objects of the Terentilian law were now effected; and a new constitution was formed, by which it was attempted at once to unite the two orders of the state more closely together, and to set them on a footing of entire equality. In the first place, the old laws for the security of personal liberty were confirmed afresh, and received a stronger sanction. Whoever, while The Valerian laws. presiding at the comitia,2 should allow the election of any magistrate, with no right of appeal from his sentences, should be outlawed, and might be killed by any one with impunity. This was the law proposed and passed by Valerius; but even this, as we shall see presently, did not content the commons: they required and carried a still stronger measure. A second Valerian law3
for-‘ Livy, III. 55. Dionysius, XI. 45. neret. Livy III. 55. Dionysius describes this 2 Livy, III. 55. law correctly. He calls it vdsov KXCh5EvTa raos’ Qucd tributim plebes jussisset populum te- {vrb ToV 6PotU reOTvras r rai5 tVXETKaas E’cXsclaits

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122 HtISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP XVI inally acknowledged the commons of Rome to be the Roman people; a Plebiscitum, or decree of the commons, was to be binding on the whole people: so it is expressed in the annalists; but Niebuhr supposes that there was a restriction on this power of which the annalists were ignorant; namely, that the plebiscitum should have first received the sanction of the senate, and of the assembly of the curie. It is, indeed, certain that the assembly of the tribes was not made the sole legislative authority in the commonwealth; what was intended seems to have been nothing more than to recognize its national character; its resolutions or decrees,4 where not directly interfered with by another power equally sovereign, were to embrace not the commons only, but the whole nation. In the same way, in the later constitution, the senate was not all-powerful; it could not legislate alone, and its decrees were liable to be stopped by the negative of the tribunes; but no one doubted that its authority extended over the whole people, and not over the members of its own order only. And this appears to have been the position in which the Valerian law placed the assembly of the tribes. Thus far we follow the express testimony of the annals from which Livy and Divisionof all the ma-Dionysius compiled their narratives. But we are warranted in moaeaiai, of bthe ddhr gmonwealth between the saying that the revolution did not stop here. Other and deeper patricians and commons. changes were effected; but they lasted so short a time, that their memory has almost vanished out of the records of history. The assembly of the tribes had been put on a level with that of the centuries, and the same principle was followed out in the equal division of all the magistracies of the state between the patricians and the commons. Two supreme magistrates,5 invested with the highest judicial power, and discharging also those important duties which were afterwards performed by the censors, were to be chosen every year, one from the patricians, and the other from the commons. Ten tribunes of the soldiers,’ or decemviri, chosen five from the patricians and five from the commons, were to command the armies in war, and to watch over the rights of the patricians; while ten tribunes of the commons, also chosen in equal proportions from both orders, were to watch over the liberties of the commons. And as patricians were thus admitted to the old tribuneship, so the assemblies of the tribes’ were henceforth, like those of the centuries, to be held under the sanctions of augury, and nothing could be determined in them if the auspices were unfavorable. Thus the two orders were to be made fully equal to one another; but at the same time they were to be kept perpetually distinct; for at this very moments the whole twelve tables of the laws of the decemvirs received the solemn sanction of the people, although, as we have seen, there was a law in one of the last tables which declared the marriage of a patrician with a plebeian to be unlawful. There being thus an end of all exclusive magistracies, whether patrician or Horntian and Doilian plebeian; and all magistrates being now recognized as acting in laws, the name of the whole people, the persons of all were to be revpoug, araoct KE~Oat Potaitocs Et’rovu, t’lv alrTl represent the whole nation, and not only one se’Xoas lUvaptv roS Zv rat ) XoXirotLv fKkXnltuas single order of men.

reOiaotEoVot, XI. 45. Now we know that at 5 Diodorus, XII. 25. this time laws passed by the comitia of centu-6 Diodorus, XII. 25. AlKa atpEiaOat drldpa’pXovs ries were not valid without the sanction of the payitaraS
sovra;5 EouvtaS rwv Karcl r6X ap px6vsenate, and, therefore, laws passed by the tribes Tro, ra” roironugs iJeXdpXEL otaovEi oisXaKla T @ ro must equally have required it. 7roXtLrl v nEOepiag. This description does not 4

Compare the difference between a resolution suit the tribunes of the commons, and the exor an order of the house of commons (although pression, r7s Tvv re roXcTrv IXeOepvaS instead of that body cannot legislate without the consent rS3 TroV iUpov XEu0oEptaS, seems to show that the of the house of lords and the king) and the patricians or burghers were intended rather canons of a synod of the clergy. A law which than the commons. should enact that ” quod clerus jussisset popu-7 Zonaras, VII. 19. He mentions the fact lum teneret” need not give to a synod the ex-without its connection; but it seems to me exclusive right of making laws; it would deserve tremely valuable, towards confirming the view its name if it merely placed it on a level with of all these arrangements which is given in this tile house of commons; if it empowerel it to history. s Diodorus, XII. 26. Livy, III. 57.

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CuAr. XVI.] IMPEACHMENT OF APPIUS CLAUDIUS. 123 garded as equally sacred.

Thus the consul Horatius proposed and carried a law which declared, that whoever harmed any tribune of the commons, any mdile, any judge, or any decemvir, should be outlawed and accursed;9 that any man might slay him, and that all his property should be confiscated to the temple of Ceres.

Another law was passed by M. Duilius, one of the tribunes, carrying the penalties of the Valerian law to a greater height against any magistrate who should either neglect to have new magistrates appointed at the end of the year,” or who should create them without giving the right of appeal from their sentence. Whosoever violated either of these provisions was to be burned alive, as a public enemy. Finally, in order to prevent the decrees of the senate from being tampered with by the patricians, Horatius and Valerius began the practice” Decrees of the senate of having them carried to the temple of Ceres on the Aventine, kept in the temple ot Ceres. and there laid up under the care of the mdiles of the commons. This complete revolution was conducted chiefly, as far as appears, by the two consuls, and’by M. Duilius. Of the latter we should wish to have The state offfairs w some further knowledge; it is an unsatisfactory history, in which not ripe for thin constiwe can only judge of the man from his public measures, instead tution of being enabled to form some estimate of the merit of his measures from our acquaintance with the character of the man.

But there is no doubt that the new constitution attempted to obtain objects for which the time was not yet come, which were regarded rather as a triumph of a party, than as called for by the wants and feelings of the nation; and, therefore, the Roman constitution of 306 was as short-lived as Simon de Montfort’s provisions of Oxford, or as some of the strongest measures of the long parliament. An advantage pursued too far in politics, as well as in war, is apt to end in a repulse. As yet, however, at Rome, the tide of the popular cause was at full flood, for the decemvirs were still unpunished, and the fresh memory of IhentofAp -univers.l Impeahment of Appiua their crimes excited a universal desire for vengeance. Virginius Cludius. Ho is cast singled out Appius and impeached him;” but Appius, with the prison. inherent pride of his family, scorned the thought of submission, and appeared in the Forum with such a band of the young patricians around him, that he seemed more likely to repeat the crimes of his decemvirate than to solicit mercy for them. But the tide was not yet to be turned, and Appius only hastened his own ruin.’ See this memorable law in Livy, III. 55. transferred to the tribunes of the soldiers, their “

Qui tribunis plebis, uedilibus, judicibus, de-name of judices, which they are allowed by cemviris nocuisset, ejus caput Jovi sacrum es-Livy himself to have borne afterwards (see also set, familia ad edeemt Cereris liberi liberieque Cicero, de Legibus, III. 4), took its origin from venurnm iret.” The different interpretations this period. given to the words “judicibus, decemviris,” in I may add, also, that the supposition that this passage, are well known. Niebuhr under-there were to be ten tribunes of the soldiers stands the latter nearly as I do, but the ” ju-and as many tribunes of the commons, would dices” he considers to have been the centum-agree with the otherwise puzzling statement of viri. But the order of the words is, I think, Pomponius, de Origine Juris, ~ 25, “that there decisive against this last notion; the centum-were sometimes twenty tribunes of the solviri never could have been mentioned between diers,”

for the two tribuneships must, under the udiles and decemviri. Whereas, according the constitution of 306, have so resembled each to my interpretation, the two old plebeian of-other in many important points, that they may fices are mentioned first, and then the two new easily have been represented as one magistracy. offices which they were thenceforward to share, 10 livy, III. 55. Diodoras, XII. 25. Livy thosq of judge or consul, and of decemvir, or says, “Tergo et capite puniretur;” Diodorus, tribune of the soldiers. Livy himself informs more correctly, iovrag KasracavOevat. The conus that there were some who had extended this nection of this law with that mysterious story law to the patrician magistrates, and who ex-of the burning alive of nine tribunes, for not plained the “judices” as I have clone; but he providing successors for themselves in their objects that judex, as applied to the consul, was office (see Valerius Maximus, VI. 3, ~ 2, and note the later title, and that the consul at this time 39 to chap. XIII. of this history), cannot b!lt: was called praetor. To which the reply is easy: strike every one; the clue, however, only gos,: that according to Zonaras, who derived his ma-far enough to excite curiosity, but will not en terials from Dion Cassius, the consuls ceased to able u i to satisfy it. be called praetors at this very time, and were 1’ Livy, III. 55. now first called consuls or colleagues; and it is’~ Livy, III. 56. very likely that their military power, being

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124 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XVI Virginius refused to admit the accused to bail, unless he could Drove”3 before a judge duly appointed to try this previous issue, “that he had not, in a question of personal freedom, assumed that the presumption was in favor cf slavery; in having adjudged Virginia to be regarded as a slave till she was proved free, instead of regarding her as entitled to her freedom, till, she was proved a slave.”

Appius dared not have this issue tried; he only appealed to the tribunes, the colleagues of Virginius, to save him from being cast into prison; and when they refused to interpose,‘4 he appealed to the people. The meaning of this appeal was, that he refused to go before the judge as Virginius had proposed, and submitted his whole case to the judgment of the people in the assembly of centuries. This he might legally do; but on the other hand, his refusal to have the question of fact, as to his conduct in the affair of Virginia,; tried before a judge, enabled Virginius to assume his guilt as certain. But bail was not to be given to notorious criminals: it was thus that Kseso had defrauded justice, and Appius would certainly fly from Rome before his trial; unless he were secured within the walls of a prison. Accordingly, Virginius ordered him to be thrown into prison, there to await the judgment of the people. But that judgment he never lived to undergo. Livy chose to believe that he His death before hia killed himself,‘5 despairing of the event of the trial. Another actrial. count implies, that it was the accusers, and not the accused, who feared to trust to the decision of the centuries; the tribunes, it was said, ordered him to be put to death in prison.” It would be painful to believe that so great a criminal, like the dictator Caesar, was not. executed, but murdered; yet the utter uncertainty of a trial before the centuries, where so many other points were sure to b’e considered besides the fact of the criminal’s guilt, and the strange latitude allowed by the Romans to their magistrates on the plea of the public safety, render it not improbable that the tribunes dealt with Appius as Cicero treated the accomplices of Catilina in the very same prison. Cicero’s conduct on that ” Ni judicem dices te ab libertate in servi-constitution, the act of one tribune could not tutem contra leges vindicias non dedisse, in vin-be stopped by another: in other words, that cula te duel jubeo.” Livy, III. 56. Niebuhr the ordinary rule of Roman law, “melior est rejects the reading “judicem dices” as nonsense, conditio prohibentis,” was, in the case of the and corrects “judicem doces.” I should lay lit-tribunes, at this time reversed. The words are tie stress on the authority of our MSS. of Livy, elav d oe &ttapxot p’. a~towvwoae rpba aXiXXousV, Kvwhich are all extremely corrupt; but in this in-poe Etvat rTv Avld rasov KEdlpEVOV PjI KWXsc’aOal, XII. stance the common reading is supported by the 25.

Wesseling and the other interpreters undersimilar expression “diem dicere”

and the term stand rov alvd prcovr Xp6vov, “in the interval,” “
condictio,” qua ” actor adclversario denuntiabat which seems to me to be neither good Greek ut ad judicem capiendum die XXX adesset.” nor sense. I am inclined to read rb ava preov Gains, IV. ~ 18. ” Ni judicem dices”

signifies, KEts,,ov, ” the matter that was between them:” ” Unless thou wilt give me notice to come be- ” If the tribunes should disagree, they had aufore a judge with thee, to have this issue tried.” thority in the matter that was disputed between For the matter of the transaction itself it may them, so as not to be restrained by the veto of be observed, that the judge would have had to their colleagues.” But I am not yet satisfied try simply the question of fact, whether Appius that this is the complete restoration of the pashad given vindicise, or possession, in favor of sage. slavery or not. And it was manifest that if the, 5 Livy, III. 58.

judge found against Appius on this issue, such 16 Dionysius, XI. 46. “

This,” he’says, was a verdict would have weighed strongly against the general opinion.” s prv,5 rev rosXXv;,r6him at his trial before the centuries. On the )oiqgs 4v. He must have copied this from some other hand, Appius wished to reserve his whole annalist, although the oldest annalist could case for the judgment of the centuries; for know as little as Dionysius of the public opinthere, as he well knew, the issue tried was far ion of the times of the decemvirs. Perhaps the less narrow, and the sentence would depend, statement came from the memorials of-the Claunot on the evidence as to a particular fact, but dian family, which would naturally be glad to on the general impression produced on the impute such a crime to the hated tribunes. minds of the audience by the speakers on either But that Appius was put to death in prison, is side; and to produce this impression the feel-also the account given by the author of the litings and interests of the judges were freely ap-tie work, ” De Viris Illustribus;” and it is sta-‘sealed to, so that the greatest criminal might ted positively as a point which was not doubted. tpae to be acquitted, if his eloquence and the And if this work was compiled, as Borghesi and influence of his friends were sufficiently pow-Niebuhr believe, from the inscriptions at the erful. base of the statues in the forum of Augustus, it 4 An obscure and corrupt passage of Diodo-may be supposed to express the prevailing opinruC would appear to intimate, that, by the new ion in the Augustan age.

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TIHAP. XVI.] THE PROSECUTIONS STOPPED. 125 occasion was sanctioned by Cato, and by the majority of the senate; and certainly the crimes of Appius were neither less flagrant, nor less notorious, than those of Cethegus and Lentulus. Another of the decemvirs, Spurius Oppius,‘l underwent a similar fate. He was particularly odious, because he had been left with Appius in Fate of the other dothe government of the city, while the other decemvirs were abroad cevirs. with the legions; and because he had been a faithful imitator of his colleague’s tyranny. His most obnoxious crime was his having cruelly and wantonly scourged an old and distinguished soldier, for no offence, as it was said, whatsoever. Bail, therefore, was refused to him also; he was committed to prison, and there died before his trial came on, either by the hands of the executioner or his own. The other decemvirs,“l and M. Claudius, who had claimed Virginia as his slave, were all allowed to give bail, or to escape before sentence was executed; and accordingly they all fled from Rome, and went into exile. Their property, as well as that of Appius and Oppius, was confiscated and sold at the temple of Ceres. From this point the reaction may be said to have begun. Vengeance having been satisfied, compassion arose in its place; the patricians seemed Reaction and division the weaker party, and any further proceedings against them were among the popular received with aversion, as a generous spirit cannot bear to strike an enemy on the ground. Accordingly, there seems from this moment to have been a division amongst the popular leaders; some thinking that they had done enough, and that in order to carry into effect the new constitution, nothing was so much needed as conciliation; while others believed that the patricians would never endure an equal government, and that it was the truest wisdom, as they had once fallen, to keep them down forever. As far as we can discern any thing of individual character amid the darkness of these times, the two consuls and M. Duilius were of the former of these two opinions; L. Icilius and L. Trebonius were of the latter. The state required, as Duilius thought, a general amnesty; and accordingly he declared”’ that he would stop any further political prosecutions; Duilimustopsall farther that he would allow no man to be impeached, nor to be thrown prosecutions. into prison as unworthy of bail, during the remainder of the year. With the next year, as he hoped, the new constitution would come into force, and then the liberty of the commons, and the peace of the nation, would be secured forever. But, as far as appears, the patricians observed that there were symptoms of a turn of the tide; and they hoped for better things than to be The consul take teo obliged to submit to the constitution of Duilius. The two consuls20
field,r tand are victorionu went out to battle against the Equians and the Sabines and re-tenuatehref,,uet thepeopa turned, asserting that they had won great victories, and claiming grant it to them. the honor of a triumph. No doubt the boast of victories in that plundering warfare was often very unsubstantial; but in this case the defeat of the Sabines, at any rate, seems to have been real and signal, for we hear no more of wars with them for a hundred and fifty years afterwards. The patricians, however, would grant no honor to consuls whom they regarded as traitors to their order, and the triumphs were refused. But on this occasion the consuls threw themselves into the hands of the more decided popular party; they summoned the people to meet in their centuries,2” and there L.

Icilius, the tribune, with the consuls’ sanc17 Livy, III. 58. of a tribune, and it is said that ”’ omnes tribus 18 Livy, III. 58. Dionysius, XI. 46. eam rogationem acceperunt.” On the other‘9 Livy, III. 59. hand, Dionysius says that the consuls summon20 Livy, III. 60-63. ed the people to the assembly, and the tribunes 21 It is not clear whether the vote in favor of are represented as seconding their representathe consuls’ triumph was passed by the centu-tion, rather than originating the question themries or by the tribes. Livy’s expressions are selves. 7ro0a A;s PovAg itarqyotpvPavre;, uvvayoe “tulit ad populum,” not “ad plebenm,” and pfwdvrwov abroan ra v leydpXwv. XI. 50. Theso “‘populi jussu triumphatum est,” not “‘plebis circumstances suit best the comitia ofcenturies, jussu.” Yet the vote is passed on the motion for the consuls could not enter the city without

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126 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XV1, tion, moved that the Roman people, by its supreme authority, should order the consuls to triumph. In vain did the patricians oppose the motion to the utnlmost: they had taken up an ill-chosen position, and the reaction here availed them nothing: the people ordered as Icilius proposed, and the consuls triumphed. This, if the consular Fasti may be trusted, took place in August. Again the Grolvwi.gstrengthofthe mist closes over the events of the remainder of the year, and we aristocratical party. can only judge of their nature by the result. The reaction grew stronger, and was increased by all the inherent strength of an aristocracy, the most powerful of all governments so long as it retains any portion of its original vigor. The patricians were determined that the new constitution should never take effect; that there should be no plebeian consul, and no plebeian tribunes of the soldiers: whether, if these points were carried, they might be forced also to have no patrician tribunes of the commons, they cared but little. To meet this determination, the bolder part of the leaders of the commons reProceedings of Duilius solved that the magistrates for the present year should be re-electat the election of new tribunes. ed. “If the patricians will not have the constitution,” they said, ” we will at least keep matters exactly as they now are; we have two consuls whom we can trust to the death, we have ten true and zealous tribunes, the leaders of our late glorious deliverance. If we retain these, the patricians will gain little by their resistance.” But here again the division in the popular party made itself manifest: the’consuls shrunk from the odium of re-electing themselves; Duilius was equally opposed to the re-election of himself and his nine colleagues. The lot for holding the comitia for the election of the new tribunes happened to fall to him. He resolutely refusedm to receive votes for any of the last year’s tribunes; and as many of the voters would vote for no other candidate, it turned out that only five candidates could obtain that proportion of suffrages out of the whole number,23 which was required to constitute the legal vote of a tribe. Accordingly, when the sun set, he pronounced the comitia to be dissolved, and as all elections were to end in a single day, he declared24 that the voting for tribunes laying aside their imperium, and so giving up have voted for no one, and there was no legal their claim to a triumph, and would necessarily return.

assemble the people without the walls. Besides, 24 There is much difficulty here in Livy’s narthe question of a triumph might be more justly rative. After saying that Duilius dismissed the decided by the people in the military array of assembly when only five tribunes had been their centuries on the CampuLs Martius than by elected, and that he would not go on with the the commons in their tribes in the Forum. If election on any future day, “concilium dinisit Livy’s expression, “omnes tribus rogationeml nec deinde comitiorum causa hliabuit,” Livy acceperunt,” could be relied upon, it would go goes on as follows, “satisfactum legi alebat, far to prove that the blending of the system of quue numero nusquam prefinito tribunis, modo centuries with that of tribes, in the comitia cen-ut relinquerentur sanciret, et ab iis qui creati turiata, that most perplexing question of Roman essent cooptari collegas juberet.

Recitabatque constitutional history, began at least as early as rogationis carmen,” &c. Now this evidently the time of the decemvirs, and probably accom-implies that Duilius referred to his own law, paniecl the admission of the patricians and their passed in this very year, by which it was made clients into the tribes. Fifty years later, in the a capital offence in any tribune to go out of ofyear 359, Livy speaks of the ”’ prserogativa tri-flee, or to let the year expire without providing bus,” and the “jure vocate tribus,” at the co-for the election of new tribunes to succeed him: mitia of centuries, without the least intimation and it appears that this very law had contained that the system implied in those expressions a clause, authorizing the elected tribunes, if was then of recent introduction. See Livy, fewer than ten, to fill up their number by choosV.

18. ing their own colleagues. Niebuhr, on the 22 Livy, III. 64. “‘Cum ex veteribus tribu-other hand, supposes.that this was a new law, nis, negaret ullius se rationem habiturum.” now proposed by Duilius; and he therefore 23 “1 Cum alii candidati tribus non explereant.“I reads, ” et ab is qui creati essent cooptari colr Explere tribun,” and ” explere centuriam,” legas jubebat,” referring the verb to Duilius, signify the obtaining such an absolute number instead of the common reading “
juberet’” reof votes out of the whole number contained in ferring to the former law. I think, however, the tribe or century, as was required to consti-that the grammar is against this construction, tute its suffrage: for if the votes of the tribes for if Livy had meant that Duilius brought forwere divided amongst so many candidates, that ward a new measure, which must have been no one had an absolute majority of the whole done at a particular time and place, lie would tribe in his favor, the tribe was held to have not have used the imperfect tenses ” aiebat” voted for no one. And so if no candidate had and ” recitabat,” but rather ” dixit”

ancld “rean absolute majority of the whole number of citavit.” And besicles, what likelihood is there tribes in his favor, the colnitia were held to that such a measure would have been passed by

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CHAP. XVI.] THE TREBONIAN LAW. 127 was duty finished; that the commons had elected no more than five, and that it must remain with these five to complete their own numnber. Accordingly, the five elected tribunes chose to themselves five colleagues, and two25 of these are expressly said to have been moderate patricians. We may safely conclude that all five were patricians, and that Duilius, hoping to prevail by moderation and conciliation, took this opportunity to carry into effect one part of the new constitution, in the confidence that, after this proof of honorable dealing, the patricians, for very shame, would be forced to fulfil the rest of it. In this, however, he was mistaken: they had no thought of fulfilling it, although by what means they were enabled to defeat it we can only conjec-The new constitutionis ture. Many years afterwards the patricians habitually set the Li-setaide. cinian law at defiance, and prevented the election of a plebeian consul, whenever the comitia were held by a magistrate devoted to their interests. But how could they persuade Horatius and Valerius, whom they had so recently insulted, to enter into their feelings, and when the day of election came on, to refuse all votes given in favor of a plebeian candidate? Perhaps the opposition of the patricians was so determined, that the consuls could not but yield to it; they might know, that although the centuries should elect a plebeian, yet the curiae would not confirm the election by conferring on him the imperium, or sovereign power; and, above all, they might feel that there was not in the mass of the commons so deep an interest in the point as could overpower even the most resolute resistance. Thus they abandoned the new constitution to its fate: there was no election of tribunes of the soldiers, nor of a plebeian consul; only two patricians of known moderation were chosen, Lars Herminius26 and T. Virginius Czelimontanus, men who were not likely to abuse their power, and so to make the victory of the patricians insupportable. Thus the hopes of Duilius were altogether disappointed, and the tribuneship had been laid open to the patricians for nothing. The most mod-The Trebonian law. erate men now saw that they had been deluded, and L. Trebonius, one of the five plebeians, was loud in his complaints of the treachery of the patricians. He then proposed a law,27
which enacted that the election of the tribunes of the commons should from henceforth be continued till the whole number of ten were elected. We read of no opposition to this law from any quarter; the patricians knew that they must abandon their hold on the tribuneship if they insisted on keeping all the curule offices to themselves, and probably they were anxious to leave no vestige of the new constitution in existence, lest the commons, while any part of it remained, should be tempted to demand the whole. Accordingly, all things returned to their old state: except that the two orders were rendered more distinct than ever by the positive law enacted by the decemvirs, and introduced into the twelve tables, by which intermarriage between them was strictly forbidden. It was impossible, however, that matters should so rest. The moderate consuls of the year 307
were succeeded by two men of a different A.U.LC. s8. A.C.444. character, M. Geganius Macerinus2s and C. Julius. Immediately patricians. the commons at the very moment when they in a single day, if there was a very great numwere complaining of Duilius’s conduct? Whereber of candidates. And thus the tenses aiebat as it is very conceivable that the clause appealed and recitabat are quite right; for they express to by Duilius had been inserted by him in his the defence which Dnilius was in the habit qf former law, perhaps with a view to the very ob-making, whenever his conduct was called in ject which he now proposed to gain by it; question.

namely, the securing the admission of some pa-25 These were Sp. Tarpeius and A. Aternius, tricians into the number of tribunes. And the the consuls of the year 300, who had passed the clause would then have been passed without law “De multe sacramento.” Livy, III. 65, suspicion, as it involved no new principle, as and Cicero, de Repub. II. 35. might seem intended merely to relieve the trib-22 Livy, III. 65. The consuls at this time came une presiding at the comitia from the fearful into office on the Ides ofDecember. Dionysiust penalty of the law, in a case in which he might XI. 63. Livy, IV. 37. be perfectly innocent; for it might not be in 27 Livy, III. 6,5. his power to secure the election often tribunes 28

Livy, III. 65.

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128 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XVL we hear again of the young patricians, as in the time of the decamvir Appius and of Keso Quinctius. The tribunes in vain endeavored to break up their organization, by impeaching the most forward individuals: the consuls took their part, and repressed, says Livy, the combination among the tribunes without attacking the tribunitian power in itself, and yet without compromising the dignity of the patricians. This can only mean that private influence, corruption, or intimidation, were used to deter the accusers from proceeding. Thus relieved from all restraint, the patricians went on more boldly; violence was constantly offered to individual plebeians; the young patricians, organized in their clubs, supported each other in their outrages: and even the tribunes, far from being able to protect their constituents, were themselves, in spite of the sacred laws, insulted and assaulted. The commons complained that they wanted tribunes like Icilius; that those whom they now had were no better than mere shadows. It requires, indeed, no ordinary man to act the part of popular leader against a powerful aristocracy. Even in the Forum the patrician clubs were now the strongest party; so great is the superiority of youth, high birth, training in martial exercises, and organization, over mere numbers. But when they left the Forum, the tribunes were but individuals, often advanced in life,29
with few slaves and no dependents; exposed in their own persons, and still more in their families, to all the insults and oppressions which wealth, rank, and their numerous clients, enabled the patricians to offer. Whose spirit would not be broken by such a trial? Who but the very boldest and firmest of men would have scrupled to purchase security in private life from such constant persecution, by withdrawing, in his public capacity, that opposition which, after all, he might feel to be hopeless? In the next year, a member of the Quinctian house was chosen consul, T. QuincA.

U. C. 309. A. C. tius Capitolinus. Accordingly, the story of the year is made up Q.3. c.nsulshi.p of T.t from some of the memorials of the Quinctian family, and is a mere leian lae. panegyric of the consul’s great qualities in peace and in war. The real history of the year is lost almost entirely; it is only said”3 that the irritation of the commons was continually becoming more violent, and that impeachments against individual patricians were constantly the occasion of fresh contests between the orders. Then the panegyric succeeds, and describes31 how the.Equians and Volscians broke in upon the Roman territory, and carried their ravages up to the very walls of Rome; how there was no one who went out to oppose them; and how the consul then called the people together, and addressed them so earnestly, and with such effect, that all internal quarrels were suspended, every man followed the consul to the field, and a great victory was gained over the enemy. So ran the story; but on this occasion it has not found its way into the Fasti, and the annals of the year contain no record of a triumph obtained by either consul. When Quinctius and his panegyric disappear from the state, the story of interA.

U. c. 310. A. C.442 nal disputes returns, and we find32 the Equians and Volscians, together with the Veientians and Ardeatians, again threatening Rome from without. But the new college of tribunes contained a man of resolution, C. Canuleius, and one, to all appearance, as wise as he was bold. He chose that particular reform out of many in which the commons felt a deep interest, and in 29 Shakspeare has truly seized this point in cannot expect to be distinguished as early in the character of the tribuneship, that it was life as those who are recommended at once to generally held by men of mature, or even of ad-public notice by the celebrity of their family. vanced age; the tribunes who oppose Coriola-Afterwards, when the tribunes, as in the case nus are elderly men, like the city magistrates of of the Gracclli, were chosenfrom families, which, modern times; andthe aristocraticalparty taunt though not patrician, were yet in the highest them with their want of strength: ” Aged( sir, degree noble, young men might be elected to hands off.” “Hence, rotten thing! or I will the office, for then they enjoyed all the aristoshake thy bones out of thy garments.” So the cratical advantages of hereditary distinction, alpopular leader of Syracuse, Athenagoras, com-though their office was still a popular one. plains of the youth and presumption of Her-30 Livy, III. 66. mocrates and his party. And this is natural; 31 Livy, III. 66.

for he who has to make his own way to fame,‘2 Livy, IV. 1.

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CHAP. XVI.] THE CANULEIAN LAW CARRIED. 129 which many of the patricians sympathized with them; the repeal, namely, of that law of the twelve tables which forbade connubia between the two orders. Many families must have felt the hardship of this law; for marriages between patricians and plebeians were common, and as they were not in the highest sense legal, the children followed the mother’s condition, not the father’s, and were not subject to their father’s power, nor could inherit from him if he died intestate. On this point there was a strong and general feeling; but the other nine tribunes,33 encouraged by their colleague’s boldness, attempted to revive the question of the admission of plebeians to the consulship, and they proposed a law,” that the consulship should be thrown open, without distinction, to the members of both orders.” Here, again, the family memorials, and the annalists who compiled their narratives from them, have left a blank in the story. No patrician made Tumelt on the Janiehimself remarkable, either by his magnanimous opposition to the lum.

The Canulean commons, or by his patriotic support of their claims; no memorable tale of outrage or of heroism was connected with these events, and thus they have been passed by almost unnoticed. But the short statement of Zonaras,34 “that many violent things were said and done on both sides,” acquires something more of distinctness from the mention made by Florus3S of a tumult which broke out on the hill Janiculum, headed by the tribune Canuleius. It seems, then, that the commons again took up arms, and established themselves, not, as before, on the Aventine or the Sacred Hill, but beyond the Tiber, on a spot easily capable of being converted into a distinct city. Thus pressed, the patricians once more yielded, and the law of Canuleius, to repeal the decemvirs‘36 prohibition of intermarriages between the two orders, was carried without further opposition. The success of Canmuleius encouraged his -colleagues; and they now more vehemently urged their law for opening the consulship to the com-Disputes about the lw mons. But this measure, it seems, excited a less general interest proposed by his coltengues for opening the in its behalf, while it awakened a yet fiercer opposition. We may consulship to the colsuppose, however, that the commons again occupied, in military order, either the Aventine or the Janiculum: for the patricians held meetings amongst themselves,37 which neither Valerius nor Horatius would attend; and C. Claudius, true to the spirit of his family, wanted to invest the consuls with full military power, and to commission them to attack the tribunes and the commons by force of arms. The Quinctii, however, so said their family accounts, would have no violence done on the sacred persons of the tribunes; and their milder counsels led to a temporary settlement of the contest. The consulship was to be suspended, but tribunes of the soldiers, with consular power, were to be appointed, and these might be either plebeians or patricians. What was to be the number of these tribunes is uncertain; three only were actually chosen; but Zonaras says,3S that according to the constitution of the office there were to be six, three to be chosen from each order. Perhaps the number three had reference to the three old tribes of the Roman people, the Ramnenses, the Titienses, and Luceres, and as these, in the division of the centuries, were now six, the sex suffragia, it may have been intended, in like manner, that after three patrician tribunes had been elected) three plebeians should be added to their number, like the first and second centuries of the three tribes, according to the system ascribed to the elder Tarquinius. At any rate, three tribunes were elected; and, as Livy declares; three patricians: A. Sempronius Atratinus, L. Atilius, and Cloelius.39 ” Livy, IV. 1. 37 Livy, IV. 6.. Dionysius, XI. 55. 34 IIoAti Kar’ A~X)eiv Kat /taoa A6iyma v rE Kae 38s VII. 19. Dionysius also agrees with him, #,rpnarrov. VII. 19. XI. 60. 3 Tertiam seditionem incitavit matrimonio-39 In the MSS. of Livy, this last tribune is rum dignitas, ut plebeii cum patriciisjungeren-called ” T. Celius,” or” Caelius,” or “

Caecilius;” tur. Qui tumultus in monte Janiculo, duce Ca-Ceecilius is the reading followed in Drakennuleio, tribuno plebis, exarsit. Florus, I. 25.

borch’s edition, but Bekker has adopted the 36 Livy, IV. 6. correction of Sigonius, “T. Cloelius.” In Dic,

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130 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XV] It is remarkable that two out of these three, Sempronius and Cloelius, were chosen Thedipute endsth friom families especially noted, twelve years4~ earlier, for their viol appoinnt of consuls lent hostility to the commons, and for the great strength of their bands of associated followers. This can hardly have been a mere accident: it looks as if the patricians had made every effort to bring them forward as efficient leaders in the struggle for which they were preparing. But again the details are lost; and Livy’s story41 merely relates that within three months the tribunes were called upon by the augurs to resign, from an alleged religious informality in their election; that there was then a dispute, whether other tribunes should be elected, or whether consuls should be appointed, as before; that T. Quinctius Barbatus, whom the patricians had appointed interrex, was on this occasion their leader; that the commons, feeling that only patricians would be elected, whether under the name of consuls or tribunes, thought it vain to dispute for nothing; and that thus, in the end, two consuls were appointed, L. Papirius Mugillanus, and another, Sempronius Atratinus, and all mention of the laws proposed by the tribunes of the commons was thus for several years laid to sleep. Another account42 represents T.

Quinctius, not as interrex, but as dictator, and Varying accounts of says that in no more than thirteen days he put an end to the conthese tranaotions. test, and then laid down his office. And as we find the record of a treaty concluded in this year between Rome and Ardea, it has been conjectured”3 that the patricians may have availed themselves of foreign aid in putting down the opposition of the commons. It is certain that in the following year we meet, for the first time, with the name of a new patrician magistracy, the censorship; and Niebuhr saw clearly that the creation of this office was connected with the appointment of tribunes of the soldiers; and that both belong to what may be called the constitution of the year 312. This constitution recognized two points: a sort of continuation of the principle of the decemvirate, inasmuch as the supreme government was again, New constitution. Cenors, qaurestors, and trib-to speak in modern language, put in commission, and the kingly unes of the soldiers. s powers, formerly united in the consuls or preetors, were now to be divided between the censors and tribunes of the soldiers; and, secondly, the eligibility of the commons to share in some of the powers thus divided. But the partition, even in theory, was far from equal: the two censors, who were to hold their office for five years, were not only chosen from the patricians, but, as Niebuhr thinks,44 by them; that is, by the assembly of the curiae; the two quastors who judged in cases of blood were also chosen from the patricians, although by the centuries. Thus the civil power of the old praetors was, in its most important points, still exercised exclusively by the patricians; and even their military power, which was professedly to be open to both orders, was not transmitted dorus the MSS. read KMvrog, for which the edit-the patricians resisted this, and finally, to simors have corrected Kosvrlos (Quintius, or Quinc-plify the question, got rid of their own tribunes tins). In Dionysius, the common reading is also, and returned to the government by conKXtrcsv zKEXdV, but the cognomen enables us to suls. correct this, and in the Vatican MS. it is rightly 40 Dionysius, X. 41. given KXeAov XtrsX6v.

Neibuhr says that L. 41 Livy, IV. 7. Atilius must have been a plebeian, because the 42 Lydus, de Magistratibus, I. 38. But the Atilii were a plebeian family, and the L. Atilius, infinite confusions of the passage in which this who was tribune of the soldiers in 356, is ex-statement occurs, render its authority extremely pressly called a plebeian by Livy himself. But questionable. this is merely the same question which occurs 43 Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 410, Engl. Transl. with respect to some of the decemvirs; and it 4 Vol. II. p. 394, Engl. Transl. It appears never can be shown that there were not some that in after times the election of the censors patrician houses of all those names, which, to was confirmed by a lex centuriata, as that of the us in the later history, occur only as plebeian, other curule magistrates was by a lex curiata. except where the plebeian family had been noble Both were, then, a mere formality; but Nie, in some. other city of Italy, and was not of Ro-buhr infers from this difference between the man extraction. Thus we do not hear of any censorship and the other magistracies, that the )atrician 2Elii or Cnecilii. It is more probable, former was originally conferred by the curiae, I think, that the three tribunes first chosen and confirmed by the centuries, as the others were patricians, and that three plebeians were were conferred by the centuries, and confirmed to have been added to their number; but that by the curiae.

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CHAP. XVI.] CONSTITUTION OF 312. 131 to the tribunes of the soldiers, without some diminution of its majesty. The newv tribuneship was not an exact image of the kingly sovereignty; it was not a curule office, and therefore no tribune ever enjoyed the honor of a triumph,45 in which the conquering general, ascending to the Capitol to sacrifice to the guardian gods of Rome, was wont to be arrayed in all the insignia of royalty. But even the small share of power thus granted in theory to the commons, was in practice withheld from them. Whether from the influence Itsinequality as re.ardof the patricians in the centuries, or by religious pretences urged ed the…..l. by the augurs, or by the enormous and arbitrary power of refusing votes which the officer presiding at the comitia was wont to exercise, the college of the tribunes was for many years filled by the patricians alone. And while the censorship was to be a fixed institution, the tribunes of the soldiers were to be replaced, whenever it might appear needful, by two consuls; and to the consulship no plebeian was so much as legally eligible. Thus the victory of the aristocracy may seem to have been complete, and we may wonder how the commons, after having carried so triumphantly the law of Canuleius, should have allowed the political rights asserted for them by his colleagues to have been so partially conceded in theory, and in practice to be so totally withheld. The explanation is simple, and it is one of the most zaluable lessons of history. The commons obtained those reforms which they desired, and they Causes why tis was desired such only as their state was ripe for. They had withdrawn quietly endured. in times past to the Sacred Hill, but it was to escape from intolerable personal oppression; they had recently occupied the Aventine in arms, but it was to get rid of a tryanny which endangered the honor of their wives and daughters, and to recover the protection of their tribunes; they had more lately still retired to the Janiculum, but it was to remove an insulting distinction which embittered the relations of private life, and imposed on their grandchildren, in many instances, the inconveniences, if not the reproach, of illegitimacy. These were all objects of universal and personal interest; and these the commons were resolved not to relinquish. But the possible admission of a few distinguished members of their body to the highest offices of state concerned the mass of the commons but little. They had their own tribunes for their personal protection; but curule magistracies, and the government of the commonwealth, seemed to belong to the patricians, or, at least, might be left in their hands without any great sacrifice. So it is that all thihgs come best in their season; that political power is then most happily exercised by a people, when it has not been given to them prematurely, that is, before, in the natural progress of things, they feel the want of it. Security for person and property enables a nation to grow without interruption; in contending for this, a people’s sense of law and right is wholesomely exercised; meantime, national prosperity increases, and brings with it an increase of intelligence, till, other and more necessary wants being satisfied, men awaken to the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind, the desire of taking an active share in the great work of government. The Roman commons abandoned the highest magistracies to the patricians for a period of many years: but they continued to increase in prosperity and in influence; and what the fathers had wisely yielded, their sons, in the fulness of time, acquired. So the English house of commons, in the reign of Edward III.,46 declined to interfere in questions of peace and war, as being too high for them to compass; but they would not allow the crown to take their money without their own consent; and so the nation grew, and the influence of the house of commons grew along with it, till that house has become the great and predominant power in the British constitution. 45 Zonaras, VI. 19. It might be a curious origin the inferior rank of the general who had question whether the ovation, or inferior tri-gained it, rather than the less importance of his umph, in which the conquering general walked military successes. on foot instead of riding in his chariot, was not 46 Hallam, Middle Ages, Vol. IIT. p. e. e I. first introduced in the case of a tribune of the 1822. soldiers; and whether it did not mark in its

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132 HISTORY OF ROME. r[CAr. XVIL If this view be correct, Trebonius judged far more wisely than M. Duilius; and the abandonment of half the plebeian tribuneship to the patricians, in order to obtain for the plebeians an equal share in the higher magistracies, would have been as really injurious to the commons, as it was unwelcome to the pride of the aristocracy. It was resigning a weapon with which they were familiar, for one which they knew not how to wield. The tribuneship was the foster nurse of Roman liberty, and without its care that liberty never would have grown to maturity. What evils it afterwards wrought, when the public freedom was fully ripened, arose from that great defect of the Roman constitution, its conferring such extravagant powers on all its officers. It proposed to check one tyranny by another; instead of so limiting the prerogatives of every magistrate and order in the state, whether aristocratical or popular, as to exclude tyranny from all. CHAPTER XVII. INTERNAL HISTORY

FROM 312 TO 350-THE CENSORSHIP, AND THE LIMITATION OF IT BY MAMERCUS

EMILIUS-SP. MAELIUS AND C. AHALA-THE QUESTORSHIP LAID OPEN TO THE

COMMONS-SIX TRIBUNES OF THE SOLDIERS APPOINTED, AND PAY ISSUED TO THE

SOLDIERS. ” What can be more instructive than to observe the first principles of right springing up, involved in superstition and polluted with violence; until, by length of time and favorable circumstances, it has worked itself into clearness?”-BURKE, Abridgment of English History, Book III. Chap. IX. THE period of nearly forty years on which we are now going to enter, so short a space in the history of a nation, so long to all of us individually, includes within it the whole of the Peloponnesian war. Whilst at Rome the very form and tendency of great political revolutions cannot be discovered without difficulty; whilst military events are wholly disguised by ignorance or flattery, and whilst we can as yet obtain no distinct ideas of any one individual, nor fully conceive the character of the national mind, Athens is, on the other hand, known to us almost in its minutest points of detail. During this time Thucydides was collecting materials for his history; and Herodotus, after having travelled nearly all over the world, was making the last additions to his great work in the country of his later years, on the southern coast of Italy. Pericles had passed all of his glorious life except its most glorious close; and Socrates, the faithful servant of truth and virtue, was deserving that common hatred of the aristocratical’ and democratical vulgar, which made him at last its martyr. The arts and manufactures of Athens were well known at Rome; and those names and stories of the wars of Thebes and Troy, which their dramatists were continually presenting afresh to the memory of the Athenians, were familiar also in the heart of Italy, were adopted into the language and traditions of Etruria and of Rome, and employed the genius of l The aristocratical hatred against Socrates is who politically are most at variance with each exhibited in the Clouds of Aristophanes; and other; and so the common dread and hatred of the famous speech of Cleon on the question of improvement, of truth, of principle-in other the punishment of the revolted Mytilensans, words, of all that is the light and life of man, shows the same spirit in connection with the has, on more than one occasion, united in one strong democratical party.

Political parties are cause all who are low in intellect and morals, not the ultimate distinction between man and from the highest rank in society down to the man; there are higher points, whether for good humblest. or evil, on which a moral sympathy unites those

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CHAP. XVII.] INTERNAL HISTORY. 133 Italian artists2 as of those of their original country. But, during the period at which we are now arrived, central Italy became acquainted, not with Athenian art only, but with the fame of the Athenian arms. The Etruscans heard with delight that a mighty avenger of their defeat at Cuma3 was threatening their old enemies of Syracuse; their cities gladly lent their aid to the invader; and the Romans must have heard with interest from their neighbors and friends of Caere or Agylla, how some of their countrymen had done good service in the lines4 of the Athenian army, and how they had been involved in that sweeping ruin in which the greatest armament ever yet sent out by a free and civilized commonwealth had so miserably perished. But the Romans knew not, and could not know, how deeply the greatness of their own posterity, and the fate of the whole western world, was involved in the destruction of the fleet of Athens in the harbor of Syracuse. Had that great expedition proved victorious, the energies of Greece during the next eventful century would have found their field in the west no less than in the east: Greece, and not Rome, might have conquered Carthage; Greek, instead of Latin, might have been at this day the principal element of the languages of Spain, of France, and of Italy; and the laws of Athens, rather than of Rome, might be the foundation of the law of the civilized world. The period now before us is marked, as far as Rome itself is concerned, with few events of great importance. The commons retained and asserted General character of those rights which were the best suited to their actual condition; the ensuing period. and thus became gradually fitted to desire and to claim others of a higher character. But for the first important advantage to their cause they were indebted to one of the wisest and best Romans of his time, who was at once trusted by them, and respected by his own order,- the patrician Mamercus _Emilius. Nine years after the institution of the censorship, Mamercus, having been A. U. C

321. A. C. named dictator, to oppose a threatened attack from the Etruscans, 431. proposed and carried a law5 to limit the duration of the censorship. That office, in its powers and outward splendor a lively image of royalty, was held for a term of five years. By the law of Mamercus iEmilius it was to be held in future only for eighteen months; and as the election of censors still took place only at intervals of five years, this magistracy was always in abeyance for a longer time than it was in existence. The censorship was an office so remarkable, that, however familiar the subject may be to many readers, it is necessary here to bestow some notice on it. Its original business6 was, to take a register of the citizens T ceorship and of their property; but this, which seems at first sight to be no more than the drawing up of a mere statistical report, became, in fact, from the large discretion allowed to every Roman officer, a political power of the highest importance. The censors made out the returns of the free population; but they did more; they divided it according to its civil distinctions, and drew up a list of the senators,7
a list of the equites, a list of the members of the several tribes, or 2

In specimens of Etruscan vases and frescoes by Pindar, Pyth. I. 140, and one of the helmets given by Micali in the atlas accompanying his taken from the enemy on this day, and sent as History of the Ancient People of Italy, and in an offering to the Olympian Jupiter, was disthose published more recently by the Antiqua-covered by an English traveller, in 1817, amongst rian Society of Rome, it is curious to observe the ruins of Olympia, and bears an inscription how many of the subjects are taken from the which tells its story, “that Hiero, the son of stcry of the siege of Thebes, and still more from Dinomenes, and the Syracusans, offered it to that of Troy. Many of the vases on which these Jove as a part of the Tyrrhenian spoil from Cusubjects occur are thought to be actually of ma.”

See Bdckh, Corpus Inscript. Grsec. tom. Athenian manufacture; others appear to be Ital-I.. 34. ian imitations; but both equally prove that the Thucydides, VII. 53. stories of the heroic age of Greece were well Livy, IV. 24. known in Italy, and the works of Grecian art 6 Magistratus, cui scribarum ministerinm Ous-. admired and sought after. todimeque et tabularurn cura, cui arbitrium for3 The naval victory of Cuma was wonby Hiero, mnle censendi subjiceretur. Livy, IV. 8. the brother and successor of Gelon, over the 7 See the accounts of the census in Livy, Etruscans, in the year 474 B.C. Olymp. 76-3. XXIV. 18, and XXXIX. 42, 44. See also ZoIt is commemorated by Diodorus, XI. 51, a-id naras, VII. 19.

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134 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XVI] of those citizens who enjoyed the right of voting, and a list of the aerarians, consisting of those freedmen, naturalized strangers, and others, who, being enrolled in no tribe, possessed no vote in the comitia, but still enjoyed all the private rights of Roman citizens. Now the lists thus drawn up by the censors were regarded as legal evidence of a man’s condition: the state could refer to no more authentic standard than to the returns deliberately made by one of its highest magistrates, who was responsible to it for their being drawn up properly. He would, in the first place, be the sole judge of many questions of fact, such as whether a citizen had the qualifications8
required by law or custom for the rank which he claimed, or whether he had ever incurred any judicial sentence which rendered him infamous:’ but from thence the transition was easy, according to Roman notions, to the decision of questions of right; such as whether a citizen was really worthy of retaining his rank, whether he had not committed some act as justly degrading as those which incurred the sentence of the law; and in this manner the censor gave a definite power to public opinion, and whatever acts or habits were at variance with the general feeling, he held himself authorized to visit with disgrace or disfranchisement. Thus was established a direct check upon many vices or faults which law, in almost all countries, has not ventured to notice. Whatever was contrary to good morals, or to the customs of their fathers, Roman citizens ought to be ashamed to practise: if a man‘0 behaved tyrannically to his wife or children, if he was guilty of excessive cruelty even to his slaves, if he neglected his land,” if he indulged in habits of extravagant expense,‘a or followed any calling which was regarded as degrading,‘3 the offence was justly noted by the censors, and the offender was struck off from the list of senators, if his rank were so high; or if he were an ordinary citizen, he was expelled from his tribe, and reduced to the class of the terarians.

Beyond this the censor had no power of degradation;14 for the private rights of Roman citizens could not be taken away by any magistrate; the sentence could only affect his honors, or such privileges as were strictly political. Yet the censors had a further hold even on the vararians, nor was their power Power of thecesors limited to the degrading a citizen from his rank; they could also over the property of the affect his fortune. It was their business, as I have said, to mnake Deople. a return of the property of every Roman, and of its value; for the taxes were levied according to this return, and here, too, its evidence was decisive. Every citizen presented at the census a detailed account of his prop” For instance, whether a man claiming to be-honorable tribe to a less honorable, but he could long to one of the tribes, followed any trade innot remove him from all the thirtyfive tribes, compatible with the character of a plebeian; all and so, in effect, disfranchise him. And yet retail trades being forbidden at this time to the the expression ” in aerarios referri,” is equivacommons. See Dionysius, IX. 25. lent to ” in Ceritum tabulas referri,” and this 9 This was called a “judicium turpe,”

and is a wellknown designation of the “civitas sine this was incurred in various actions, which are suffragio;” for Gellius says expressly, that “in specified by the lawyers: as, for instance, if a has tabulas censores referri jubebant, quos nots man were cast in an actio furti, or vi bonorum causa suffragiis privabant.” XVI. 13. It would raptorum, or tutele, or mandati, or pro socio, seem, however, that ” tribu movere,” and ” in &c.

See Gaius, Institutes, IV. ~ 182. And the “erarios referre,” were two distinct sentences disqualification thus incurred was perpetual, and that the former did indeed only imply a reand could not be reversed by the censors. See moval from a higher tribe to a lower (in which Cicero, pro Cluentio, 42. sense it probably is that Dionysius speaks of 10 Dionysius, XX. 3. Fragm. Mal. the censors as removing a man Ec 7-aS TrV ri1 A.

Gellius, IV. 12. owv O vXd;, XVIII. 22. Fragm. Mai); but that 12

Dionysius, XX. 3. See the wellknown sto-the latter was, for the time, equivalent to a jury of the censor Fabricius expelling Rufinnus from dicium turpe, and deprived a citizen of all his the senate, because he had ten pounds’ weight political rights; but it could be reversed either of silver plate in his possession. by the censor’s colleague, or by the next cen13 As, for instance, that of an actor. See sors. But the question concerning the aerarians Livy, VII. 2. like every other connected with the censors and 14 There is a remarkable passage in Livy, the centuries, is beset with difficulties, from our XLV. 15, in which C. Claudius, one of the cen-ignorance of the changes introduced at differsors in the year 584, is represented as denying ent periods, and thus being apt to ascribe to ons the right of the censor to deprive any man of time what is applicable only to another. his vote: he could remove him from a more

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COAP. XVII.] POWERS OF THE CENSORS. 135 erty; he stated the name”5 and situation of his landed estate, what proportion of t was arable, what was meadow, what vineyard, and what olive ground. He was even to number his vines and olive-trees, and to the whole thus minutely described he was to affix his own valuation. He was to observe the same rules with regard to his slaves, and undoubtedly with regard to his horses and cattle; for all these came under the same class of res mancipii. But the censor had an unlimited power of setting on all these things a higher valuation, and, consequently, of subjecting them to a higher rate of taxation. Further, we have instances16 of a censor’s calling for a return of other articles of property, such as clothing, jewels, and carriages, which were not returned in the regular order of the census; and on these he would set an extravagant valuation, to ten times their actual worth.’ Nor does it appear that in these cases there was any remedy for the person aggrieved: the censor’s decision was final. On the return of taxable property thus made, the senate, in case of need, levied a certain rate, ordinarily,l7 as it seems, of no more than one per thousand; but raised, as circumstances might require, to two, three, or four per thousand. For it must be understood that this property tax, or tributum, was mostly a war tax, and not a part of the regular revenues of the state: it might happen, therefore, that no property tax was levied, and in that case the censor’s surcharge, or overvaluation, would have been inoperative; but wars were so frequent, and the necessities of the state so great, in the early periods of the Roman history, that there was probably no one term of five years in which the tributum was not needed, and, consequently, no return of any censors which was not carried into effect. We are told also that the censors,18 on some occasions, not only put their own valuation on the property returned at the census, but also fixed the rate to be levied upon it: being sure in this, as in so many other instances, to have their acts sanctioned by the senate, if it did not appear that they had been influenced by any unworthy motives. In addition to this great power with regard to the taxes, or tributa, the censors had the entire management of the regular revenues of the Over the vectigalia, or state, or of its vectigalia.‘1 They were the commonwealth’s stew-property eof the omards, and to their hands all its property was intrusted. But these monwealth.

state demesnes were ample and various, including arable land, vineyards, pastures, forests, mines, harbors, fisheries, and buildings. The letting or farming of all these belonged wholly to the censors; the harbors including the portoria or customs, which appear to have been levied as a harbor, wharfage, and perhaps warehouse duty. They were thus a charge paid by the merchant for his use of the state’s property; and this is the proper notion of vectigal as opposed to tributum; that the first was received by the state in its capacity of landlord or proprietor, the latter was paid to it as a political society; the vectigal was given by the farmer, trader, or consumer, as the price of some commercial or economical benefit; the tributum was the citizen’s duty to his country. -

Besides all these sources of revenue, the state claimed a monopoly of salt;0 and the right of 15 See all these particulars in the ” forma cen-18 Livy, XXXIX. 44. Bualis,” given by Ulpian, de Censibus, lib. III. 19 Ut vectigalia popli Romani sub nutu atque quoted in the Digest, Tit. de Censibus, L. 4. arbitrio (censorum essent). Livy, IV. 8. (Lib. L. Tit.

XV.) 2o The salt works at the mouth of the Tiber 1G Livy, XXXIX. 44.

Ornarnenta et vestemn were said to have been first established in the muliebrem et vehicula…. in ceisum referre reign of Ancus Marcius. Livy, I. 33. Accordjussit:…… uti decies tanto pluris quam ing to Gronovius’

excellent note on the wellquanti essent estimarentur. known passage in Livy, II. 9, the government, 17 This was the proportion observed in the in the early times of the commonwealth, kept tribute imposed on the twelve defaulting colo-the sale of salt in its own hands, and did not nies in the second Punic war; Livy, XXIX. 15; farm it, as was usual with the other vectigalia. and Niebuhr concludes that it was the ordinary But it was farmed, and the price at which it was rate. “Three per thousand” is mentioned as to be sold was fixed by the censors in the year the rate fixed by Cato and Valerius Flaccus in 548, when M. Livius, one of the censors, actheir severe censorship in 568. Livy, XXXIX. quired from this very circumstance his nickname 44. Salinator. Livy, XXIX. 37.

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136 HISTORY OF ROME [Clap. XVI1 selling this most necessary article was also let by the censors on their own terms; for they fixed the price at which it was to be sold to the public. Why salt was thus considered as state property may probably be explained on the principle that the sea and the sea-shore belonged to no man; and in a country where the Whole supply of salt comes from the sea, it would not appear unnatural that the state should take into its own hands the sale of a commodity so universally needed, and which was derived immediately from that element which no individual could claim as his property. At any rate, salt was at Rome, as afterwards in France, an article that could be sold only by the government. With these almost kingly powers, and arrayed in kingly state, for the censor’s robe”1 was all scarlet, and not merely bordered with a scarlet band, elected by the curiae, and holding their office for five years, the censors might well seem too great for a free commonwealth, and the patricians, in retaining an office so important in their own exclusive possession, seemed to have more than compensated for their loss of a part of the military tribuneship, had the constitution of 312 been really acted on. It was a most welcome law, then, to the commons, when the dictator Mamercus iEmilius, in the year 321, proposed the shortening of the term of the ceniir’s office to eighteen months. Nor did the patricians refuse their consent to the measure; for there were many of their body who felt that a magistracy held for five years could be accessible only to a few individuals of the highest distinction; and that the mass of the patricians, no less than of the commons, would be subject to the power of the censors, without being ever able to exercise it themselves. The greatness of tho censor’s office has led me to depart a little from the chronological order of events, and to anticipate, by a few years, the regular mention of the 2Emilian law. I now go back to the year 312, and the appointment of consuls in the room of tribunes of the soldiers, immediately after the institution of this latter office. Consuls continued to be appointed for the next four years; but a memorable A. U. C. 315. A.

C. event which occurred in the year 316, again led to the election of 37.

sivScaribty,iaid ex-tribunes. The year 315 had been a season of great scarcity:2 a Bp. Melius. special officer had been named with the title of preefectus annone, or master of the markets, in order to relieve the general distress; but he had been able to do very little, and the suffering was so extreme that many of the poorer citizens threw themselves into the Tiber in despair. In this state of things,23 Sp. Mselius, one of the richest of the commons, and a member of one of the plebeian centuries of knights or equites, a man of large mercantile dealings, and having thus many connections in the neighboring countries, succeeded in making large purchases of corn, and issued it to the poorer citizens either at a very low price, or even gratis. He thus became exceedingly popular, and was followed by a great multitude24 whenever he appeared in the Forum; so that it was supposed that he would attempt to win a share of the consulship for the commons, and was likely himself to become the first plebeian consul.

The patricians, resolvpd to prevent this, procured the appointment of one of the most emiA. U. C. 316. A. C. nent of their order, T. Quinctius Capitolinus; but the danger 436. might be only delayed: the scarcity still continued, and MIelius was gaining fresh popularity every day: the harvest was still distant, and if the distress became greater, the mingled despair and gratitude of the commons might overbear all opposition, and the consulship’might be wrested from the patricians in spite of all their efforts. On a sudden25 it was announced that the old L. 21 Polybius, VI.

53. And a censor’s funeral, 23 Livy, IV. 13. Zonaras, VII. 20. funus censorium, used to be voted even to the 24 Zonaras adds, that he had actually providlemperors, as the most honorable and magnified himself with men to seize the Capitol, and cent of any. See Tacitus, Ann. IV. 15, and other strong positions in the city; for this must XII. 2, with Lipsius’ note on the first quoted be the meaning of the expression, E7ropi-aaro qpopassage. vpots. 22 Livy, IV. 12. 25 The senate, according to Zonaras, appoint’

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CHAP. XVII.] DEATH OF SP. TLAhLIUS. 137 Quinctius Cincinnatus had been named dictator by the consul T. Quinctius, in consequence of a meeting of the senate: the dictator had made C. Servilius Ahala his master of the horse; the patricians and the plebeian knights26 had occupied the Capitol and the other strong places of the city during the night, and in the morning the dictator appeared in the Forum, with the array of his four-andtwenty lictors, all bearing along with their rods those wellknown axes which denoted his sovereign power, while he was supported besides by his master of the horse, at the head of a numerous body of the younger patricians in arms. The dictator took his seat at his tribunal, and sent C. Ahala to summon Maelius to appear before him. As master of the horse, all the mem-He is utto death by bers of the centuries of equites were under his immediate authori-c. tha-a ty; and on this account, perhaps, he was chosen to deliver the summons. Maelius saw that his fate was determined; he endeavored to fly: his enemies charged him with snatching up a butcher’s knife,”’ and endeavoring to repel the knights who were pursuing him; under somewhat similar circumstances the treacherous murder of Wat Tyler was excused by his pretended insolent behavior to the king; and Ahala, as eager as Sir William Walworth to do Lis work, slew Melius on the spot, as guilty of disobedience. The old dictators justified the deed to the multitude: ” Maelius had aimed, not at the consulship, but at making himself king; the master of the markets had reported to the senate that secret meetings were held at his house, and arms collected. To meet this danger the senate had appointed a dictator; he had purposed to try Meelius, and judge him according to his guilt or innocence; but, as he had refused to obey his summons, and had resisted his own immediate commander, he had been lawfully slain.“29 Immediately afterwards, treating Malius as a convicted traitor, he ordered his house to be levelled with the ground; thus the story of the concealed arms could never be disproved, for no time was allowed to the tribunes of the commons to search the house: Muelius’

enemies might report whatever they pleased. The house stood under the Capitol, not far from the Mamertine prison,30-and the site of it was, for ages after, called the JEquimmelium, or the Meelian level. Such is the story which the traditions or memoirs of the Quinctian and Servilian families handed down, and which the annalists adopted on Th commons are intheir authority. Whatever ambitious designs Maelius may have had, dignant at his death. nothing, even according to the statement of his enemies, was proved against him; and his aiming at the consulship would have been a sufficient crime in the eyes of the patricians to tempt them to violent measures. On the other hand, charity was so little familiar to the Greeks and Romans, that the splendid munificence of Meelius is in itself suspicious; a time of great distress would make it easy for a man of his wealth to engage a band of armed adventurers, sufficient to put him in possession of the Capitol by a sudden attack; and then his popularity with the commons, and their hatred of the patricians, would have rendered him ample service. However, the commons were indignant at his summary death; and there is a dim and confused account of disturbances consequent upon it. Ahala ed L. Quinctius dictator before they left the in the sex.

suffragia, or patrician centuries of senate-house; and they did not separate till knights or cavalry. And so, after the death of evening, that the result of their measures might Mnlius, Ahala is described as returning to the not be prematurely known. The occupation of dictator, “stipatus caterva patriciorum juvethe Capitol during the night, and the appear-num.” Livy, IV. 14. ance of the dictator in the Forum early in the I7

Dionysius, XII. 1. Fragm. Mai. morning, ready to anticipate whatever might 2 Livy, IV. 15. have been the design ind us of 29 “l Jure cnsum pronuntiavit,” an expression the Doge of Venice Gradenigo, and the ener-which seems as technical and official as our getic measures by which he met and baffled the verdict of “justifiable homicide.” Suetonins conspiracy of the Querini and Thliepoli. See pronounces this same judgment on the murder Daru, B. VII. of Coesar, “Pregravant ceetera facta dictaque 26 Zo1naras says that the Capitol was secured ejus ut.. jure ceesus existimetur.” C. 16. Zia rT5r wltov. This may include the plebeian 30

Niebuhr Vol. II. note 928. Bunsen, Becenturies of knights, but it certainly applies schreibung der Stadt Rom. Vol. III. p. 4G, mainly to the patricians, who were all enrolled Varro, Ling. Lat. V. ~ 157. Ed. Muiller.

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138 IISTOKY OF ROME. [CHAP. XVII was obliged to leave Rome;31 and tribunes of the soldiers, instead of consuls, were chosen for the following year: thus much is intelligible; anrd the strength of the patricians in the comitia of the centuries, the immense power of the officer who presided at them, and perhaps, also, the natural leaning of the richer plebeians to the side of the patricians in a time of distress, when the contest was so likely to take the form of one between numbers and property, will sufficiently account for the election of three patricians, and, amongst them, of L. Quinctius, the son of the old dictator. But still the greatest number of votes was given to Mamercus JrEmilius, who had been chosen one of the quaestores parricidii along with L. Valerius a few years before, and whose popular dictatorship four years later we have already noticed.

There was, however, a much more mysterious story32 to be found in some of Story of L. Minucius the annalists from whom Livy compiled his history; that.L. Minucovnllgona,,dtofthis cius, that very master of the markets who is said to have given popular acts. the first information of the dangerous designs of Sp. Maelius, now, in the disturbances that followed, went over from the patricians to the commons, was chosen by the ten tribunes to be their colleague, thus raising the number to eleven, and in this office put a stop to the dissensions. Further, he is said to have brought down the price of corn at the end of three market days to one as for the modius,33
and to have become so popular, that the commons presented him, as their deliverer out of misery, with an ox with gilded horns to offer as a sacrifice;34 and a statue was erected in his honor without the Porta Trigemina, made out of the bronze or brass coins which the commons subscribed for the purpose, each man contributing an ounce, or the twelfth part of the as, which was still of the weight of a full pound. Dion Cassius has preserved a statement, that in these times many patricians Remarks on this story. did, in fact, go over to the commons; and it is remarkable, that from this time forward we meet with none but plebeians of the name of Minucius, although patrician Minucii have hitherto occurred several times in the Fasti. And it is conceivable enough, that if any man had wished so to degrade himself, as the patricians would consider it, he might have done it with no opposition on their part: nay, they would have at once cast him out from their body as an unworthy member; for the feeling of later times, when P. Clodius was adopted into a plebeian family to enable him to stand for the tribuneship, and when the aristocracy opposed it as only furthering the purposes of his ambition, could not exist amongst the haughty patricians of the fourth 91 Valerius Maximus, V.

3, ~ 2. And so Ci-be Pliny’s meaning. Then the sale of Mollius’ cero, de Republica, I. 3. Offensio commemo-corn at a cheap rate may have taken place in ratur Ahal:. He had just before spoken of the mean while; and if much corn had really “Camilli exilium,“I and immediately afterwards been hoarded, it would naturally cause a great mentions ” invidia Nasicee.” Now offensio is reduction of prices when brought suddenly into in itself an ambiguous term, and may signify the market in the spring, especially if there either exilium or invidia; either ” the misfor-was a promise of an abundant harvest in the tune or calamity of Ahala,” or “the odium coming summer. which he incurred.” But then this odium may 94 Livy mentions the ox, Pliny the statue, have induced him to leave Rome, as Nasica XVIII. 4, and XXXIV. 11, and both specify did, without undergoing any formal trial; and the place, extra portam Trigeminam, that is, on then, when his party was strong enough, he the bank of the Tiber, between the northeastmay have returned, according to the statement ern foot of the Aventine and the river. But as of the pseudo-Cicero pro Domo, c. 32, and this Livy’s’

expression, ” bove aurato extra portam may have been called a return from banishment Trigeminam est donatus,”’ is rather strange, his without much exaggeration. editors have proposed various corrections, 3 Livy, IV. 16.

amongst which, the most plausible was that of 33 Pliny, Hist. Nat. XVIII.

4. Livy describes Gronovius, who proposed to read’ bove et this, as if Minucius had sold at this rate the prato.” But a bos auratus, that is, auratis corn which Mselius had collected, and which cornibus, was given by the consul to P. Decius, had been confiscated after his death. But Pli-one of the tribunes of the soldiers, for saving ny’s expression, ” in trinis nundinis ad assem his army in the first Samnite war, Livy, VII.

redegit,” implies a more gradual, and, at the 37; and Niebuhr’s conjecture is simpler and same time, a more extensive reduction of the more probable, that the words “et statu6la lrice. If he proposed a law to fix a maximum, have dropped out in Livy’s text, between it would, of course, require three nundinte to ” bove aurato” and “extra portam Trigemi. elapso before it could be passed; and this may nam.”:

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CHAP. XVII.] DICTATORSHIP OF M. AEMILIUS. 139 century. On the other hand, Cicero treats these supposed passings over from one order to the other as mostly fictitious, and invented by plebeians, merely to claim for themselves kindred with an old patrician house of the same name. Nor is it probable that there could have been eleven tribunes at once; but it may be that L. Minucius so acted in concert with the tribunes as master of the markets,35 that he was said to be like an eleventh member of their college. The rest is sufficiently probable, that he proposed and carried, after the regular period of three market days, a law to fix the maximum at which corn shoutld be sold; and this, in a season of scarcity, when the evil is always attributed by the vulgar to the covetousness of corn-dealers, rather than to natural causes, would quite account for his popularity. In the following year, however, consuls were.again chosen, and continued to be so for four years, that is, till 321, when Mamercus._milius Dictatorship of Ma was appointed dictator. His law for abridging the duration of mercus. miliu. the censor’s office so offended the existing censors, one of whom was M. Geganius Macerinus, already known as a zealous partisan of his order in his consulship in 308, that they degraded him from his tribe,36 and rated his property in the census at eight times as much as its real value. The commons were so indignant that they called aloud for military tribunes instead of consuls; and for the next two years tribunes were accordingly elected; but still no plebeian was chosen, hor even any patrician distinguished for his attachment to the popular cause. Again, for five years, we find the names of consuls in the Fasti, from 324 to 328 inclusive. But the power of the commons was silently and The tribunes of tho healthily advancing; and within this short period we find two re-to by the senate to markable instances of it.

In 305,37 T. Quinctius, a son of the old oubmit to its nlathrio L.

Cincinnatus, and C. Julius Mento, were consuls. The.Equians tyand Volscians had united their forces, and assembled a great army at their usual position on Algidus. A pestilence, nearly cotemporary with that which visited Athens so fearfully in the early years of the Peloponnesian war, had prevailed in Rome at intervals during the last four years, and had carried off great numbers of the people. This gave a sense of weakness; and, to increase it, the consuls, attacking the enemy on Algidus, were defeated. Then the senate resolved to appoint a dictator; but the consuls, jealous at this implied censure on themselves, refused to obey the senate’s decree. Some party or family feuds, of which we know nothing, were most probably at work in this dispute; and it was proposed and carried, that the senate should call upon the tribunes for their aid.

Niebuhr thinks that the tribunes were called upon to propose the senate’s decree to the commons, that their acceptance of it might give it the force of a law. Livy’s story is, that the tribunes threatened to throw the consuls into prison, if they persisted in disobeying the senate. However this be, there was, at any rate, an important acknowledgment of the power of the commons, when the patrician senate appealed to them to enforce its authority over the highest patrician magistrates. Again, in 328, when a war with Veii was resolved on, the tribunes threatened’ to stop the enlistments of soldiers, unless the question of going to The qoestton of a was war were first submitted to the people in their centuries. The with Vti is sbmitted senate had considered its own decree sufficient; but it had taught the tribunes, by its own conduct, not to regard it so; and accordingly the war’ Three of the tribunes, we are told by Livy, the college, must have gone along with him in had taken no part in proposing the vote of the his measures as master of the markets, and his commons, which rewarded l!&Minucius with his acting in concert with them, perhaps, in some ox and his statue, but, on the contrary, con-instances, against the wishes of the patricians, tinued to revile him, as he had been the first may have given rise to the story. person to give information to the senate of the 3 Livy, IV. 24. supposed treasonable designs of Mvelius. But 37 Livy, IV. 26. the other seven, constituting the majority of 38 Livy, IV. 30.

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140 HIISTORY OF ROME. [CraP. XVI, was proposed in the comitia, and sanctioned by the votes of all the centuries. These were great constitutional points; another matter, deeply affecting indiA. U c. 325.

A. C. viduals, had been provided for by a law passed three years before, 427. Law for a fixed which fixed a definite money computation for the fines of39 sheep money commutation for the Snes of sheep and and oxen commonly imposed by the consuls for contempt of their oxen. jurisdiction.

That the payment of these fines in kind would be often highly vexatious, is obvious: and if the consul were allowed to fix his own rate of commutation, it might bear hardly on the delinquent, especially if, as is probable, the brass money was now beginning to rise in value, so that the old money price of an ox or a sheep would be now more than it was worth.

Cicero’s statement40 is, that the censors, L. Papirius and P. Pinarius, had imposed their fines in kind, and had thus seized so many cattle; that the consuls, to relieve the commons, fixed an easy rate of money commutation, at which the cattle might be redeemed. From the year 329 to 341 we have tribunes constantly, with the exception of A. U. C. 331. A. C.

only two years, instead of consuls. In 331, after a long interval,41 4:1.

New demand for we again hear of a call for an agrarian law; recent victories over agrarian law. the Volscians and Veientians had added, probably, to the amount of the demesne land; and the patricians who occupied it, either paid no acknowledgment for it at all, or if they did, it went not into the national treasury, but into that of their own order; the commons reaped no benefit from it. At the same time the commons had to serve at their own expense in war; and thus, as the poorer classes could ill support this burden, and could provide themselves only with inferior arms, the numbers and the efficiency of the regular infantry were much below what they might have been. Accordingly, the tribunes demanded that there should be a division of a portion of the demesne land amongst the commons; and that the occupiers of the remainder should pay their vectigal regularly, and that it should be devoted to the purpose of paying the soldiers. Here was a question in which the mass of the commons were interested; and it was likely that, during the continuance of this contest, the leaders of the commons would gain some of those points which they so longed for, but which were of far less importance, in the estimate of their followers, an admission to the higher magistracies. A favorable opportunity presented itself three years afterwards, in 334: when A. 34. A C. the patricians42 themselves proposed an increase in the number of 8.

The office ofthe the quaestores classici, those officers chosen by the centuries, and Zihrovn open to the quite distinct from the quaestores parricidii, whose business it was to receive all money paid to the public treasury, and to make all payments from it. This was an office of great trust and dignity, and was usually regarded as entitled to a place in the senate; the censors, in drawing out their list of that body, generally included in it the quaestors of the last five years. Now, as wars were beginning to be carried on on a greater scale, and were attended with more success than formerly, it was desirable to have two new quuestors to accompany the armies to the field, and to take charge of the plunder that might be gained, or of the lands that might be conquered. But the tribunes naturally demanded, that if the college of queestors were thus increased to four, two of them should be chosen from the commons. This the senate would not listen to, but proposed that the whole number should be taken indiscriminately from either order. When the tribunes refused to accept this compromise, having learned, from experience, that such a pretended free choice would always end in the exclusive election of patricians, the senate dropped the measure altogether. But the tribunes then brought it forward themselves, and, after long disputes, the compromise first proposed by the senate was accepted, s9 Livy, IV. 30. 41 Livy, IV. 36.’ De Republica, II. 35. 42 Livy, IV. 43.

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CIAP. XVII.] THE MURDER OF M. POSTUMIUS. 141 and the qusestorship, with its four places, was declared by law to be open alike to the patricians and to the commons. Here, again, the advantage gained by the commons as an order was great; but the individuals who had sown the seed did not reap the fruit; Dispute about the agrafor again, owing to the great influence of the magistrate who pre-i. Postumus rbyr sided at the comitia, none but patrician qusestors were chosen. soldiers. Still the commons waxed stronger: three years afterwards, in 337, an agrarian law43 was passed, by which fifteen hundred of the commons received allotments of two jugera a man out of the land lately conquered from the A. C. C.. A. C. people of Lavici. But a larger division of the demesne land was 4;5. demanded, and in a quarter where it could be enjoyed more securely; for the colonists sent to a frontier district would have continually to defend their new property with their swords, and men naturally longed for a division of the old demesne nearer home, which every new advance of the Roman boundary placed at a greater distance from danger. This, however, the patrician occupiers of this land were too powerful to permit; and the contest really A. U. C. 340. A. c. turned upon the disposal of the new conquests. Thus, in 340, 412. Bolae was conquered, a town of the zEquians, not far from Lavici; and the commons required that a portion of this new!y-won territory might, at least, be allotted to them. Even this was resisted, and by none more vehemently than by M. Postumius Regillensis,44 one of the military tribunes of the year 341. He oommanded one of the armies which were in the field against the Acquians, and, abusing his military power for political purposes, he threatened to visit upon his soldiers any display of feeling which they might have shown in favor of the proposed agrarian law. This excited universal indignation, which he heightened by refusing to his army any share of the spoil which they had won in recovering Bol0e from the,Equians. Open discontent then broke out, and Postumius, repressing it with extreme severity and the most merciless executions, provoked his soldiers to a mutiny, in which he was stoned to death. A crime so rare in the Roman annals produced its natural and just consequence, a reaction against the cause which appeared to be con-Proceodings in consenected with it. Consuls were chosen instead of tribunes of the q of.bfthismurder soldiers; and the commons, to whom the senate had given the choice of the judge45 in this cause, commissioned the consuls to inquire into the murder of Postumius, and to punish the guilty.

This choice was sanctioned by. the curie, and the judges thus appointed-fulfilled their task with moderation, so that the influence which the patricians had gained by the whole transaction was marked by the undisturbed election of consuls for three years following. But by that time the feeling had changed: the continued opposition of the patricians to any agrarian law seemed a more present evil than the murder of Postumius; and, while that crime had been duly punished, the injustice of the patricians was triumphant. It is dangerous to overlook a change in public opinion, and still more to try to force in its old direction the tide which is beginning to turn. The patricians carried the election of consuls for a fourth year in spite of a strong feeling of discontent; but the commons were so roused, that in spite of all ob-A. U. C. 346. A. C.

structions caused by the presiding officer, they elected, at the 406open comitia of quaestors,46 no fewer than three plebeians. Then the agrarian law was demanded more vehemently than ever, and three 43 Livy, IV. 47. ted by plebeians against the patrician order; 44 Livy, IV. 49, 50. it was then an act of moderation in the senate 45,, A plebe consensu populi, consulibus ne-to allow the offending party to name the judge gotium mandatur.”’ Livy, IV. 51. A remark-and the patricians,: to whom the injury had able passage, which Niebuhr, as may be sup-been done, would, at any rate, require that the posed, has not forgotten to appeal to, as a proof nomination should be submitted to them for of the identity of the populus in old times with their approval. the patricians. It would seem as if the murder 6l Livy, IV. 54. of Postumius was regarded as a crime commit

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142 HISTORY OF ROME LCHAP. XVII Contest abouttheagra. tribunes, all of the Icilian family, were conspicuous as the leaders rianlaw continued. of the commons. The year passed away in these contests, but the commons insisted on having tribunes instead of consuls for the year following; and this was consented to,4” but at the same time rendered nugatory by the condition annexed to it, that none of the tribunes of the commons of that year should be either’reelected to the same office, or be chosen tribunes of the soldiers. Thus those candidates being excluded whose claims were greatest, the patricians once more succeeded in defeating the plebeian candidates of less name, and in obtaining every place in the tribuneship for their own body. Two years afterwards came the issue of the contest. A truce, which had A. U. C. 49. A. C. been concluded for twenty years4s with the Veientians, was now 403. Pay granted to on the point of expiring; and as war, rather than peace, was supthe soldiers: number of tribunes of the sol-posed to be the natural state of things between two nations, unless some express treaty was interposed, so, at the end of the truce, hostilities would be resumed of course, unless either party wished to -ienew it, and was willing to purchase its continuance on the enemy’s terms.’ Rome now felt itself much stronger than Veii, for that town had been lately torn with internal discords, so much more violent and injurious than those of Rome, in proportion as there was less of equal law and of acknowledged rights. The Romans, therefore, put a higher price on the renewal of the truce than the Veientians would consent to pay; and both nations prepared for war. This was the moment for the commons to press their claims, and they refused to vote for the law unless something was done to satisfy theml. The patricians, looking forward to all the glory and dominion promised them by the expected conquest of Veii, or yielding to the power of justice, at last gave way. The vectigal,49 or tithe, due from the occupiers of the public land, was to provide pay for the soldiers; if this were not sufficient, it was to be made good by a tax br tribute levied upon the whole people, according to the census of every citizen; and six tribunes of the soldiers were henceforth to be elected annually; one of whom, as Niebuhr thinks, was always to be a patrician, and to perform the important judicial duties afterwiards discharged by the prmtor urbanus; the other five were to be elected indiscriminately from either order. At any rate, six tribunes were elected from this time forwards, and this increased number gave the commons a greater likelihood of seeing some of the places filled by men of their own body. And so it happened, in fact; but for this the commons had yet to wait five years more. Accordingly pay50 was issued to the soldiers, six tribunes of the soldiers were A. U. C. 350. A. C. elected, and in the year 350, about the end of the Peloponnesian 402. war, the Romans began their vast career of dominion by laying siege to the great Etruscan city of Veii. t Livy, IV.

55. 14, that it was usual, when a truce was nearly 48 Livy, IV. 58. Livy says, that in the year expired, to negotiate as to the terms on which 848
the truce had already expired; and, as it it might be renewed; and this, I doubt not, is had been concluded, according to his own ac-the true explanation of the negotiations that count, in the year 330, Niebuhr supposes that weint on during the years 348 and 349. it must have been intended to last only twenty 9 This is not stated by Livy; but as it had cyclic years, of ten months each. But we find been the great object insisted on by the tribthat hostilities did not begin till 350, and no unes, it is natural to suppose that it must either one will believe that the Romans allowed two have been granted, or at any rate promised. It years, in which they were, according to ancient was probably, however, paid very irregularly, notions, at war with Veil, to pass away without and hence the pay of the soldiers would, in attacking their enemy, because the Veientians point of fact, be provided chiefly out of the tax were involved in civil dissensions, and the Ro-or tributum. marls were too generous to take advantage of 60 Livy, IV. 59, 60, 61. their weakness. We see from Thucydides, V.

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143. CHAPTER XVIII, WARS OF THE ROMANS FROM 300 TO 864-THE 2EQUIANS AND

VOLSCIANSTHE ETRUSCANS-SIEGE AND CAPTURE OF VEII. Ta siev orsvS6ptvot, r’a SE XroXEoivTegS-0- 7reaPEKEvdaravTo rTa 7roE ltKa cKa 7rstrp6rsTpo EyEvovro-, psera K9ULvwwv TagS ArXEaTE 7rTOUtoEVOt.-THUCTDIDES, I. 18. THE
internal history of Rome in the first century of the commonwealth is obscure and often uncertain; nor can we venture to place full con-The foreign history of fidence in the details of events, or of individual characters. The certmain than.thedm. e family traditions and funeral orations out of which the oldest an-tie. nalists compiled their narratives were often, as we find, at variance with each other, and dealt largely in exaggeration and misrepresentation. Yet still, up to a certain point, they were a check upon one another; there were necessarily limits to falsehood, when fellowcitizens, whether individuals or parties, were the subject on which it was exercised. But with regard to foreign enemies, even this check was wanting. Every family might claim victories over the _Equians or the Veientians: there was no sufficient knowledge of chronology to make it evident that the story of one victory and one triumph was fatal to the truth of others; the accommodating annalists found room for ail. The account, then, of the early wars of the Romans cannot be trusted implicitly in its merest outline; we have the highest authority1 for saying that victories, and even triumphs, were sometimes purely imaginary; a year which is filled with pretended successes of the Romans may have witnessed nothing but their defeats. We are reduced, therefore, not only to an outline, but to one made up from such scattered and almost accidental notices, that scarcely any one but Niebuhr would have attempted, far less have been able, to restore it. Here, as well as in the domestic history, the work is almost done to my hands: it were endless to make. particular acknowledgments, when scarcely a page of this volume could have been written, had I not enjoyed the benefit of Niebuhr’s guidance. Our last notice of the foreign affairs of Rome stopped at that disastrous period, the end of the third century, when the AlEquians and Volscians, Advance of the R having overrun Latium, having occupied many of the Latin towns, power between 300 and and established themselves on the Alban hills, were in the habit of carrying their plundering inroads up to the very walls of Rome. And whilst the Opican nations were thus formidable on the side of Latium, the Sabines made frequent descents into the Roman territory between the Tiber and the Anio, and sometimes spread their ravages on that side also as far as the immediate neighborhood of the city. Such nearly was the state of things about the year 300, which may be considered as the lowest point of the Roman fortunes. The next sixty years witnessed a wonderful change; at the end of that period the Roman power had spread itself out on every side, and the Opican nations, the Sabines, and the Etruscans, had all given way before it. Of these three enemies, the Sabines were the soonest and most effectually repelled. After the year 306, when M. Horatius Barbatus, the deliverer of the Roman commons from the decemvirs’ tyranny, is pessfe with the san said to have gained a great victory over them,’ we read of them hines. 1 That, namely, of Cicero, in the often quoted 2 Livy, IIT. 62, 63. Fasti Capitolini. ” M. passage of his Brutus, c, 16. “Multa scripta Horatius, Ml. F. Barbatus, de Sabineis (trisunt in eis (scil. in mortuorum laudationibus) umphavit) Ann. CCCIV.

VII. K. Septembr.” plt facta non sunt, falsi triumphi,” &c.

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144 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XVIII no more during a period of more than a hundred and fifty years. A treaty of some sort or other must have followed this victory; perhaps it was only a truce for a certain number of years, which may have been continually renewed by mutual consent; the Romans having enough to do in Latium and in Etruria; and the Sabine youth finding a field for their enterprise, by joining their kinsmen the Samnites, who soon after this time began their conquests in Campania. Thus the Roman territory along the left bank of the Tiber was left in peace, and the frontier of the commonwealth on this side remained long unaltered, being bounded by the territory of the Sabine city of Eretum, which was situated about nineteen miles from Rome. A far more obstinate and varied contest was maintained against the z3Equians and Volscians. It is pretended that L. Valerius, the worthy col-.ns and vhoSciDS…i: league of M. Horatius, gained a great victory over them in the tatorship and victory 4 of A.

Postumius Tuber-year 306;3 but in 3094 we find them again overrunning the Roman territory, and advancing unopposed, for the last time, as far as the walls of Rome by the Esquiline gate. In that same year T. Quinctius the consul is said to have gained a great victory over them, and there is this evidence of its reality, that the Romans established a garrison on the enemies’ frontier at Verrugo;5 a place undoubtedly on the Alban hills, but whether on Algidus above Tusculum, or on the side of Velitrue looking towards Antium and the Volscian lowlands, seems impossible to be ascertained. From this time we hear of no general efforts of the zEquians and Volscians for fifteen years; but in 324 A. U. C. 324. A. C. the united armies of the two nations again appeared on Algidus,6 423. Land the Romans, in alarm, named A. Postumius Tubertus dictator to oppose them.

That the danger was great, is shown by the dreadful story related of A.

Tubertus,7 that he executed his own son for having engaged with the enemy without orders, although successfully. This rigorous observance of discipline always occurs in Roman history, when the Roman arms were engaged in any contest more than ordinarily hazardous; and thus in the great Latin war about ninety years after this period, the act of A.

Postumius Tubertus was again repeated in the more famous instance of T.

Manlius. On the present occasion the Latins and Hernicans aided the Romans with their whole force, and the Opican nations were completely defeated. A truce of eight years was concluded with the zEquians;8 the power of the Volscians, already shaken by their defeat,. was further weakened by civil dissensions; the advocates for peace-and war proceeding to the most violent extremities against each other. Eight years afterwards,9 the Opican nations, first the Volscians, and soon after 3 Livy, III. 61. the year 338, which with the Roman annalists 4 Livy, III. 66. is wholly devoid of military transactions, was a Livy, IV. 1. indeed devoid of Roman victories, but not of 6 Livy, IV. 26. defeats, or at least of disasters.

For Livy be7 Livy, IV. 29, mentions the story, but wishes gins the account of the next year with the not to believe it. It is related, however, by Dio-words, ” Non diutius fortuna AEquis indulsit, dorus, XII. 64; by Valerius Maximus, II. 7, ~ qui ambiguam victoriam Volscorumpro suA am6; and by Aulus Gellius, XVII. 21. Gellius plexi fuerant.” Now this “dubiavictoria” had also speaks of ” Posthumia” or ” Posthumiana been won in 332, and the expression, “non diimperia et Manliana,” I. 13, ~ 7; although it is ntius indulsit,” would imply that for a certain one of Livy’s reasons for not believing the story, time fortune had favored the ZEquians; in other that the common proverbial expression to de-words, that they’ encouraged by the Volscians’ note power arbitrarily and cruelly exercised was success in 332, took up arms themselves in the ” imperia Manliana non Postumiana.” following year, and were during that year mnas -

L8 ivy, IV. 30. ters of the, field. Thus it would seem that a 9 According to Livy, the ABquians had ob-truce of eight years, not cyclic, but common tained a truce for eight years, in the beginning years, had been observed from” 325 to 333; and of the year 325. IV. 30. Five years afterwards, the probability is, that the term originally in 330, they are described as suing again for an agreed upon was five years, to which three extension of this term, and obtaining an addi-were afterwards added; Livy’s mistake consisttional truce for three years. IV. 35. The re-ing in this, that he supposes the whole eight newal of hostilities is placed in the year 334, years’ truce to have been granted in 325, and Livy, IV. 43; but it may be concluded that it that the three years added in 330 were an ad 8hould in fact be placed a year earlier, and that dition to this number.

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CHAP. XVIII.] WARS WITH THE OPICAN NATIONS. 145 the ~zEquians, again renewed the contest. The seat of war was War on the. Equia, again on the frontier of the zEquians: and there, in the year 332, frlontaken. Lbcte Rnd the Romans received a check which we may not improbably conmans.

jecture to have been a serious defeat. But four years afterwards, in 336, the people of LaviciP are mentioned as joining the zEquians, and are spoken of as new enemies. Lavici, now La Colonna, placed on an isolated hill which rises as a sort of outwork at the northern extremity of the Alban cluster, had been one of the thirty Latin cities which signed the treaty of alliance with Rome in 261. Since that time the conquest of the Opican nations had separated it from its old confederacy, and it had possibly received an.Equian colony; but it had hitherto taken no active part against Rome. Now, however, it openly joined the fEquians; and its soldiers, after having ravaged the neighboring territory of Tusculum, encamped, together with their allies, in their old station on Algidus.

They gained one victory, but it was speedily retrieved by the dictator Q.

Servilius Priscus; Lavici was taken by the Romans,‘l its inhabitants massacred, expelled, or sold for slaves, and a large portion of its land was allotted to colonists of the Roman commons. This was a decided conquest, and gave the Romans possession of an advantageous post on their enemy’s frontier. The victory seems also to have shaken the ~Equian confederacy; for Bola, another town formerly belonging to the Latins, but wrested from them by the Opican conquerors, was allowed by the other ilEquian states to fall unassisted, and another important post was thus occupied by the Romans. This happened in the year 341.12 The tide had now turned, and as ill success loosened the bond which held the Opican nations and cities together, so victory strengthened the al-continned adcesa liance of the Romans, Latins, and Hernicans. In 342, this last the Romans, Latina. people recovered Ferentinum,‘3 one of their towns which the Volscians had formerly conquered; and as we hear, in two following years, of the ravage of the Latin and Hernican territory by the enemy, we cannot doubt that all the three confederate nations took an active part in the war. The Opicans, however, struggled vigorously; the frontier posts of Verrugo,‘4 and of the castle of Carventum,l5 were taken and retaken; but the./Equians suffered so much from having the seat of war so continually on their frontier, that in the rally of the Opican league, which took place in the year 347, the lowland Volscians appear at the head of the confederacy, and the gathering-place of the army was at Antium. For two years nothing decisive happened; but in 349,1B the Romans opened the campaign with their force divided into three small armies; and while one threatened Antium, and a second advanced upon Ecetree, laying waste the country on every side to divert the enemy’s attention, the third pushed direct for Anxur, or Tarracina, a most important place, standing at the very end of the plain of the Pontine Marshes, at the point where the Apennines of the Volscian highlands come down close upon the sea.

Tarracina,Ir a Tyrrhenian city, had been subject to Rome in the last period of its They take Tarra.ina, monarchy; immediately afterwards.it had been conquered by the or Anxur, Volscians, and from them received its name of Anxur; it is the natural gate of the country’round Rome on the one hand, and of Campania on the other, and its capture would restore the Roman boundary to the, extent which it had forIO Livy, IV. 45. been able to find any notice of the place in Westn Livy, IV. 47. phal’s work on the neighborhood of Rome. 12 Livy, IV. 49. 16 Livy, IV. 59. 3 Livy, IV. 51. 17

It was probably a town belonging to the 14 Livy, IV. 55, 56, 58. same race as Circeii and Ardea: that race which l” Livy, IV. 53, 55. The position of Carven-may be called either Tyrrhenian, Pelasgian, or tum and of its castle or citadel is wholly un-Sikelian, and which, in language and religion, known. Sir W. Gell puts it doubtfully at Rocca bore so close an affinity to the Greeks. TarraMassimi, a high point on the Volscian high-cina is mentioned as a dependent ally of Rome lands near Cora. Bunsen suggested to me the in the first treaty between Rome and Carthage, high ground of Monte Ariano, Mons Artemi-concluded in the first year of the commonsius, the southeastern summit of the Alban wealth. See Polybius,, III. 22. hills, which rises above Velletri. I have not 10

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146 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XVIII merly reached under the Tarquinii. Its distance from the front of the war probably put its inhabitants off their guard, and it yielded to the sudden attack of the Romans with little resistance.‘8 Twentyfive hundred of the inhabitants, who survived the storming of the town, were saved alive to be sold for slaves; and the two divisions which had covered the siege now came up to join their comrades, and the plunder of the town was given to the whole army without distinction. Two years afterwards the Romans invaded the Volscian highlands, and Artena. and Artena,Lg on the edge of the mountains, looking across to the Alban hills at the back of Algidus, was taken, and razed to the ground. From henceforward the attention of Rome, for some years, was so much engaged by her wars on the Etruscan frontier, that she would have been well contented to have maintained and secured her conquests from the i]quians and Volscians, without endeavoring to extend them. And now was proved the advantage of the occupation of posts on the enemies’ territory, and still more of the Roman system of colonies. When Anxur was taken, the neighboring Volscian cities seem to have concluded a truce with Rome to save their lands from ravage; at least, there was a free intercourse between them and the garrison, and the Roman soldiers were scattered20
over the neighborhood to traffic with Anxur is lost again by the inhabitants instead of plundering them. Advantage was taken a surprise. of this, and Anxur was surprised by a sudden attack and recovered. But, as the Volscians are not charged with perfidy, we must either suppose that the assailants came from some of the more distant cities, which had not been included in the truce, or that the truce itself was concluded only for periods of a few days,2’ and continued by successive renewals; and that, at the end of one of these periods, the Volscians had refused to renew it, whilst the Romans had fully depended on its continuance. This was in 353, and two years afterwards Anxur was again recovered by a fresh surprise, the BuLat again recovered. Volscians22 neglecting to guard their walls whilst keeping a festival. It was recovered just in time; for as the war of the Romans with Veil and the neighboring cities still continued, the Opican nations seem to have renewed their league, and made another combined effort to retrieve their losses. In 358,23 the VoIscians were employed in besieging Anxur, while the _/Equians were surrounding Lavici: had ndt the Romans possessed these two posts, the enemy might have again spread ravage over their whole territory, at a moment when a force could ill have been spared to check them. As it was, Anxur and Lavici were left to their own resources, and to the aid of the Latins and Hernicans, who, at this critical period, seem to have sustained the whole weight of the struggle with the Opican nations, for all the Roman armies were engaged elsewhere. Whether Lavici was taken or not, we know not; but in the next year Veii fell, and then the.Equians and Volscians solicited and obtained a truce.24 The Romans availed themselves of’ it to establish a new colony The Romans establish. a colony at Vitellia, on in the country conquered from the ~Equians, at Vitellia, 2 not far the Equian frontier. from Preneste, on the opposite side of the great gap or break by which the chain of the Apennines is there interrupted. They had found the benefit of their colony at Lavici; and this more distant settlement was made 1B Livy, IV. 59. with Athens, when Lacedsemon concluded the 19 Livy, IV. 61. The present Monte Fortino, peace of Nicias. See Thucydides, V. 26, 32.

according to Sir W. Gell; and according to 2 Livy, V. 13. Westphal also, if Artena, Ortona, and Virtona 23 Livy, V. 16. be, as is probable, only one and the same place. 24 Livy, V. 23. I learn, from a review of this history in the 25 Livy, V. 24, 29. Sir W. Gell places Vitellia Dublin Review, No. XIII., that Nibby fixes the at Valmonte, in the situation described in the exact site of Artena att a place not more than a text.

Westphal puts it, but doubtfully, immemile on the southeast of Monte Fortino, where diately under the northeast extremity of the the lremains of a polygonal wall on a high level Alban hills, on that shoulder of ground, raised ispot are still visible. above the ordinary level of the Campagna, which.O Livy, V. 8. connects the roots of the, Alban hills with the 1 Like the ten days’ truce, which was all that Apennines. the Bceotians could be persuaded to agree to

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CHfAP. XVIII.] WARS WITH THE VOLSCIANS, ETC. 147 proportionably stronger; three thousand colonists were sent to occupy it instead of fifteen hundred. But the 2Equians were more roused than daunted by this occupation of Vitellia, as they had already been taught the importance of such colonies. We hear nothing of the Volscians, so that they probably remained at peace; but the Equians, though alone, dislodged the Romans Th.e Equiana destroy from their old post of Verrugo,26 and in the following year sur-it. prised the new colony of Vitellia. Four years after the fall of Veii, the whole force of Rome, under both consuls, was once more employed against the iEquians on the old battle-ground of Algidus;t1 which clearly shows that the ZEquian frontier had again advanced, and that Vitellia and its territory were lost to Rome. An easy victory is, indeed, claimed for the Roman armies in thisided u campaign, but the contest was not over, and its issue was still un-tollhe time of the Gauldecided, when in the next year the storm of the Gaulish invasion broke upon Latium, and crushed both of the contending parties; the Romans, however, for a short time only, the iEquians forever. Thus in her long contest with the Opican, nations, Rome had advanced, indeed, from her depressed state at the beginning of the century, yet had Results of thie g by no means reduced her enemies to submission. The occupa-content. tion of’Anxur on the side of the Volscians, and of Lavici and Bola on the ~Equian.frontier, was-an important advantage; but the attempt to effect a settlement within the line of the -Equian highlands had been utterly defeated, and the.Equians, instead of defending their own country, were still able to fix the war on what may be called their advanced post of observation, the Alban hills; and from their advantage ground of Algidus, could still overhang Tusculum, and threaten devastation to the whole territory of Rome. It was in the opposite quar telr, on the right bank of the Tiber, that the Romans made the first important addition to their dominion, and, for the first time, since the days of their kings, increased their power by an accession of new citizens from the population of the countries which they conquered. We have seen that in the year 280,‘8 the Veientians had concluded a peace with the Romans for forty years. But in the year 317 the two Ware with Veii and nations were again involved in war; whether we are to suppose, Fidenta. with Niebuhr, that the truce was to last only for forty cyclical years of ten months each, and, therefore, that it had expired three years before, or whether it was brought to a premature termination, like the thirty years’ peace between Athens and Sparta, which was cut short in the midst by the breaking out of the Peloponnesian war. The latter seems more probable, because the quarrel is especially said to have originated in the revolt of Fidenm; whereas, had the truce been at an end, no particular cause of war would have been needed; hostilities would have been resumed as a matter of course. The left bank of the Tiber, immediately above its confluence with the Anio, is skirted by a line of low hills at the distance of about half a mile. On Situation of Fidelle. It one of these, which, like all the hills of the Campagna, break off into twitally keptnbode Ro-. cliffs on their sides, stood the town of Fidense,29 between five. and mono. six miles distant from Rome; the citadel, as some think, was on a higher point 26 Livy, V. 28. modern Villa Spada, just five miles from Rome; Livy, V. 31. According to Diodorus, Ve-a spot which is.now shown to strangers as the.itros’and Satricum revolted from Rome at this site of the villa of Phao-, Nero’s freedman, and period, and Circeii must have been lost pre-the place where Nero killed himself. Accordviously and recently recovered again,:as a col-ing to Sir W. Gell, Fidenee was about half a mile ony was planted there in the year 362. It is further on the road, and its citadel stood on the clear, from this statement, that the Opican na-isolated hill of Castel Giubileo, which rises imtions were rather roused than daunted by the mediately above:the Tiber..Westphal says that fall of Veii, and were carrying on-the war with some inscriptions have been found which idenRome with unabated vigor, down to the very tify the spot. If so, and if I recognize his detime of the Gaulish invasion.

See Diodorus, scription, the excavations in, the rock behind the XIV. 102, 106. Villa Spada, resembling those at Snenton, near 28 See chapter XII.

Nottingham, would be, probably, the tombs of 5 Westphal places Fidense at the site of the the citizens of Fidense.

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148 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XVIIIt of the ridge, separated from it by a valley, and rising immediately above the river. Fidenoe is described as an old Roman colony, established as early as the time of Romulus;30 other accounts call it an Alban or Latin colony,31 while it is represented as having been originally a city of the Etruscans.3 It is said also to have twice revolted from Rome since the expulsion of the kings, and to have been twice reduced, the last time in the year 256,33 and to have forfeited the half of its territory to the Roman garrison or colonists who occupied its citadel. All that can be gathered from these stories is, that the subject population in Fidenwe consisted chiefly of Etruscans; and that the ruling part of the inhabitants, the citizens of the colony, were Romans.

In the year 317,34 from some causes, of which we know nothing, the old Etruscan population rose against the Roman colonists, expelled them, and then put themselves under the protection of Veii. It is added that four Romans, sent to remonstrate with them upon their revolt, were murdered by them at the command of the Veientian king, who was become their new sovereign; and statues of the men thus slain were afterwards set up in the rostra; an honor that was paid two centuries later to the ambassadors murdered by the Illyrian queen Teuta. This revolt of Fidenas, and the protection afforded to the revolters by the Veientians, led to a renewal of war between Rome and Veii; and the seat of the war was removed not only from the right to the left bank of the Tiber, but even, on more than one occasion, to the left bank of the Anio, that is to say, within three miles of Rome. Inl 320, however, Q. Servilius Priscus,35 who was appointed dictator, is said to have taken Fidenm, and new colonists were again sent to occupy the place; but in 329 we read of another revolt, accompanied by a massacred6 of the colonists, and Mamercus ~Emilius was named dictator to meet this new danger. He gained a great victory over the Veientians and Fidenatians, and again took Fidene; but this time the work was done effectually:37 the Etruscan population were either massacred or sold for slaves, and the town and its territory remained from henceforth in the undisturbed possession of the Romans. At the same time a peace was concluded with the Veientians for twenty years.38 This was in 330; but in the year 348, Livy says that the term of the truce had already expired;”

so that Niebuhr conjectures that in this instance also we must reckon by cyclical years of ten months, and that the truce was only concluded for sixteen common years and eight months. On the other hand, if this were so, the truce must have expired early in 347, for there seems no foundation for Niebuhr’s conjecture, that it had not begun before 331: it was surely likely that it would have been solicited immediately after the taking of Fidene, and concluded early, rather than late, in 330, much less can we suppose it to have been delayed till the year following. Besides, we read of no actual hostilities before the year 350, that is, till the end of twenty common years; and the story that the Romans forbore to press their demands on Veii during 3o Compare Livy, I. 14 and 27.‘4 Livy, IV. 17. He speaks as if the Roman 31 Dionysius, II. 63, says that Fidene No-colonists had revolted; but Niebuhr seems mentum, and Crustumeria were all of them Al-right in supposing, that when we read of the ban colonies, founded at the same time by three revolt of a colony in these early times, we should brothers. Virgil names Fidenme along with No-understand it not properly speaking of the colomentumn and Gabii, and also speaks of it as an nists, but of the subject population who arose A;lban colony. uEn. VI.

73. and drove them out, and then asserted their 3 Livy, I. 15. Strabo, V.

2, ~ 9, p. 226. Plu-own independence, or connected themselves tarch makes Fidenee, Crustumeria and Antem-with some people of their own race. nee to have been Sabine towns, Romulus, 17. ” Livy, IV. 21. The common editions of Miiller well remarks that in Fidenee and Crus-Livy, including Bekker’s, call him A. Servilius, tumeria, as in Rome, we find traces of these following in this most of our present MSS. But same three elements of the population, Latins, Glareanus says that most of the MSS. had Sabines, and Etruscans. But at Fidene, the ” Quintus ” and that ” Aulus”

was the reading close connection of the place with Veiil (to which of Aldus’ tS., which he followed in his edition. place it seems to have been subject or depend-Sigonius, Glareanus, Pighius, and Drakenborch, ent, as was also Capena), seems to show, that all prefer the reading ” Quintus,”

previously to its final conquest by the Romans, 3” Livy, IV. 31. the Etruscan element was predominant. See 97 Livy, IV. 84. Willer’s Etrusker, Vol. I, p. 113, 361. Ws Livy, IV. 35. ” Dionysius, V. 60. 9 Livy, IV. 58.

Tempus induciarum enerat.

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CasP. XVIII.] SIEGE OFF VEII. 149 the year 348 out of magnanimity, because the V~aentians were distracted by internal factions, is suspicious enough to throw discredit upon the whole narrative which involves it. It is far more probable that, as the expiration of the truce drew near, both parties tried what could be gained by negotiations.4 The Romans were engaged in war with the JEquians and Volscians, and although successful in the campaign of 347, yet they had obtained no decided advantage. Thus the Veientians tried to spin out the negotiation till they should see the event of the next campaign, but as that was unfavorable to the Romans, the garrison at Verrugo being surprised and cut to pieces by the Volscians, the Veientians took courage, and refused to grant the Roman demands. The next year, however, greatly altered the face of affairs; the Romans were completely successful against the Volscians, and took the important city of Anxur: war with Veii was now looked forward to with delight, the commons were conciliated by the grant of pay to the soldiers, and thus, at the close of the twentieth year of the truce, apparently in the spring of 350, the Roman people voted for instant war with the Veientians; and the military tribunes of that year4’ commenced the invasion of the Veientian territory, and the occupation of fortified posts in the neighborhood of Veii. Again, in the year following, 351, the Roman arms were called off from Veii by the Volscian war,42 and nothing was attempted against the city. T,,,,, siege of ii formBut in the next year the Volscians were quiet, and the siege of ed. Veii was commenced in earnest. Livy’s expressions43 convey the notion that a double line of walls was C’arried all round the city, as at Platsea, A. U. C. 35s. A. C. the inner wall to blockade the besieged, the outer one to shelter 400the besiegers from any attempt to raise the siege on the part of the other states of Etruria. But the circuit of the walls of Veii, according to Sir W. Gell’s measurements,44 was above five miles; the besiegers’ line, therefore, must have embraced a still larger space, and the deep valleys with rocky sides, between which the small streams of this district always flow, would have offered formidable interruptions to the work. Besides, it is manifest that if such a circumvallation had been completed, Veii must have been starved out within a year, instead of resisting for seven years, and not being even at last reduced by famine. It appears rather that the two Roman armies employed in the siege established themselves in two separate camps, and secured the communication between them as well as they could by detached forts, intending to carry on their circumvallation on each side from their camps, as the Athenians did at Syracuse, till it should meet and effectually inclose the city. And as it was necessary that the lines should be maintained through the winter, the Romans now, for the first time, became acquainted with war on a greater scale, and, instead of returning home after a few days’ service, a-considerable portion, at least, of the soldiers were to remain before Veii during the whole year.

This was as strange and unwelcome to the Romans as it would have been to the Peloponnesians, but the national feeling was interested in the war, and the lines, after having been once taken by a sally of the besieged, were recovered and maintained by an army of volunteers. Still there was no complete circumvallation: Veii was open and accessible to relief; and the people of the two neighboring cities of Capena and A.. U. A. c. Falerii, being at length aroused to a sense of their own danger if 399. Attacks made on Veii fell, exerted all their power to deliver it. They attacked the te besegg amy. Roman lines,45 stormed one of the two camps which formed the strongholds of the besieging army, and for the remainder of the year the communications of Veii with the surrounding country were carried on in freedom. 4 See note 48 of the last chapter. description of the Peloponnesian lines round 41 Livy, IV. 61. Ab his primum circumsessi Platea: T rstiXos EsXc d o roi;s septldXoVs, rpd6 re Veii sunt. fXarativ, Kai et rig e:Ov aTr”AW0 vpv &lrtAi. III. 4‘2 Livy, IV. 61. 21. 43 Livy, V. 1. Ita muniebant ut ancipitia mu-44 See the conclusion of the article ” Veii,” in flimenta essent, alia in urbem-versa, aliis frons his work on the topography of;ome and its in Etruriam spectans auxiliis, si qua forte inde vicinity. venirent, obstruebatur. Compare Thucyclides’ 45 Livy, V. 8.

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150 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XV11 For five years after this, the siege, if so it may be called, made but little proghe otho Etruscan ress. The Romans retained their camps before Veii, as the Veientates refuae their aid tians had once held the Janiculum; they plundered the Veientian territory, and by their advanced position protected their own. The Capenatians and Faliscans could not again succeed in carrying the Roman camps, and the Tarquinensians, who took part in the contest in the year 35s,46 and ventured to invade the Roman territory, were repelled with loss. But this interference of the people of Tarquinii, one of the greatest and most influential of the Etruscan cities, and not the immediate neighbor of Veii, was probably a symptom of the dispositions of the whole Etruscan confederacy. A great council of the whole nation met at the temple of Voltumna,47 the Panionium of Etruria; the question of aiding Veii with the united force of the twelve cities was debated: but at this critical moment the attention of the northern states of the league was drawn off to another and a more imminent danger. The Gauls had crossed the Alps, and were overrunning the country of the twelve cities of northern Etruria, between the Alps and the Apennines. With such an enemy so near them, the northern states of Etruria proper, Volterme, Faesula, Cortona, and Clusium, were not disposed to march their forces away to a contest on the banks of the Tiber, and to leave their own homes open to the inroads of the Gauls. Accordingly, the southern cities were left to their fate; and only Capena and Falerii took any part in the final struggle between Veii and Rome. But the events of the last year of this struggle plainly showed what Rome A. U. C. 35. A. C would have had to fear from a coalition of all the twelve cities of 393. The Romans de-Etruria. Two of the Roman military tribunes45 were defeated by feated before Veik Cmllusoappointed die-the Faliscans and Capernatians; one of them was killed in the tator.

battle; and the panic spread to the lines before Veii, and even to Rome itself, where the rumor prevailed, that the whole force of Etruria was on its march, that the lines before Veii were actually assailed by the enemy, and that his victorious bands might be expected every moment to advance upon Rome. So great was the alarm, that the matrons crowded to the temples to avert, by prayers and sacrifices, their country’s peril; and the senate resolved to appoint a dictator.49 The dictator thus chosen was the famous M. Furius Carnillus. During thirty years from this period Camillus was:undoubtedly the most emiThe history of the fall nent man in Rome, and the favorite leader of the aristocracy, who r 7teii hby hbeen up-twice made him their champion in the hour of their greatest need, plantory. thep once to put down MI. Manlius, and again to prevent, if possible, the passing of the Licinian laws. Nor was the distinction of his family confined to him alone; one of his sons was the first prmtor, and another was twice dictator, and twice consul, and gained a memorable victory over the Gauls. But in proportion to this high eminence of the Furian family, was the exaggeration of which they were the subject. The stories told of them were so popular, that they were not merely engrafted upon the brief notices contained in the genuine records of the time, but took the place of these altogether; so that it is through 41 LiVy, V. 16. point supplant the real history, that Livy does 47 Livy, V. 17. The situation of this temple not so much as mention the resolution of the is unknown, as well as the attributes of the, senate to appoint a dictator, but after describgoddess to whom it was dedicated. The as-ing the alarm at Rome, auld the prayers of the semblies held at the temple were-composed only matrons, he passes abruptly to the legend, and of the ruling caste, the Principes or Lucumones merely says, fastalis clux ad excidium illius of Etruria: but they were connected with a re-urbis servandaeque patrim M.

Furins Cainillus ligious festival, with games of various sorts, and dictator dictus: magistrum equitum P. Corneespecially witlhdramatic entertainments; sothat lium Scipionem dixit.” V. 19. It appears, people of all ranks came together on these so-however, that the master of the horse, accordleninities, and the concourse attracted traders ing to the Fasti Capitolini,was not P. Cornefrom foreign countries, as to a favorable oppor-lius Scipio, but P. Cornelius Maluginensis. tunity of carrying on their traffic. See the “Frammenti nuovi,” published by 48 Livy, V. 18.

Borghesi. 41 So strangely does the poetical story at this

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CmAP. XVIII.] LEGEND OF THE FALL OF VEII. 151 the Greek writers only that we can learn the real issue of the Gaulic invasion, and the history of the taking of Veii has not been preserved at all. That the beautiful and romantic story of the fall of Veii belongs, entirely to the traditions and funeral orations of the Furian family, is plain from this, that the events, even of the very last year of the war, are related historically down to the very time of the appointment of Camillus to the dictatorship; but then the history suddenly vanishes, and a mere romance succeeds in its place wherever the actions of Camillus are the subject, interspersed here and there with fragments of authentic history, where the story relates to the actions of other persons. Thus we do not really know how Veii fell, or by what means a contest which, in the beginning of the year 359, wore so unpromising an aspect, was, before the end of that same year, brought to a triumphant conclusion. It is mentioned50 that the Latins and Hernicans, who seem hitherto to have taken no part in the war, joined the Romans with their whole force as soon as Camillus was made dictator. Probably the defeat sustained in the early part of the year, and the fear lest all Etruria should combine to relieve Veii, if any accident should turn the stream of the Gaulish invasion upon other countries, convinced the Romans that they must make the most of the present moment, whilst the Etruscans still stood aloof. An overpowering army of the Romans and their allies was brought against Veii; the siege of Platsea shows what great works for the reduction of a town could be completed within a short time by the united labor of a multitude of hands: a mound might be carried to the top of the loftiest walls; or their foundations might be undermined, and a breach opened in an instant; or, in the wide extent of Veii, some ill-guarded spot might be found, by which the enemy might effect an entrance without opposition. Be this as it may, the manner of the real capture of the place is irrecoverably lost; but it is certain that in the year 359, after a war of nine years, this old antagonist of Some, the large, the wealthy, and powerful city of Veii, was taken by the Romans, and the political existence of its people destroyed forever. But before we finally quit the poetical legends of the early Roman history, the last of them, and not the least beautiful, that which relates to the Difference between theo fall of Veii, must find its place in this narrative. In the life of flef““lltoods ofnthe Camillus there meet two distinct kinds of fiction, equally remote fallly menoirs. from historical truth, but in all other respects most opposite to one another: the one imaginative, but honest, playing, it is true, with the facts of history, and converting them into a wholly different form, but addressing itself also to a different part of the mind; not professing to impart exact knowledge, but to delight, to quicken, and to raise the perception of what is beautiful and noble; the other, tame and fraudulent, deliberately corrupting truth in order to minister to national or individual vanity, pretending to describe actual events, but substituting in the place of reality the representations of interested or servile falsehood. To the former of these classes belongs the legend of the fall of Veii; to the latter the interpolation of the pretended victory of Camillus over the Gauls. The stories of the former kind, as innocent as they are delightful, I have thought it an irreverence to neglect; the fabrications of the latter sort, which are the peculiar disgrace of Roman history, it is best to pass over in total silence, that they may, if possible, be consigned to perpetual oblivion. The poetical story of the fall of Veii is Us follows: For seven years and more the Romans had been besieging Veii. Now the summer was far advanced,51 and all the springs and rivers were Poetica, story of the very low; when on a sudden the waters of the lake of Alba be-fof wAoverflows ltis gan to rise; and they rose above its banks, and covered the banks. fields and houses by the water-side; and still they rose higher and higher, till they reached the top of the hills which surrounded the lake as with a wall, and Wi Livy, V. 19. ”’ Dionysius, XII. 11. Fragn>. Mal.

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!52 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP XVIMI they overflowed where the hills were lowest; and behold, the water of the lake poured down in a mighty torrent into the plain beyond. When the Romans found that the sacrifices52 which they offered to the gods and powers of the place were of no avail, and their prophets knew not what counsel to give them, and the lake still continued to overflow the hills and to pour down into the plain below, then they sent over the sea, to Delphi, to ask counsel of the oracle of Apollo, which was famous in every land. So the messengers were sent to Delphi. And meanwhile the report of the A rophet of ei de-overflowing of the lake was much talked of; so that the people elares the meaning of of Veii heard of it. Now there was an old Veientian,53 who was the overflow.

skilled in the secrets of the Fates, and it chanced that he was talking from the walls with a Roman centurion whom he had known before in the days of peace; and the Roman spoke of the ruin that was coming upon Veii, and was sorry for the old man his friend; but the old man laughed and said: “Ah! ye think to take Veil; but ye shall not take it till the waters of the lake of Alba are all spent, and flow out into the sea no more.” WrLn the Roman heard this he was much moved by it, for he knew that the cld man was a prophet; and the next day he came again to talk with the old man, and he enticed him to come out of the city, and to go aside with him to a lonely place, saying that he had a certain matter of his own, concerning which he desired to know the secrets of fate. And while they were talking together, he seized the old man, and carried him off to the Roman camp, and brought him before the generals; and the generals sent him to Rome to the senate. Then the old man declared all that was in the Fates concerning the overflow of the lake of Alba; and he told the senate what they were to do with the water, that it might cease to flow into the sea: “If the lake overflow, and its waters run out into the sea, woe unto Rome; but if it be drawn off, and the waters reach the sea no longer, then it is woe unto Veii.” But the senate would not listen to the old man’s words, till the messengers should come back from Delphi. After a time the messengers came back, and the answer of the god agreed in The Romins dig all things with the words of the old man of Veil. For it said,54 through the mountain “Se end draw off the wtlr “See that the waters be not confined within the basin of the of the lake. ~ lake: see that they take not their own course and run into the sea. Thou shalt let the water out of the lake, and thou shalt turn it to the watering of thy fields, and thou shalt make courses for it till it be spent and come to nothing.” Then the Romans believed the oracle, and they sent workmen, and began to bore through the side of the hills to make a passage for the water. And the water flowed out through this passage under ground; and it ceased to flow over the hills; and when it came out from the passage into the plain below, it was received into many courses which had been dug for it, and it watered the fields, and became obedient to the Romans, and was all spent in doing them service, and flowed to the sea no more. And the Romans knew that it was the will of the gods that they should conquer Yeii. So Marcus Furius Camillus was made dictator; and the Veientians sent to The Romans refuse Rome to beg for peace,55 but the Romans would not grant it. peaceto theveientians. Now the Etruscans are skilled in the secrets of fate above all other nations; and one of the chief men of Veii, who had gone with the embassy, turned round as he was going out of the senate-house, and looked upon the senators, and said: “A goodly answer truly have ye given us, and a generous; for though we humble ourselves before you, ye will show us no mercy, but threaten to destroy us utterly. Ye heed neither the wrath of the gods nor the vengeance of men. Yet the gods shall requite you for your pride; and, as ye destroy our country, so ye shall shortly after lose your own.” 52

Dionysius, XII. 12. 64 Livy, V. 16. 59 Dionysius, XII. 13. Livy, V. 15.

Plu-55 Dionysius, XII. 17. tarch, Camillus, 4.

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CHAP. XVIII.] LEGEND OE THE FALL OF VEII. 153 Meanwhile Marcus Furius56
pressed the city on every side; and he was at the head of a mighty army; for the Latins and the Hernicans had brought their aids; and he commanded his men to dig a way un-heart of tho citadlt of der ground, which should pass beneath the walls, and come out again to the light within the precinct of the temple of Juno, in the citadel of Teii. The men worked on by night and by day; for they were divided into six bands; and each band worked in turn and rested in turn; and the secret passage was carried up into the precinct of the temple of Juno; but it had not broken through the surface of the ground; so that the Veientians knew not of it. Then every man57 who desired to have a share of the spoil hastened from Rome to the camp at Veii. And Marcus, the dictator, made a vow, and promised to give the tenth part of all the spoil to Apollo, the god of Delphi; and he prayed also to Juno, the goddess of the Veientians, that she would be pleased to depart from [eii, and to follow the Romans home to their city, which from henceforth should be hers, and where a temple worthy of her majesty should be given her for her abode. After this, he ordered the Romans to assault the city on every side; and the Veientians ran to the wall to meet them; and the shout of the battle arose, and the fight was carried -on fiercely.5” But the king of the Veientians was in the temple of Juno in the citadel, offering a sacrifice for the deliverance of the city; and the prophet who stood by, when he saw the sacrifice, cried aloud, “This is an accepted offering; for there is victory for him who offers its entrails upon the altar!” Now the Romans were in the secret passage, and heard the words of the prophet. So they burst forth into the temple, and they snatched away the entrails from those who were sacrificing, and Marcus, the Roman dictator, and not the king of the Veientians, offered them upon the altar. Then the Romans rushed down from the citadel, and ran to the gates of the city, and let in their comrades; and all the army broke into the town, and they sacked and took Veii. While they were sacking the city, Marcus looked down upon the havoc from the top of the citadel, and when he saw the greatness of the city Comillus vaunts yun. and the richness of the spoil, his heart swelled within him,59 and’

elf ofhis victory. he said, ” What man’s fortune was ever so great as mine?” But then in a moment there came the thought, how little a thing and how short a time can bring the greatest fortune down to the lowest, and his pride was turned into fear, and he prayed, if it must be that in return for such great glory and victory, some evil should befall himself or his country, yet that it might be light and recoverable. Whilst he prayed he veiled his head,60 as is the custom of the Romans in prayer, and turned round towards the right. But as he turned, his foot slipped, and he fell upon his back upon the ground. Yet he was comforted rather than dismayed by his fall, for he said, ” The gods have heard my prayer, and for the great fortune of my victory over Veii they have sent me only this little evil.” Then he ordered some young men,61 chosen out from all his army, to approach to the temple of Juno; and they had washed themselves in pure The statue of Juno i4 water, and were clothed in white, so that there was on them no carried from Veii to sign or stain of blood and of slaughter; and they bowed low as Ro they came to the temple, but were afraid to touch the image of the goddess, for no hand might touch it except the priest’s who was born of the house that had the priesthood. So they asked the goddess whether it was her pleasure to go with them to Rome. And then there happened a wonder; for the image spake, and answered, ” I will go;” and when they touched it, it moved from its place of its own accord, and it was carried to Rome. Thus Juno left her abode in the 56

Livy, V. 19. 60 Dionysius, XII. 22, 2s. E utarchl, Camil 57 Livy, V. 20, 21. lus, 5. 6s Livy, V. 21. Plutarch, Camillus, 5. 61 Livy, V. 22. 69

Dionysius, XII. 19.

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154 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XVIII citadel of Veii, and she dwelt in her temple at Rome, on the hill Aventinus, which the Romans built and dedicated to her honor. After this62 there were rejoicings at Rome greater, than had ever been known Camillus triumphs before; and there were thanksgivings for four days, and all the proudly. temples were filled with those who came to offer their thankofferings. And Marcus entered the city in triumph, and he rode up to the Capitol in a chariot drawn by four white horses, like the horses of Jupiter and like the horses of the sun. But wise men thought that it was done too proudly; and they said, “Marcus makes himself equal to the blessed gods; see if vengeance come not on him, and he be not made lower than other men.” To return from this famous legend to our imperfect history of the times, the Romans, by the fall of Veii, acquired a considerable addition to territory by the con-their territory. The inhabitants of several districts subject to the quest0 of eii. Veientians had revolted to the Romans during the war, or rather, to escape the ravage of the Roman armies, had surrendered themselves and their lands at discretion. The rest of the country, if any remained so long independent, must have fallen with the capital; and thus the Romans now extended their dominion along the right bank of the Tiber from its mouth to a distance of about thirteen miles above Rome,63 whilst it stretched northwards from the Tiber as far as the Lago di Bracciano, Lacus Sabatinus,64 and the edge of the actual Campagna at Alonterosi; passing thence, in a line including the remarkable eminence of Monte Musino,“5 to the Tiber opposite the Ager Crustumerinus. But in the years immediately following the conquest of Veii, the Romans penetrated still deeper into Etruria. Capenia, which had stood by the Veientians to the last, fell in the very next year after its ally;66 and its conquest put the Romans in possession of an additional portion of the right bank of the Tiber, above the territory just won from the Veientians. In the year after, we hear of the submission of Falerii, the sole remaining member of the alliance, situated either on or near the site of the modern town of Civita Castellana.61 Camillus was the military tribune who reduced Falerii, and accordingly we have another tale in the place of history. A schoolmaster,68 who had the care of the sons of the principal citizens, took an opportunity, when walking with his boys without the walls, to lead them to the Roman camp, and throw them into the power of the enemy. But Camillus, indignant at this treason, bade the boys to drive their master back into the town again, flogging him all the way thither, for the Romans, he said, made no war with children. Upon this the Faliscans, won by his magnanimity, surrendered to him at discretion, themselves, their city, and their country.. Whether the city, however, was really surrendered at this time, may seem very doubtful; that it sued for and obtained peace is likely: it lost, also, a portion of its territory, for we read of a number of Faliscans as forming a part of the four new tribes69 of Roman citizens, which were created immediately: after the Gaulish invasion. In the same year, or in the following year, may be placed also the submission Submission of Nepete of Nepete and Sutrium,70
which appear immediately after the reand Sutrium. treat of the Gauls as the dependent allies of Rome. They did not 62 Livy, V. 23. Musino, in Sir W. Gell’s work on the neigh63 Pliny, Hist. Nat. III. 9. borhood of Rome, under the title “Ara Mu4 This may be concluded, not only from the time.”

short distance between Veii and the Lacus Sa-66 Livy, V. 24. batinus, and from there being no independent 67 Westphal and Nibby place the Etruscan city, so far as we know, between them; but it Falerii at Civita Castellana, and the later Roman seems to follow, also, from the name of one of colony at S. Maria di Falari, about half way bethe new tribes which were formed immediately tween Civita Castellana and Ronciglione. Sir after the Gaulish invasion, the tribus Sabatina. W. Gell places the Etruscan city at S. Maria di The lands of this tribe must have been situated Falari. near the lake; and from whom could the Ro-68 Livy, V. 27. mans have conquered them at that period, ex-69 Livy, VI. 4. cept from the Velentians? 70 Diodornus places in the same year the peace 69 Se the the description and sketch of Monte with the Faliscans, and something in conneo

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CHAP. XVIII.] THE CIMINIAN MOUNTAINS. surrender themselves, “dediderunt se,” but obtained a:treaty of alliance, such as we find so often between the weaker and the stronger states in Greece. Nepete still exists, with almost the same name, and is a wellknown town on the Perugia road to Rome, standing in a beautiful country between the-edge of the Campagna and the valley of the Tiber, a little to the north of Mlonterosi. Su.

trium also exists in the modern town of Sutri, a little to the west of the present road from Monterosi to Ronciglione. The Romans had now reached what may be called the extreme natural boundary of the basin of the Tiber on the side of Etruria. Sutrium The Romans reach the and Nepete looked up immediately to the great and lofty ridge of ridge of the Ciminiac -mountains. the Ciminian mountains, that ridge which the traveller ascends as soon as he leaves Viterbo, while from its summit he catches his first view of the neighborhood of Rome, of the line of the Apennines skirting the Campagna to the northeast, and of the Alban hills in the farthest distance, and, although the particular objects cannot be distinguished, of that ever memorable plain in which stands Rome. This ridge, in short, separates the streams which feed the Tiber from the valley of Viterbo and the basin of the lake of Bolsena, or, to speak the language of the fourth century of Rome, it separated the territories of Veii and Falerii, the advanced posts, as it were, of the Etruscan confederacy, from those of Vulsinii and Tarquinii, two of the greatest and most distinguished states of the whole nation. Eighty yearLu after this period, the passage of the Ciminian mountains was regarded as a memorable event, as little less than the entrance into They cross thea, and. an unknown world.” But now, emboldened by their victories’the peoaple ofn Valsi over the nearer Etruscan cities, and aware, no doubt, that the and the Salpinatians dread of the Gauls on the northern frontier would render a general gathering of the whole nation impossible, the Romans seemed anxious to cross their natural boundary, and to penetrate into the heart of Etruria. A war broke out, we know not on what grounds, between Rome and Vulsinii;7 but in the first year the Romans were crippled, according to their own account, by a famine and pestilence; and the Vulsinians, aided by the Salpinatians, a neighboring people wholly unknown to us, invaded the Roman territory without op-A. U. c. 364. A. C position. In the next year, however, the Romans were able to 3ss. act on the offensive; a great victory was gained over the Vulsinians; the Salpinatians did not risk a battle; and, after the lands of either people had been laid waste by the conquerors, the Vulsinians sued for and obtained a truce for twenty years,73 on the condition of giving satisfaction to the Romans to the extent of their demands, and furnishing a year’s pay for the army employed against them.

Of the Salpinatians we hear no further mention, either now or at any future period. Thus Rome was gaining ground rapidly in Etruria, while in Latium she could not yet dislodge her old enemies the eEquians, even from the A1ban hills.‘With so stubborn, so active, and so powerful an ad-c versary on the south, any attempt to make extensive conquests on the north must ever have been full of danger; and an alliance between the Etruscan confederacy and the Opican nations, at this period of the Roman history, would probably have effected what the league between the Etruscan and Sabellian nations, ninety years afterwards, attempted in vain. But Providence, which designed that Rome should win the empire of the world, altered the course ol events by turning the torrent of a Gaulish invasion upon Latium. This it was which crushed the LEquians forever; and which obliged the Romans, by its tion with Sutrium. The present text is cor-71

Livy, IX. 36. rupt:. Xo6rptov Epv &punav. Niebuhr proposes 72 Livy, V. 31.

to supply Er, but the corruption lies, I think, 73 Livy, V. 32. in the verb, and in the preceding conjunction, 0ai. See Diodorus, XIV. 98.

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156 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIX consequences, to confine their attention again for a long period to the left bank of the Tiber. There, in many years of patient and arduous struggles, they laid deeper and firmer the foundations of their after greatness, by effectually subduing the remnant of their Opican enemies, and obtaining a more complete command than ever over the resources of the cities of the Latins. Thus the Gaulish invasion and conquest of Rome was but the instrument of her greater and surer advance to the dominion of Italy. CHAPTER XIX. INTERNAL HISTORY FROM 350

TO 86I PLEBEIAN MILITARY TRIBUNES-BANISHMENT OF CAMILLUS. ” SIrNIus.-He’s a disease that must be cut away. MENENIUS. Oh, he’s a limb that has but a disease: Mortal to cut it off; to cure it easy.” SHAKSPEARE, Coriolanus.

Q/o3SE~‘reS yap abroV oe 7rooXXsl 70o’,S3E 7-o 7re Kara 7r’ lavroV ur5pa irapavoyas ES r v fiatlav w. TvpavviYo; lrLt5Vtovrl o 7rXroAtLL

Kaiaracav.-THUCYDIDES, VI. 15. IN the fourteen years which elapsed between the beginning of the last war Advance of the plebe-with Veii and the invasion of the Gauls, the plebeian leaders reaped ans. the fruit of the seed which their predecessors had sown so perseveringly. Now, for the first time, we find plebeians not only admitted into the college of military tribunes, but forming in it the majority. Yet even this was, as it were, only the first-fruits of the harvest; many years elapsed before the full crop was brought to the sickle. In the year 352, the third year of the war with Veii, the Romans intending, The patricians interfere as has been mentioned, to blockade the city, were obliged to keep withthe electionoftrib-a part of their forces on duty during the winter. This was doubly.une. munpopular, both as it obliged so many citizens to be absent from their homes for several months together, a term of service ill endured by an army of householders and agriculturists; and also as it increased the expense of the war, for the soldiers received pay only for those months in which they were actually under arms. Thus the tribunes began to complain of the burden of the siege, and the indecisive character of the war hitherto was likely to make it unpopular; but when news came that the Roman lines had been destroyed by a sally of the besieged,’

national pride prevailed, and all ranks united in supporting A. U. C. 353.

A. C. the contest zealously. But the next year only brought fresh dis399.

asters:’ Anxur was surprised by the Volscians, and the armies before Yeii were completely defeated, and the blockade entirely raised. Then feelings of irritation revived; and these were so far shared by the senate, that they obliged all the military tribunes of the year to go out of office on the first of October,3 two months and a half before the expiration of their year. The commons, however, were not satisfied; for the first act of the new military tribunes was to call out to military service, not only the citizens within the usual age,4 but the older men also, who were to form a force for the defence of the city. Such a Livy, V.. 2 Livy, V. 8.

Livy, V. 9. i Livy, V, 10.

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CrAP. XIX.] PLEBEIAN MILITARY TRIBUNES. 157 call, just as winter was coming on, was most unwelcome; besides, every additional soldier rendered a heavier taxation necessary; and as the patricians were continually evading the payment of the vectigal for their occupation of the public land, so the tributum or property tax necessarily increased in amount. In this state of things, the patricians were so afraid of the possible effects of the tribunician power, that they ventured on the unusual step of tampering with the elections for new tribunes, which took place in December. The tribune who presided at the comitia must have been gained over to betray his trust; he refused votes, we must suppose, when given in favor of the most popular, and therefore the most obnoxious candidates, whilst others could not gain from the tribes themselves the requisite majority of suffrages. The consequence was that, in defiance of the Trebonian law, only eight tribunes were returned;5 and these, by a second violation of the law, filled up the vacant places by choosing two colleagues for themselves. But this overstraining broke the bow. One honest tribune of the college, Cn. Trebonius, was enough, where the cause was so manifestly just, to Plebeians for the irst awaken the indignation of the commons. Three of the other trib-time elected efstribcee, of the soldiers. unes,6 men, as it seems, of those base natures which always follow the stream, now strove to avert their own unpopularity by impeaching the two unfortunate military tribunes who had been defeated before Veii. These were condemned and fined, but their punishment did not abate the storm. The tribunes then proposed an agrarian law; and when this was resisted, they positively refused to allow the tribute to be collected1 for the benefit of the army at Veii. This stoppage of the supplies brought the soldiers almost to a state of mutiny. We have seens that a custom, so old as to be held equivalent to law, authorized the soldier to practise a summary process of distress upon the paymaster, if his pay was not regularly issued. Thus the law itself seemed to sanction insubordination, if the soldier’s right was denied him: so that if the tribunes persisted in forbidding the tribute to be levied, the siege of Veii was inevitably at an end. Then at last, after an interval of more than forty years, the con-A. U. C. 355. A. C. stitution of the year 312
was fully carried into effect; the elections 397. of military tribunes were left really free, and four out of six9 of the members of the college were chosen from among the plebeians. A similar re-A. U… 356. A. C.

sult attended the elections of the year following; four out of six 396. of the tribunes of the soldiers were again chosen from the commons. Such a choice, continued for two years successively, proves how deep was the indignation excited by the attempt of the patricians to tamper with Endevors of the pati.the tribuneship, of the commons. But the influence of an aristoc-celnstie rscoveiotn oth.e racy acts through the relations of private life, which are in their militry tribuneshir. very nature permanent, whilst it is opposed only by a strong feeling of anger, or Livy, V. 10. examine the sevram names, we find a M. Titin^ Livy, V. 11.

ins elected tribune of the commons in the year t Cum tributum conferri per tribunos non 306, and a Sex. Titinius tribune in the year 316. posset.

Livy, V. 12. And the fragments of the Fasti Capitolini deo Pignoris capio.

See Gainus, IV. ~ 27. scribe P. Msalius as the son of Sp. Mselius, and o The names, as given by Livy, are, P. Licin-give him the surname of Capitolinus; so that ius Calvus, P. Manlius (Mienius being a mere there is every reason to regard him as the son correction by Sigonius), L.

Titinius, P. Mselius, of that Maelius who was murdered by Servilius L.

Furius Medullinus, and L. Publilius Volscus. Ahala in 316, and whose house, as we know, He calls them all patricians, except Licinius; stood sufficiently within the precincts of the yet it is certain that all, except L. Furius and P. Capitoline Hill to entitle him to the name Cap5Manlius, were plebeians. The names are all itolinus. Lastly, Publilius Volscus is described plebeian; which, although not a decisive argu-in the Fasti as ” Voleronis Nepos,” and as bearment with respect to the very early times of the ing the surname of Philo; so that there can be commonwealth, yet becomes a circumstance of no doubt that he was a descendant of the fagreat weight in the middle of the fourth cenmous tribune who carried the Publilian law in tury of Rome. Again, the reappointment of the year 283, and of the family of the no less many of the tribunes of this year, four years famous plebeian dictator who passed the Publilafterwards, as colleagues of P. Licinius, is a con-ian laws of the year 416. firmation of their being plebeians. And if we

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158 HISTORY OF ROME. [ CHAP. XIX, an urgent sense of public interest, both of which exist only in seasons of excite. ment, and wear out by the mere lapse of time. It happened also that in the last two years Rome had been visited by a winter of such unusual severity, as to appear preternatural, and afterwards, by a pestilence; and such calamities have a wellknown tendency to engross men’s minds with their own domestic affairs, and to make them regard political questions with indifference. Nor did the patricians fail to represent these visitations as proofs of the displeasure of the gods, who were offended that plebeiansT” had been elected even in the comitia of centuries, which professed to be regulated according to the divine will as observed and declared by the augurs. And still further to secure their object, when the election of military tribunes came on, the most eminent individuals of the noblest families of the patricians appeared as candidates. Accordingly, every place in the college for the year 35571 was once more filled by a patrician; and the election of the following year presented the same result. The tribunes of the year 358 appear, however, to have been moderate men; The commons resist and there was a danger lest they should hold the comitia fairly, them with succees. and lest some plebeians might thus again be elected as their successors. Accordingly the senate obliged them all, on religious pretences,‘2 to resign before their year was expired; and an interrex was named: to hold the comitia. But the discontent of the commons-had been again growing; even in this very year the tribunes had opposed the enlistment of soldiers to meet a new enemy, the people of Tarquinii; and now, when-the object of the patricians in appointing an interrex could not be mistaken, they interfered, and would not allow the comitia, to be held. The dispute went on for some time, and lasted till a third interrex had been appointed, the famous M. Camillus. But even he, though one of the bitterest enemies of the commons, was, on this occasion, obliged to yield; either Veii must be relinquished, or the commons must have justice; and accordingly it was agreed that the elections should be held freely, so as to allow a majority in the college:to the plebeians,” and four out of six of the military tribunes were again chosen from the plebeians. The defeat of two of these tribunes by the Faliscans and Capenatians led to But after the fllofveii the appointment of M. Camillus as dictator, and in this year Veii thepatriciansugainpre-fell. Thus the patricians were no longer obliged to conciliate the commons; the opposition of the tribunes to the levying of the tribute was henceforward of no importance; and we hear no more of plebeian military tribunes. The entire college was composed of patricians in the years 360, 361, and 364; and in the years 362 and 363, the senate decreed that consuls should be created, instead of military tribunes; so that from the fall of Veii to the Gaulish invasion the patricians appear to have recovered their old exclusive possession of the highest magistracies. Yet this period was by no means one of hopeless submission on the part of the Disputes about the tithlle commons; nor were there wanting subjects of dispute, which the of te plunder of Veii.

tribunes followed up with vigor. Camillus had vowed to offer to Apollo the tithe of the spoil won at Veil; but the town had been plundered before Apollo’s portion had been set apart for him; and the soldiers having disposed of all that they had gained, were unwilling to: refund:it afterwards.‘4 The 10 Livy, V. 14. consul, and afterwards decemvir, with Appius n Livy, V. 14, 16. Claudius, in the year 303. Thus the plebeians 12

Livy, V. 17. were four to two in the college of 359, and not is Livy, V.

18, Fasti Capitolini. Frammenti five to one; and this agrees with the stipulanuovi, Borghesi. According to Livy, the trib-tion made previously to the election, “ut major unes were P. Licinius, the son of the tribune pars tribunorum militum ex plebe crearetur.” of 355, L. Titinius, P.

Menius, P. Mselius, Cn. Livy, V. 17.::Genucius, and L. Atilius. But the fragments 14 Livy, V. 23. The practice of devoting a of the Fasti show that for P. MT nius we should tithe of the spoil to some god was adopted here also read Q. Manlius; and the cognomen sometimes, in order to prevent an indiscrimiof Cn. Genucils, as appears from the Fasti for nate plunder: the spoil was first to be brought 856, was Aug:.-rinus; so that he belonged to to the general, that t-le tithe might be duly septhe patrician Conucii, one of whom was elected arated from-it, and the remainder was then to

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CHAP. XIX.] INFLUENCE EXERCISED BY THE PATRICIANS, 159 pontifices, however, declared that the vow must be performed; and an appeal was made to the conscience of every individual, calling upon him to value his share of the plunder, and bring the price of the tithe of it into the treasury for the purchase of an offering of gold to Apollo. This call was slowly obeyed, and Camillus complained loudly of the profane neglect of the people: he urged further, that his vow had included the tithe, not only of the movable property of Veii, but also of the city and territory.l5 The pontifices decided that this too must be paid; and the money was accordingly advanced out of the treasury for this purpose. The money of the Romans at this period was all of copper; gold was dear, and could not readily be procured. Accordingly the Roman matrons are said to have brought to the treasury all their ornaments of gold;16 and the senate showed its sense of their zeal by giving them permission to be drawn in a carriage about Rome on all occasions, and to use a peculiar and more luxurious sort of carriage at the games and solemn sacrifices. Yet, after all, the gold was not accepted as a gift; the senate ordered every matron’s contribution to be valued, and the full price paid to her. This transaction irritated the minds of men against Camillus, as if his vow had been a mere pretence, in order to defraud the people of the spoil The commonsdesireto which they had so hardly won. But the conquest of Veii gave moetoveii. occasion to another dispute of a more serious character.: T. Sicinius,l7 one of the tribunes, proposed a law for removing a portion of the patricians and commons to Veii, and for allotting to them the whole, or a considerable part, of the Veientian territory; so that the Roman commonwealth should consist of two cities, Rome and Veii. The peculiarity of this proposal, according to Roman notions, consisted in making Veii a co-ordinate state with Rome, instead of a colony. The unity of the commonwealth was in no way injured by the foundation of new colonies, because these became its subjects, and not its equals; whereas, if a portion of the Roman people lived in Veii, a city equal to Rome in extent and magnificence, the commonwealth must either be reduced to a mere confederacy, like that of the cities of the Latins, or else it would be a matter of dispute at which of the two cities the assemblies of the united people should be held, and which of them should be the home of the national gods. Accordingly the project was strenuously resisted by the patricians, who saw how fatal it would prove to the greatness of Rome, and they persuaded two of the tribunes to oppose it.‘s Thus the measure was resisted for that year, and it met with the same fate the year following, 361; both parties having obtained the re-election of the same tribunes, so that T. Sicinius and his friends again brought forward the law, and A.

Virginius and Q. Pomponius, the two tribunes who sided with the patricians, were again ready to meet it with their negative. But in the year 362, Virginius and Pomponius were no longer reelected tribunes, but were, on the contrary, impeached for their betrayal ofe mere rje their constituents’ interests during the time of their magistracy. throug the iuen They were tried, and condemned to pay a heavy fine,‘9 and the t p tribunes again brought forward their law, with -a confidence that-it would meet with no opposition. But the patricians now resolved to exert their influence in a fair and constitutional manner, and they exerted it with success. Leaving the decision of the question to the votes of the tribes,20 and being prepared themselves to attend at the comitia and give their votes like the rest of their fellowcitizens, they endeavored, by their individual authority, to win the suffrages of their tribesmen, entreating and reasoning by turns, and imploring them not to pass a law which would put the conquered city of Veii on a level with its conqueror.

Their arguments and solicitations were listened to with respect, and be equitably divided. See the advice given by 17 Livy, V. 24. Crcesus to Cyrus after the taking of Sardis.‘1 Livy, V. 25, 29. Herodotus, I. 39.‘9

Livy, V. 29. 6 Livy, V. 25. Xo Livy, V. 30. “6 I;vy, V. 25.

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160 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIX, when the question was brought forward, it was negatived by the votes of eleven tribes out of twenty-one. A victory thus fairly and honorably obtained, was likely to dispose the patricians to placable and kindly feelings. Immediately after the reA grant of land in the territory of Ve mado jection of the law, the senate decreed a division of the Veientian to th commons.. territory21 amongst the commons on a scale of unusual liberality. Each lot consisted of seven jugera; and not only fathers of families were considered in this grant, but they received an additional allotment of seven jugera for each free person in their household. Thus the dispute was, for the time, peaceably and advantageously settled. The year 363 is remarkable, as introducing another change in the time at Alteration of the time which the curule magistrates entered on their office. The consuls, at which the tribunes of the soldiers entered one of whom was M. Manlius, afterwards so famous, were obliged on their office. by the senate”2 to resign three months before the end of their year, so that their successors, the military tribunes of the year 364, came into office on the first of July. But why they were required to resign is doubtful. The ostensible reason was the state of their health; a dry and exceedingly hot season had ruined the crops, and given birth to a violent epidemic disorder, which attacked both of the consuls, and prevented them from taking the field against the Vulsiniensians. On the other hand, Niebuhr thinks that the real cause of their deposition was their having neglected to aid the people of Caere, the allies of Rome, when their harbor of Pyrgi was taken and sacked by Dionysius of Syracuse. Perhaps, too, personal feelings were concerned, for immediately on the resignation of the consuls, M. Camillus was appointed interrex, who was afterwards so strongly opposed to M. Manlius, and whose enmity may have already begun before this period. It should be observed that the six military tribunes elected for the following year were all patricians. If Camillus had any undue share in effecting the resignation of the late conchnrge of corruption suls, he did not long enjoy his triumph. L. Appuleius,23 one of against Cnmillus. He the tribunes, impeached him for having appropriated secretly to ti from Rome. his own use a portion of the plunder of Veii. It was said24 that some doors of brass, the bullion of a country which at this time used only brass money, were found in his house; and that his numerous clients and friends told him plainly,“5 when he applied to them for their aid, that they were ready to pay his fine for him, but that they could not acquit him. We are startled at finding the great Camillus brought to trial on a charge of personal corruption; but that strict integrity which Polybius ascribes to the Romans seems not always to have reached as high as the leaders of the aristocracy, for the great Scipio Africanus was impeached on a similar charge, and his brother, the conqueror of Antiochus, was not only accused, but condemned. Nor were the eminent men of the Spartan aristocracy free from the same reproach; the suspicion attached itself to Leotychides, the immediate predecessor of Archidamus; to Pleistoanax, the son of Pausanias; and just before the banishment of Camillus, the famous Gylippus, the conqueror of the Athenians at Syracuse, had been driven from his country for a similar act of baseness. Other accounts,26 as was natural, ascribed the condemnation of Camillus solely to the envy and hatred of the commons; while, according to others,27 his punishment was a sort of ostracism, because the arrogance of his triumph, after the conquest of Veii, seemed inconsistent with the conduct of a citizen in a free commonwealth. It seems allowed by all, that no party in the state attempted to save him; and it is clear, also, that he incurred the forfeiture of all his civil rights in consequence of his not appearing to stand his trial, either as an outlawry, or because his withdrawal was held equivalent to 21 Livy, V.

80. 25 Livy, V. 82. 2a Livy, V. 31. 26 Dionysius, XIII. 5. Fragm. Mai. 28

Livy, V. 32. 27 Diolorus, XIV. 117. ” Plutarch, Camillus, 12.

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CHAP. XX.] CONDITION OF THE ETRUSCAN STATES. 161 a confession of guilt, and a man convicted of furtum, incurred thereby perpetual ignominy, and lost all his political franchise. Perhaps his case was like that of the Spartan Pausanias; and the treasure which he secreted may have been intended to furnish means for making him tyrant of Rome. But at any rate, he withdrew from Rome before his trial came on, and retired to Ardea. The annalists reported28 that as he went out of the gates, he turned round, and prayed to the gods of his country, that if he were unjustly driven into exile, some grievous calamity might speedily befall the Romans, and force them to call him back again. They who recorded such a prayer must have believed him innocent, and therefore forgave him for it; they even thought that the gods heard it with favor, and fulfilled its petition by sending the Gauls, in the very next year, to be ministers of vengeance on his ungrateful country. CHAPTER XX. STATE OF FOREIGN NATIONS AT THE PERIOD

OF THE GAULISH INVASIONITALY, SARDINIA, CORSICA. TA TS #4Eripa; 7rpayyaTElas Hdtov…. roir6 EarLv’ are KaSd’rEp’ rTX crXElv 6&ravra’ rls; oouVlivrg lrpdyplara rtpo;s v’KXLV dpOS…. oi)o Ka? leta -tU laroplas viro’ tav (JvvotpV ayayea’ ro’s 1vrvyXdvouri rTaV XtpwOpv rs ritXrL, X

KEXpriratL rpgS Triv rv i6wv rpayladrwv auvrEXelav. POLnBIUs, I. 4. THE
farthest point hitherto reached by the soldiers of any Roman army was scarcely more than fifty miles distant from Rome. The southern Introduction tothe view limit of Roman warfare had been Anxur; its northern was Vul-of the state of foreige sinii. Nor do we read of any treaties or commercial intercourse by which Rome was connected with foreign powers, since the famous treaty with Carthage, concluded in the first year of the commonwealth. Still the nations of the ancient world knew more of one another than we are inclined to allow: for we do not enough consider how small a portion of their records has come down to us; how much must have been done of which mere accident has hindered us from hearing. About thirty’ years later than the Gaulish invasion, the author of that most curious survey of the coasts of the Mediterranean, known by the name of the Periplus of Scylax, mentions Rome and Ancona alone of all the cities of Italy, with the exception of the Greek colonies; and this notice is the more remarkable, as Rome is not immediately on the coast, and the survey rarely extends to any place far inland. Aristotle also was not only acquainted with the fact that Rome was taken by the Gauls, but named an individual whom he called Lucius,2 as its 2e Livy, V. 82.

Plutarch, Camillus, 12. Dio-ony, but Scylax does not describe it as such; nysius, XIII. 6. whereas, in speaking of the cities on the Luca1 For the date of the Periplus of Scylax, see nian and Iapygiau coast, he expressly notices Niebuhr’s essay inl the first volume:of his their Greek origin. “

Klene tHistorische Schriften,” Bonn, 1828, p. 2 Plutarch, Camillus, 22. It need not be said, 105; or, as translated by Mr. Hare, in the second that in the old times men were designated by nurmber of the Philological Museum. I have their prsenomen rather than by their nomen or said that Scylax mentions no other Italian cities cognomen; and thus Aristotle would call L. but Rome and Ancona, with the exception of Furius “Lucius,”’

rather than “Furius,” or the Greek colonies. It is true that, according “

Camillus,” just as Polybius calls Scipio “Pub to other writers, Ancona itself was a Greek col-lius,”’ and Regulus “3Marcus.” 11

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162 HISTORY OF ROME. [iAPr. XX, deliverer. Heraclides Ponticus3 even spoke of Rome as a Greek city, which, while it shows the shallowness of his knowledge concerning it, proves also, that it was sufficiently famous in Greece, to make the Greeks think it worthy of belonging to their race and name; and we see, besides, that a wide distinction was drawn between the Latins and the Etruscans, the latter of whom they always regarded as foreigners, while in-the former they did but exaggerate the degree of connection really subsisting between the two nations, whose kindred is proved by the resemblance of their languages. But the fame of the Gaulish invasion, the first great movement of barbarians breaking down upon the civilized countries of Europe from the north, which had occurred within historical memory, drew the attention of the Greeks more than ever towards Italy. And as this invasion led to a more general mixture of nation and nation, for less than twenty years afterwards we read of Gaulish cavalry in the service of Dionysius of Syracuse, and of their being sent by him to Peloponnesus to help the Lacedaemonians against Epaminondas; so I may at this period draw up the curtain which has hitherto veiled from our view all countries and-people beyond the immediate neighborhood of the Tiber, and look as widely over the face of the world as the fullest knowledge of Greeks or Carthaginians enabled them at this time to see either eastward or westward. The fall of Veii, and the submission of Capena and Falerii, have shown us that The Etruscans. the greatness of the Etruscans was on the wane. In the days of their highest prosperity they had spread their dominion widely over Italy. The confederacy of their twelve cities, each of which was again the head of a smaller confederacy of the neighboring towns, occupied the whole country between the Tiber, the Macra, the Apennines, and the sea. But they were also to be found on the north of the Apennines,4 and another Etruscan confederacy, consisting also of their favorite number of twelve cities, extended to the shores of the Adriatic, and possessed the plain of the Po, and of its tributary rivers to the north and south, from the sea as high as the Trebia. Bononia, under its older name of Felsina, Melpum, Mantua, and Atria, with Cupra on the coast of the Adriatic, were Etruscan towns. Nor had their dominion been confined to the north of the Tiber; a third confederacy of twelve cities had occupied Campania;5 and amongst these were Capua, Nola, Surrentum, and Salernum. Plutarch, Camillus, 22. Heraclides noticed endless question of the origin of the Etruscans Rome in his treatise, iiEpi~ bvX; and said that or of the comparative antiquity of their several a report had come from the west, telling how a settlements, I have thought it sufficient merely host had come from the land of the Hyperbo-to notice the limits which their nation reached reans, without the Pillars of HercuLles, and had at the time of its greatest power. taken a Greek city called Rome, which was situ-5 It is well known that Niebuhr doubts the ated somewhere in those parts about the great existence of this Campanian Dodecapolis; and sea. he thinks that the whole statement of Etruscan 4 This is the positive statement of the ancient settlements in Campania is a mere mistake, ar’swriters; as Livy, V. 63, Strabo, V. p. 216, and ict out of the common confusion between the Verrius Flaccus and Csecina, quoted by the in-Tyrrhenians and the Etruscans. He says that ierpreters of Virgil, En. X. 198, in the Verona neither in the inscriptions found in Campallia, MS. Niebuhr, agreeably to his notion that the nor in the works of art, is there to be observed Etruscans came into Italy over the Alps, from any trace of an Etruscan population; and he the north, and not by sea from Asia, considers thinks that in the days of the Etruscan greattheir settlements in the valley of the Po to have ness, that is, in the third century of Rome. we been older than those in Etruria. Miller be-cannot conceive the possibility of Etruscan cololieyves them to have been of equal antiquity with nies being settled in Campania, while the intereach other; the Etruscans, or Rasena, he holds vening country between the Tiber and the Liris to have been an aboriginal people of Italy, set-was occupied by the Romans and the Opicae natled from time immemorial both on the north tions. See Vol. I. p. 74, 76 Enug. transl. MUller, and south sides of the Apennines.-(Etrusker, on the contrary, receives the common account of Einleitung, III.~ 1.) Micali places the original the ancient writers as containing in it nothing seat of the Etruscans in the Apennines; he improbable. Etrusker, Einleitung, IV. I.‘Pceven ventures to fix on the precise spot, namely, lybius’ testimony is positive that the Etruscans the mountains which extend from the high point possessed the Phlegrnean plains round Capua of La Falterona, above the valley of the Sieve, or and Nola, at the time when they were also in posofMngello.

(Storia degliantichi popoli Italiani session of the plains round the Po, II. 17. And Vol. I. p. 106.) From thence they descendeci there were writers whom Velleius Paterculns first into Etruria, and afterwards, having become quotes as saying that Capua and Nola were a civilized.

people. they sent out their colonies founded by the Etruscans, about forty-eight into northern Itiily. Without entering on the years before the common date of the foundation

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CHAP. XX.] CONDITION OF THE ETRUSCAN STATES. 163 Nay, there are traditions and names which have preserved a record of a still more extended Etruscan sovereignty: there was a time when their settlements in Campania must have been connected with those in Etruria by an uninterrupted line of conquered countries; the Volscians6 were once subject to the Etruscans; the name of Tusculum seems to show that their power had penetrated into Latium; and it is stated generally that they had possessed nearly the whole of Italy.’

But from this their height of greatness they had long since fallen. Within historical memory they were only to be found in Etruria, on the Po, and in Campania; but about half a century before the period at which we are now arrived, the Samnites had broken up their southern confederacy, and had wrested8 from them Capua, and most of their other cities in that quarter; while more recently, in the last year of the siege of Veii,5 the conquest of their northern confederacy was completed by the Gauls. Thus there only remained the central confederacy of Etruria Proper, and even this had been broken in upon, as we have seen, by the loss of Veii. Still there were left to them the powerful cities of Tarquinii, Vetulonium, Volaterrme, and Pisa, on or near the coast; and In the interior Vulsinii, Clusium, Perusia, Cortona, and Arretium. We are told that in early timesl0 the Etruscans had enjoyed the dominion of the neighboring seas, as well as the land of Italy. About one hun-Theirrelation withthe dred and fifty years before the fall of Veii, the Etruscans and Car-Greeks. thaginians in the western part of the Mediterranean stood in nearly the same relation to the Greeks who ventured into those seas, as the Spaniards in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did to the English in the West Indies and in South America. The Greeks were treated as interlopers, and they in their turn seem to have held, that there was no peace beyond the Straits of Messina.

Dionysius of Phocaea, when he fled from the ruin of the Ionian cause in Asia Minor, after the sea-fight off Miletus, considered the Etruscans’l and Carthaginians as his natural prey, just as Raleigh regarded the Spaniards; and those treaties of commerce between Etruria and Carthage, of which Aristotle”’ has preserved the memory, provided, it is likely, not only for their relations with one another, but for their mutual defence against a nation whom both looked upon as their common enemy. But with the growth of the Greek cities in Sicily the maritime dominion of the Etruscans began to fall; and after the great naval victory gained over them at Cuma by Gelon’s brother and successor, Hiero, they sank from sovereigns of the sea to pirates; and a few years afterwards, a very short time before the decemvirate at Rome, the Syracusansl3 sent a fleet to the coast of Etruria, with the of Rome. When Paterculus further quotes Cato, of the Oscan inhabitants; just as Mastarna andc as saying that Capua had been founded by the his followers once occupied Rome, or as the Etruscans, and yet that it had existed only two Campanians afterwards occupied Messina. The hundred and sixty years at the time of its con-Etruscan Doclecapolis, or confederacy of twelve.quest by the Romans in the second Punic war, cities, if indeed it ever existed in Campania, must there is indeed a calculation not very easy to be have been founded undoubtedly at an earlier explained; for this would place the foundation period; and yet we need not conceive it much of the Etruscan Capua, or Vulturnum, only earlier than the beginning of the commonwealth about fifty years earlier than its conquest by the of Rome. Samnites, and in the year of Rome 281, a period 6 Servius,.En. XI. v. 567. at which it is indeed difficult to conceive of the Servius, -En. XI. v. 567. Etruscans as establishing themselves for the first Livy, IV. 37. time in Campania. The solution of the whole 9 Melpum, oneoftherichestcitiesintheconnquestion is, probably, to be found in what Vir-try north of the Po, was said by Cornelius Negil says of Mantua: ” Gens illi triplex:…. pos [Pliny, Hist. Natur. III. 17]

to have been Tusco de sanguine vires.” The ruling portion destroyed by the Gauls on the very day on which of these Camllanian cities was Etruscan, but the Camillus took Veii. What gave occasion to this bulk of the population was Oscan. Thus, when story, representing the coincidence as so x ery they were conquered by the Samnites, the marks exact, it is hard to guess; but that generally the of the Etruscan dominion speedily vanished, fall of the northern Etruscan confederacy was and the inscriptions which have reached our contemporary with the siege of Veii, is rendered times are naturally Oscan, as that continued to sufficiently probable by the appearance of the be the language of the mass of the people. The Gauls in Etruria Proper so soon afterwards. foundation of Capua and Nola by the Etruscans 0 Livy, V. 33. may, in fact. have been no more than their oc-l Herodotus, VI. 17. cupation by some bands of Etruscan adventu-12 Politic.

III. 9. rers, who may have been engaged in the service 13 Diodorus, XI.

88.

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164 ~ HISTORY OF ROME. [CEOAP. XX avowed object of putting down their piracies. And yet we know there was an active commerce14 carried on between Etruria and the cities of old Greece, so advantageous to both nations, that we can scarcely conceive how either of them could have allowed the robberies of its own people to hazard its interruption. It is possible, however, that what the Greeks call piracy was a system of vexations and violence carried on against Greek vessels in the Etruscan seas, with the view of keeping the trade exclusively in Etruscan hands; and the robberies of which the Greeks complained were committed by the people of the small towns along the coast, who, not possessing natural advantages or wealth enough to engage on a large scale in commerce, turned their seamanship and enterprise to account in another way, and fitted out small vessels for piracy instead of the large ships employed for trading voyages. Thus it is expressly mentioned that the people of Cuere,“6 which was a large and wealthy city, possessing its harbor on the coast for the convenience of its trade, were wholly free from the reproach of piratical practices thrown by the Greeks upon the mass of their countrymen. Nothing can be more unequal than the fate of the three sister islands of Sicily, Sardinia. Sardinia, and Corsica. Whilst the first of them has rivalled in its fame the most distinguished countries of Europe, the two latter have remained in obscurity from the earliest times down to the present hour.

They seemed to repel that kindling spark of Greek civilization, which found so congenial an element in Sicily; and, therefore, as they did not receive what was the great principle of life in the ancient world, they were condemned to perpetual inactivity and helplessness. Of what race were the earliest inhabitants of Sardinia, we have no records to inform us.

Settlers from Africa, not Carthaginians, but native Lybians,‘6 are said to have crossed over to the island at a very remote period. They were followed at intervals, such was the Greek tradition, by some adventurers or fugitives from Greece and Asia Minor; but these all belong to the mythic period, and the Greek settlements are said to have been afterwards utterly extirpated, whilst those from Asia, described as fugitives from Troy, were driven to the mountains and became barbarized. A more probable statement mentions a colony of Iberians from Spain, the founders of Nora,“7 the oldest city in the island; and during the height of the Etruscan dominion, the Etruscan colonists brought in a new element to the already mingled population. When the power of the Carthaginians began to grow, Sardinia soon attracted their notice; already, in the first year of the Roman commonwealth, eight-and-twenty years before the expedition of Xerxes, it is spoken of as belonging exclusively to their dominion, in their famous commercial treaty with Rome; and at the period of the great Persian invasion of Greece, Sardinia is mentioned, together with Corsica, as furnishing mercenary soldiers’s to that great host with which Hamilcar invaded Sicily, and which was destroyed by Gelon at Himera. Yet a few years before, when the Persians were overpowering the Greek commonwealths in Asia Minor, Sardinia was more than once looked to by the Ionions,‘9 as offering them a desirable refuge from the conquerors’ dominion, and as affording every facility for a flourishing Greek colony. But it was to the Ionians of Asia like an unknown world; and no sufficient number of colonists could be induced to join in the enterprise, while a small body would have been utterly unable to maintain its ground against the Carthaginians. Thus Sardinia remained subject to Carthage; and as the Carthaginians wanted it chiefly to supply their armies with soldiers, and to provide harbors for their ships engaged in the trade with Etruria, they took no pains to improve its natural resources, but are said to have purposely kept waste” some ” We know this by the surest evidence 1D

Strabo, V. 2 ~ 3, p. 220. namely, by the vast quantities of Greek, and in 16 Pausanias, X. 17. particular of Athenian pottery, found in the re-17

Pausanias, X. 17. cent excavations at Vulci and Tarquinii. See 18

Ierodotus, VII. 165. the ” Discours de M1. Bunsen,” in the sixth vol-19
erodotus, I. 170, V. 124. ume of the ” Annali dell’ Instituto di corrispon-20 Aristotle, De mirabil. 100. denza archeologica,” p. 40, et seqq.

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CIAP. XX.] CORSICA-CAMPANIA. 165 of its most fertile districts, that no reports of its fertility might tempt thither what they above all things dreaded, a colony of Greeks. Corsica had undergone nearly the same course of events as Sardinia. - It oldest inhabitants were Iberians and Ligurians; it was then occu-corica pied by the Etruscans, who after having, by the aid of the Carthaginians, effected the ruin of the Greek settlement of Aleria or Alalia,2’ and having shared the dominion of the island with their Carthaginian allies down to the time of the decemvirate at Rome, were now, in the general decline of their nation, leaving it entirely to the Carthaginians. Corsica was valuable for its timber and its mines, but its agriculture was of no account, and its native inhabitants were reckoned among the most untamable of barbarians.22 These were the countries which bounded the horizon of Rome to the north and west.

Southward and eastward, beyond that belt of mountain country held by the Opican nations, the zEquians and Volscians, Campai. which girt in Latium from the Anio to the sea, there lay a country, destined ere long to be the favorite battle-field of the Romans, but a stranger to them as yet both in the relations of peace and of war. Campania, inhabited in the most remote times by the Sikelians,23 then wrested from them by the Opicans, receiving at a very early period the first germ of Greek:civilization, in the Chalcidian colony of Cuma, and afterwards subjected, like so many other parts of Italy, to the wide-spreading dominion of the Etruscans, had lately, as we have seen, submitted to a new invader, the nation of the Samnnites. The Samnites, a people of the Sabellian or Sabine race, had descended from their high valleys amidst-the ranges of the divided line of the Apennines, and were now the ruling nation in Campania, although they had by no means extirpated the older races of its inhabitants On the contrary, they seem themselves to have almost melted away into the general mass of their mixed subjects; the conquered did not become Samnites, but the conquerors became Campanians, the Opican or Oscan being the prevailing language, but the influence of the Greek colonies, Cuma and Neapolis, spreading powerfully around them, as usual, the arts and the manners of Greece. But the Samnite invasion, and the revolution which followed it, produced great disorder; the old inhabitants, whom the conquerors despoiled of their property, were driven to maintain themselves by their swords; the conquerors themselves had many adventurers amongst them, who preferred war with the prospect of fresh plunder, to a peaceful life in the country which they had won; and thus for more than’a century we read of numerous bands of Campanian or Opican mercenaries, partly Samnite and partly Oscan, employed in the wars of Sicily, as if foreign service had been one of the principal resources of the nation. It is mentioned that eight hundred of them were engaged by the Chalcidian Greeks of Cuma or Neapolis,24 to serve in the Athenian armament against Syracuse; but that arriving in Sicily after the destruction of the Athenians, they were hired by the Carthaginians. As a new people had thus arisen in Campania, so new names and a new power had lately come into notice in the south of Italy.

From Thurii to vsoion of te sonthof lRhegium, on the shore of the Ionian sea, from Rhegium to Posi-Italy by the Lucoinn. donia on the Tyrrhenian sea, the numerous Greek colonies which lined both coasts were settled in a country known to the early Greek writers by the names of Italia and CEnotria.25 The natives of the interior, (Enotrians and Chonians, had for many years past wanted either the will or the power to offer serious annoyance to the Greeks; and when Sybaris was destroyed by its neighbor city Croton, the natives took no advantage of these internal quarrels, and a new Greek colony, Thurii, arose in the place of Sybaris, without any opposition on their part. But the latter part of the fifth century before the Christian era, in other words, the early part of the fourth century of Rome, and the period of the 21 Herodotus, 1. 166. 24 Diodorus, XIII. 44.

22 Strabo, V. 2, 6, 7, p. 224. Aristotle Politica, VII 10. Herodot Thucyides, V. 2. erodotus L “Thucydides, VI. 2. 107.

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166 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHIAP. XX. Peloponnesian war, was a time marked by natural as well as political calamities beyond all remembered example. The pestilences, which we have already noticed as causing such havoc at Rome and throughout Latium, travelled, we may be sure, into Samnium also; their visitations are often accompanied by unfavorable seasons, which cause scarcity or famine; and the distress occasioned by one or both of these scourges, may have led to those movements amongst the Samnites, which at this period so greatly changed the face of Italy. On one side, as we have seen, they broke in upon the Opicans of the valley of the Vulturnus and the country round Vesuvius; on another they overwhelmed the CEnotrians and Chonians,t2 and spread themselves as far as the Ionian sea. The tribe or mixed multitude which moved on this expedition southwards, was afterwards known by the name of Lucanians. It does not follow that they were numerous, far less are we to suppose that they extirpated the older inhabitants; but as conquerors they gave their name to the country, and till they gradually became a settled people, they were the terror of the Greek colonies. It is probable that many of the (Enotrians became barbarized by the oppressions and example of their conquerors, and that the whole population of the interior, known under one common name of Lucanians, carried on a restless plundering warfare against the Greek cities on both coasts of the peninsula. Posidonia fell into their hands, and the Greek inhabitants, like the Opicans of Capua, became a subject people in their own city; and so general was the terror excited by the Lucanian inroads, that the Greeks formed a league27 amongst themselves for their mutual defence, and if any city was backward in coming to the rescue, when summoned to aid against the Lucanians, its generals were to be put to death. But whilst the barbarians were thus driving them to the sea, another enemy drove them back from the sea to the barbarians.

Dionysius of’ Syracuse had formed an alliance with the Lucanians, hoping, with their aid, to obtain possession of the Greek cities; he repeatedly invaded Italy, destroyed Caulon and Hipponium, and made himself master of Rhegium. When the Lucanians first became formidable to the Italian Greeks, they were Character of the Lucn-stigmatized as a horde of the lowest barbarians,28 a mixed band nians. of robbers, swelled by fugitive slaves, and desperate adventurers of every description. But when time had converted the invaders and plunderers of (Enotria into its regular inhabitants and masters, when the Lucanians had an opportunity of displaying the better points of their character, then the contrast between their simple and severe manners, and the extreme profligacy of the Greek colonies, could not fail to attract attention. “The Lucanians,” says Heraclides Ponticus,25 “are a hospitable and an upright people.” And another testimony30 declares that “amongst the Lucanians, extravagance and idleness are punishablb~ crimes; and if any man lends money to a notorious spendthrift, the law will no6 enable him to recover it.” We find similar praises bestowed by Scymnus of Chios on the Illyrians, who a century before his time had been infamous for their piracies. But when a rude people have lost somewhat of their ferocity, and have not yet acquired the vices of a later stage of civilization, their character really exhibits much that is noble and excellent, and both in its good and bad points it so captivates the imagination, that it has always been regarded by the writers of a more advanced state of society with an admiration even beyond its merits. The extreme southeastern point, the heel of Italy, was the country of the 26 Strabo, VI. 1, ~ 2, 3, p. 253, 254. latter part of the fourth century before the 27 Diodorus, XIV. 101. Christian nera: he was a disciple of Plato, Spen28 We Athenians, says Isocrates, paov pTrati-sippus, and Aristotle. See Fynes Clinton, Fasti oietv rao? PlotloivoigS
ravir7s r-EtbyEveiaS e Tpl3aX-Rellen. Vol. III. Appendix XII.;Aoi Kai ACsvKavor TlE avr-owv voAEvegas. De Pace, 30 Nicolas Damascenus, de moribus gentium. ~ 62, p. 169. Artic. “‘Lucani.” He lived in the Augustan ]9 De Politiis sive rebuspublicis. Artic. ” Lua-age. eani.” Hleraclides Ponticus flourished in the

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CHAP. XX.] DIONYSIUS OF SICILY. 167 Iapygians or Apulians, the one being the Greek and the other the Latin form of the same name.31 They stretched round the Iapy-ITpyga. gian cape, and were to be found along the coast of the Adriatic, as far as the headland of Garganus. But neither these nor the Sabellian nations immediately beyond them, nor the Umbrians, who lived again still further to the northwest, and joined the Etruscan settlements on the shores of the Adriatic, were, as yet, become famous in history.

There was, however, a movement beginning about this period on the east of Italy, which threatened to lead to the most important conse-Interference ofionys. quences. Dionysius of Syracuse, unsatisfied with his Sicilian do-iun of Syracuse in the minion, and looking to Greece itself as the most tempting field of aairs of outh Italy. ambition to every Greek, was desirous of getting a footing on the coast of Epirus, and of establishing a naval power in the Ionian sea and the Adriatic. Accordingly he entered into an alliance with the Illyrians,32 and, unless there is a confusion between the two names, he occupied both the island of Issa,33 the modern Lissa, and the town of Lissus34 on the main land, a little to the north of Epidamnus, and kept a fleet regularly stationed at this latter settlement, to uphold the reputation of his power. But there is a statement in Pliny35
and other writers, that Ancona, Mumana, and Adria, on the coast of Italy, were also Sicilian settlements. Adria is expressly said to have been founded by Dionysius, and his intercourse with these countries is further shown by the fact, that he was in the habit of importing the Venetian horses,36 as the best breed for racing; the great games of Greece being to him, as they had been to Alcibiades, an object of peculiar interest and ambition. Strabo also calls Ancona a Syracusan colony,37 but ascribes its foundation to some exiles who fled from the tyranny of Dionysius. That there was a Greek population there, and that the Greek language was prevalent, is proved by its coins; yet on the other hand, Scylax, though he names Ancona, does not call it a Greek city, a circumstance which he rarely or never admits, when he is speaking of Greek cities built on a foreign coast. The probability is, that the death of Dionysius, and the subsequent decline of his power, left these remote colonies to themselves; that their communication with Greece and Sicily was greatly checked by the growing piracies of the Illyrians, and that they admitted, either willingly or by necessity, an intermixture of barbarian citizens from the surrounding nations, which destroyed or greatly impaired their Greek character. But it marks the power of Dionysius, that at one and the same time he should have been founding colonies on the coast of the Adriatic, and t}hat on the other side of Italy he should have been master of the sea without opposition, insomuch that, under pretence of restraining the piracies of ” See Niebuhr, Vol. I. p. 151. Ed. 1827. ness of so famous a man. But Dioclorus must i2 DiOdOorus, XV. 13. have left out something in the middle of the 33 Seymnius Chins, V. 413. Scylax also calls passage, and joined the end with the beginning Issa a Greek city. with most extraordinary carelessness; hK raVr7s i4 Diodorus, XV. 13, 14. It is hard to account never coulcl have referred to rlyv 6XVry riv dvouafor the strange state of the actual text of Diodo-o[ievnyv Auac6v, but, as I should suppose, to Syrrus, in which, after mentioning the foundation of acuse, such as it was when Dionysius first beLissus, it goes on, EK
rav’rrs o’v SPs#cl~EUOS Atovv~i-came tyrant. Some mention of Syracuse must loS KareCgKdac ve&pa c. K. r. N. describing, in three have preceded the description of the docks and lines, the great works of Dionysius at Syracuse, walls, and the expression, ray rXsE, as at present which Diodorus had already mentioned at the sentence is either wholly ungrammatical, o0 length in the preceding book, and which have is mere nonsense. Mitford really supposes that no intelligible connection with the foundation EK ra6rnss refers to Lissus and talks of the adof Lissus. It is a curious specimen of the patch-vantages derived from this colony giving Diowork of so many of the ancient histories; for nysius the means of building docks, &ec., at Syrthe whole passage, beginning at IadpLou Kard riva acuse; an interpretation equally at variance XPenja6v, and going down to the end of the chap-with grammar and with history. ter, is taken apparently from some account 35 Rist. Natural. III. 13. Numana a Siculia either of Paros, or of the Greek settlements in condita; ab iisdem colonia Ancona. Etymoloc the western seas, where the writer having been gic. Magn.

in “A piaS. led accidentally to mention Dionysius, au 7rpda-36 Strabo, V.

1, ~ 4, p. 212. asron aro? Atovvriov O rTou rvpdavov, took the op-37 V.

4, ~ 2, p. 241. portunity to give a brief sketch of the great

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168 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXI. the Etruscans, he appeared with a fleet of sixty triremes‘8 on the coast of Etruria; passed the mouth of the Tiber almost within sight of Rome, landed on the territory of Caere, defeated the inhabitants who came out to resist him, sacked their seaport of Pyrgi, and carried off from the plunder of the temple of Leucothea,“5 or Mater Matuta, a sum computed at no less than a thousand talents. The mention of this eminent man leads me naturally to Sicily, to take some notice of the heart and root of that mighty dominion which spread out its arms so widely and so vigorously. Besides, the Roman history has hitherto presented us with nothing but general pictures, or sketches rather, of the state of the commonwealth as a whole: individuals have been as little prominent as the figures in a landscape: they have been too subordinate, and occupied too small a space in the picture, to enable us to form any distinct notion of their several features. But Dionysius outtopped by his personal renown the greatness of the events in which he was an actor; he stood far above all his contemporaries, as the most remarkable man in the western part of the civilized world. We may be allowed, then, to overstep the limits of Italy, and to consider the fortunes and character of a man who was the ruler of Syracuse and of Sicily, during a period of nearly “orty years in the middle of the fourth century of Rome. CHAPTER XXI.

DIONYSIUS THE ELDER, TYRANT OF SYRACUSE. I6irXtov tEKtirtovad qact EpwT-Evra, rtvas?uroXapeadver 7i/ayIeaarTKtordrov v avdopas yyovevat can oio vF rO>t\pfloro aTer, e rov, s rep?‘AyaNot-fa Kai Atovhatrov TroO

EgKEctera;.-Kai a’rept,v 7rev roltorTy, avlpduo’ Es ifrsraao-,v a’yeLv TOV; avaytvo’trcKvras…. KaiSaov 7rpoooref’val 7Obv Ms7dreo’covra x6yovApP6;EL.-POLYBIUS, XV. 35. THE history of colonies seldom offers the noblest specimens of national charState of Syrcuse be-acter. The Syracusan people, made up, in the course of a long fore the tyranny of alternation of tyrannies and factions, out of the most various elements, had been bound together by no comprehensive code of laws, and, from their very circumstances, they could not find a substitute for such a code in the authority of ancient and inherited rites of religion, and of the manners and customs of their fathers. The richer citizens, who often possessed very large fortunes, were always susHermocrates and Dio-pected, and probably not without reason, of aiming at making cles. themselves tyrants; whilst the people, possessing actual power, yet feeling that its tenure was precarious, were disposed to be suspicious, even beyond measure, and were prone to violence and cruelty. The Athenian invasion, by obliging the Syracusans to fit out a great naval force, had increased, as usual, the power of the poorer classes,’ who always formed the great mass of the seamen in the Greek commonwealths: while, on the other hand, although Hermocrates, one of the most eminent of the aristocratical leaders, had personally displayed great courage and ability, and although the cavalry in which the I8 Diodorus, XV. 14. Pseuldo-Aristotle, (Eco-Aristotle. “Leucothee Groecis, Matuta voca. nom. II. p. 1349. Ed. Bekker.

bere nostris.” Ovid, Fasti, VI. 545. a’TEXafev IE roT rU; AuetoOEas IEspo.

Pseudo-l Aristotle, Politic. V. 4.

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CHAP. XXI.] CODE OF DIOCLES. 1iW richest citizens set ved had always acquitted itself well, yet the heavyarmed infantry, which contained the greatest proportion of the upper classes, had gained little credit; and the victory over the invaders had been won by the seamen of Syracuse far more than by its soldiers. Thus the popular party became greatly strengthened by the issue of the invasion: Hermocrates and some of his friends were banished,2 while Dioces, the head of the popular party, a man somewhat resembling the’ tribune Rienzi, a sincere and stern reformer, but whose zealous imagination conceived schemes beyond his power to compass, endeavored at once to give to his countrymen3 a pure democracy, and to establish it on its only sure foundation, by building it upon a comprehensive system of national law. Of the details of this code we know nothing. Diodorus ascribes to it the high merits of conciseness and precision, and while he speaks of it as Code severe, he praises it for its discrimination in proportioning its punishments to the magnitude of the crime. But its best praise is, that it continued to enjoy the respect, not only of the Syracusans, but of other Sicilian states also, till the Roman law superseded it. This was the law of Syracuse, and Diocles was the lawgiver: while others, who in the time of Timoleon, and again in the reign of Hiero, either added to it, or modified it, were called by no other title than expounders of the law;4 as if the only allowed object for succeeding legislators was to ascertain the real meaning of the code of I iocles, and not to alter it. But democracy and law, when first introduced amongst a corrupt and turbulent people, require to be fostered under the shelter of profound Effotsoftlhe.ristocrat. peace. Unluckily for Diocles, his new constitution was born to icalparty agsinstit. stormy times; its promulgation was coincident with the renewal of the Carthaginian invasions of Sicily, after an interval of nearly a century. “War,” says Thucydides,5

“makes men’s tempers as hard as their circumstances.” The Syracusan government was engaged in an arduous struggle; the power of its enemy was overwhelming, while every failure in military operations bred an increase of suspicion and disaffection at home. Then the aristocratical party began, as they are wont to do, to use popular language, in order to excite the passions of the multitude, and thus make them the instruments of their own ruin. They encouraged the cry of treason and corruption against the generals of the commonwealth; and personal profligacy was united with party zeal. Hipparinus was a member of the aristocratical party; he was also a desperate man, because he had ruined himself by his extravagance;6
both these causes united made him anxious to overthrow the-popular government; and looking about for a fit instrument to accomplish his purpose, he found and brought forward Dionysius. There must have been no ordinary promise of character in Dionysius to lead to such a choice. He was a young man under five-and-twenty,1 not Early character of Diodistinguished for his birth or fortune, and his personal condition nytue. was humble; he was a clerks in some one of the departments of the public business. But he had been a follower of Hermocrates, and had accompanied him in his attempt to effect his return from exile by force, and had been wounded’ in the conflict which took place on that occasion, and in which Hermocrates was killed. He was brave, active, and eloquent; the wealth’ and influence of a a Xensph. Hellenic. I. i. 27.

Thucydides,’~ It is said that at the beginning of his career, VIII. 85.

when he was fined, on one occasion, by the mag3 Diodorus, XIII. 34, 85.

istrates for addressing the people irregularly, 4’,ErSys7rv ro veopoOerov.

Diod. XIII. 85. Philistus, the historian, a man of large property, 6 I1I.

82. BiaLos WBdoraXeo, Kai,rp6; r 7raposra paid the fine for him, and told him to go on -ai 6pya’s TOy zro)iv byrooo?. speaking as much as he pleased, and that as 6 Aristotle, Politica, V. 6. often as the magistrates fined him, so often 7 Cicero, Tuseulan. Disputat. V. 20. would he continue to discharge the fine for him, 8 Demosthenes, Leptines, prope finem.

Diodorus, XIII. 91. 9 Diodorus, XIII. 75.

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170 HISTORY OF ROME [CHAP. XXJ powerful party supported him, and he came forward when men’s minds were wrought up to the highest pitch of alarm and irritation; for Agrigentum, after a seven months’ siege, had been taken and sacked by the Carthaginians, and the fugitives who fled to Syracuse for shelter, ascribed the loss of their city to the misconduct of the Syracusan generals, who had been sent to its relief, and had allowed it to fall unprotected. The popular party was no longer headed by Diocles. We do’not know the Death ofDiocle. exact time or occasion of his death, but the circumstances attending it are most remarkable. One of the laws of his code had denounced the penalty of death against any man who came into the market-place armed. This was especially directed, no doubt, against the aristocratical party, who were apt to resort to violence,1 in order to break up or intimidate the assemblies of the people, or to revenge themselves on any of the more obnoxious popular leaders. It happened that Diocles had marched out of the city on an alarm of some hostile inroad, perhaps that very attempt’ of Hermocrates to get back to Syracuse by force, which has been already noticed. But he was suddenly recalled by the news that the enemy were in the city, and, armed as he was, he hastened back to meet them, and found them already in possession ot the market-place. A private citizen, most probably after the fray was over, when the death of so eminent a citizen as Hermocrates would be deeply felt, even by many of his political adversaries, called out to Diodes, in allusion to his having appeared in arms in the market-place, “Ah, Diocles, thou art making void thine own laws!” ” Nay rather,” was his reply, ” I will ratify them thus;” and he instantly stabbed himself to the heart.

Such a spirit, so sincere, and so selfdevoted, might well have been the founder of freedom and of legal order for his country, and saved her, had his life been prolonged, from the selfish ambition of Dionysius. His place at the head of the government was supplied, inadequately, as it apRestorationof thea - pears, by Daphnaeus and Demarchus.3 Dionysius played the tocraticalexiles. demagogue ably; inveighing against the incapacity of the generals, representing them as men of overweening influence,‘4 and urging that the people would do well to choose in their place men of humbler means, whom they would be able more effectually to control. Accordingly the assembly deposed their actual generals, and elected others in their room, and amongst these was Dionysius. Thus far successful, he ventured on a more decisive measure, a general recall of exiled citizens.“l It should be remembered, that in the continual struggles between the aristocratical and popular parties throughout Greece, the triumph of one side was accompanied by the banishment of the most forward supporters of the other. Every state had thus always its exiles, like the fuorusciti of the Italian republics, whose absence’” was essential to the maintenance of the existing order of things, and whose recall was equivalent to a revolution. 11 As the aristocrats at Corcyra broke into the 3 Diodorus, XIII. 96. Daphnnus had comcouncil-house with daggers, and murdered the mandecl the Syracusan troops which had been heads of the popular party to the number of sent ineffectually to the relief of Agrigentum. about sixty, partly to escape from the payment Diodorus, XIII. 86. Demarchus was one of the of a fine which they had lawfully incurred, and generals sent to supersede Hermocrates in the partly to prevent the passing of a decree for an command of the auxiliary force which was coalliance with Athens. Thucyd. III. 70. operating with the Peloponnesians, on the coast 12 It is true that, according to Diodorus, Dio-of Asia Minor, against the Athenians. Thucyd. cles had been banished some time before [XIII. VIII. 85. 75]; but his account of the affairs of Syracuse, 14 Diodorus, XIII. 91. Aristotle, Politica, V.

between the Athenian expedition and the tyr-5. AtOVVtoL5 tcarryopv Aaevaiuo Kad rTv rXovGa1ov anny of Dionysius, is exceedingly fragmentary, 1tiLOq7 raN rvPavvtaos, lta rlrv EXOpav 7raruivOteis and observes no chronological order. It may 67jOTrIKUf cjv. be, then, that Diocles had been recalled pre-15 Diodorus, XIII. 92. viously to the final attempt of Hermocrates; at l Thus it was one of the clauses in the oath.least the circumstances of that attempt, and of taken by every member of the court of Heliaea, the affray which led to the death of Diocles, bear at Athens, ” that he would not recall those citia remarkable resemblance to each other. See zens who were in exile.” Demosthenes, TimocDiodorus, XIIL. 33
and 75. rates, p. 746.

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CHAr. XXI.] GENERAL POLICY OF DIONYSIUS. 171 The Syracusan exiles were the youth of the aristocratical party, the friends and comrades of Hermocrates, bold and enterprising, proud and licentious, the counterparts of Kaeso Quinctius and of the supporters of the decemvir Appius; men whose natural hatred and scorn of the popular party was embittered by the recollection of their exile. An obdurate spirit is not the vice cf a democracy; the kindly feelings of the people, their sympathies with youth and high birth, their hopes and-their fears were alike appealed to; the tide was already setting towards aristocracy; the assembly decreed a general recall of the exiles, and the revolution from that moment became inevitable. The overthrow of the constitution of Diocles and of the popular party was sure; but it was owing to the terror of the Carthaginian arms, and Dionysius a ppointed the personal ascendency of Dionysius, that there was set up in its creptaing.enerll of tn place the despotism of a single man, instead of an aristocracy. Dionysius continued to attack his colleagues,‘7 no less than the generals who had preceded them; “they were selling Syracuse to the Carthaginians,” he said; ” they were withholding the soldiers’ pay, and appropriating the public money to themselves; he could not endure to act with such associates, and was resolved therefore to lay down his office.” A dictatorship is the most natural government for seasons of extraordinary peril, when there appears a man fit to wield it.

The terror of the coalition drove the French, amidst the full freshness of their enthusiasm for liberty, to submit to the despotism of the committee of public safety; and Dionysius, bowing all minds to his ascendency by the mighty charm of superior genius, was elected sovereign commander of the commonwealth.” It is said that Hipparinus, who first brought him forward, was appointed as his nominal colleague; with as much of real equality of power as was enjoyed by Lebrun and Cambaceres when they were elected consuls along with Napoleon. From this time forward Dionysius retained the supreme power in Syracuse till his death, a period of nearly forty years.

When he first assumed the government, the Peloponnesian war was not yet ended: and Length ofhireign. one of his latest measures was to send aid to his allies the Lacedemonians, when Sparta itself was threatened with conquest by an army of the Theban confederacy, headed by Epaminondas. In the course of this long reign he had to contend more than once with domestic enemies, and was always more or less engaged in hostility with Carthage. The first he crushed, and from the last, although reduced on one occasion to the extremest jeopardy, he came forth at last triumphant.

Without entering into a regular account of his life and actions, it will be enough to take a general view of his government in some of its most important relations at home and abroad. Dionysius owed his elevation, as we have seen, to the ascendency of his own genius acting upon minds agitated by suspicion of their own gov-Internal a.,irs. State eminment, and by intense fear of the progress of the Carthaginians. ~fp”rt’e’o The recall of the exiles gave him a number of devoted partisans, and the war led to the employment of a large body of mercenary soldiers, who both from inclination and interest would be disposed to support an able and active general. These remained faithful to him’” when his ill success against the Carthaginians, in the 17 Diodorus, XIII.. 94. also should be invested with these fl,! powers, 18 17fPLayog atronpadrwp. It is not to be sup-and that the people should take the oath which, posed that this title conferred that unconstitu-in fact, conveyed them, namely, “that they tional and absolute power which the Greeks would let their generals exercise their command called” tyranny.” It implied merely an unre-at their discretion.”

See Thucydides, VI. 2G, stricted power of conducting the operations of‘2.

But as the perpetual dictatorship at Romo the war, and released the general from the ne-was equivalent to a tyranny, so Dionysius, by cessity of consulting the government at home retaining his command for an unlimited time, as to his measures, and of communicating his and abusing the military power which it gave plans to them. It was the title conferred on Ni-him for purposes wholly foreign to its proper cias and his colleagues by the Athenians, when objects, did, in fact, convert it into a political they sent their great expedition to Sicily; and despotism. after the Syracusans had sustained their first 19 Diodorus, XIII. 112, 113.

defeat, Hermocrates urged that their generals

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172 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XX1 very first year of his government, had shaken his popularity amongst the Syracusans, and encouraged them to attempt an insurrection. Nor was it the old popular party to whom he was most obnoxious, but the citizens of the richer classes, who as they would have rejoiced in the overthrow of the democracy, so were no way pleased to see it succeed by the despotism of a single man, under which they were sure to be the greatest sufferers. And partly, perhaps, from this very reason the poorer classes began to be better affected to his government, and he showed a desire to win their attachment. The knights, or richest class, fled from Syracuse in great numbers, or were banished, or put to death;20 a great mass of landed property was thus placed at his disposal; and there was, besides, as in every state of the ancient world, a considerable amount also of public land, of which wealthy individuals had ordinarily a beneficial occupation. With all these means in his power, he put in practice the two grand expedients of revolutionary leaders, a large admission of new citizens, and a division of the public and confiscated land amongst them. The new citizens were many of them enfranchised slaves, to whom he assigned houses in Syracuse, as well as portions of land in the country. Thus the state of parties had assumed a new form; the better part of both the old aristocratical and popular interests were drawn together by their common danger, while Dionysius was supported by a few individuals of the richest class who shared in the advantages of the tyranny, by the mercenary soldiers, and by the lowest portion of the whole population, who owed to him their political existence. Accordingly, as the knights had shown their hostility to his government, so Fruitless attempt to also did that large body of citizens of the middle classes, who in overthrow the power of the ancient commonwealths composed the heavyarmed infantry.

Dionysius. When Dionysius led them into the field to make war against the Sikelians (the old inhabitants of Sicily, whom the Greek colonies had driven from the coast into the interior of the island), they openly rose against his authority,’ and invited the exiled knights to join them. This was one of the greatest dangers of his life; he fled to Syracuse, and was there besieged; but the strength of the walls protracted the siege, and time led to divisions and quarrels amongst the besiegers. Meantime Dionysius engaged the services of a body of those Campanian mercenaries,22
whose reputation for valor was so high at this period in Sicily, and by their aid he defeated his antagonists. But, wishing to break effectually so formidable a combination, he offered an amnestya3 to all who would return and live quietly in Syracuse; and finding that few on y of the exiled knights accepted this offer, and feeling that the class of heavyarmed citizens was no less hostile to him, he took advantage of the ensuing harvest, when the citizens were engaged in getting in their corn in the country, and sent parties of soldiers24 to their houses in Syracuse to carry off their arms. After this he began to increase his navy, the seamen being now the class of citizens on whom he could most rely, and further strengthened himself by raising an additional force of mercenaries. From this time till his death, a period of nearly thirtyseven years, the governauses of the per ment of Dionysius met with no further disturbance from any do-.ence of his govero-mestic enemies.

Eight years afterwards, indeed, when the great Carthaginian armament under Imilcon was besieging Syracuse, an attempt was made25 by some of the knights to excite the people against him, and Theodorus is said to have attacked him in the public assembly as the author of all the calamities of his country. But the influence of the commander of a Lacedaemonian auxiliary force26 then at Syracuse was exerted strongly in his favor; his ao Diodorus, XIII. 113, XIV. 7. known expedients of the Greek tyrants to ob21 Diodorus, XIV. 7. - tain or to secure their power. Tjv 7rapaiseto 2’

Diodorus, XIV. 8. =roorat rgv B7rXXwv (scil. ol rTipavvYot) says Aris23

Diodorus XIV. 9. totle, implying that it was their ordinary man24

Diodorus, XIV. 10. This is the,rapatpset; ner of proceeding. Politica, V.

10.‘tv %waXov, the disarming of these classes which 25 Diodorus, XIV. 64, 65. asually possessed arms, one of the most well-20 Diodorus, XIV. 70.

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CHAr. XXI.] TYRANNY OF HIS GOVERNMENT. 173 own mercenaries were formidable; and in a season of such imminent danger fromn a foreign enemy, many even of those who disliked his government would thinlk it inexpedient to molest it. On this occasion he tried all means to win popularity, mixing familiarly with the poorer citizens, gratifying some by presents, and admitting others to those common tables or messes of the soldiers, which were kept at the public expense. But the permanent security of his dominion rested on his mercenary troops, who were ever ready to crush the beginnings of a tumult, on his own suspicious vigilance, on the ascendency of his firm and active character, and on the mutual jealousies and common weakness of the old aristocratical and popular parties, among whom there seems to have been no eminent man capable of opposing so able a tyrant as Dionysius. It should be remembered that the far weaker government of the second Dionysius was only overthrown, in the first instance, by the defection of a member of his own family; and when he was expelled a second time, the Syracusans could find no competent leader amongst themselves; they were obliged to-invite Timoleon from Corinth. All the ancient writers, without exception, call the government of Dionysius a tyranny.2”

This, as is well known, was with them no vague and His government was a disputable term, resting on party impressions of character, and thus tyranny. liable to be bestowed or denied according to the political opinions of the speaker or writer. It describes a particular kind of government, the merits of which might be differently estimated, but the facts of its existence admitted of no dispute. Dionysius was not a king, because hereditary monarchy was not the constitution of Syracuse; he was not the head of the aristocratical party, enjoying supreme power, inasmuch as they were in possession of the government, and he was their most distinguished member: on the contrary, the richer classes were opposed to him, and he found his safety in banishing them in a mass, and confiscating their property. Nor was he the leader of a democracy, like Pericles and Demosthenes, all powerful, inasmuch as the free love and admiration of the people made his will theirs; for what democratical leader ever surrounded himself with foreign mercenaries, or fixed his residence in the citadel,2
or kept up in his style of living and in the society which surrounded him the state and luxury of a king’s court? He was not an hereditary constitutional king, nor the leader of bne of the great divisions of the commonwealth: but he had gained sovereign power by fraud, and maintained it by force; he represented no party, he sought to uphold no ascendency but that of his own individual self; and standing thus apart from the sympathies of his countrymen, his objects were essentially selfish, his own safety, his own enjoyments, his own power, and his own glory. Feeling 27 Diodorus, XIV. 70. Tlta l SE a2 T avawirta a sort of privileged order.

And thus the offer 7rapsEldpave. That this institution of syssitia, of admission to such a society would be an effector common tables, was not peculiar to the La-ual bribe to many, as being at once a benefit cedemonians, is well known. It was practised and a distinction. at Carthage, and even its first origin was as-28s Even Xenophon calls him “

Dionysius the cribed, not to any Greek people, but to the tyrant.”

(Hellenic. II. 2, ~ 24.) It is remark(Enotrians of the south of Italy. See Aristotle, able, however, and confirms Niebuhr’s opinion Politic. II. 11, VII. 10. Aristotle blames the that the Hellenics contain two distinct works, Lacedaemonians for altering the character of the and that the five last books were written many institution by making each individual contrib-years later than the two first, when Xenophon’s ate his portion, instead of causing the whole feelings were become more con-iletely aristoexpense to be defrayed by the public. The ob-cratical or antipopular, that in the latter books ject of the common tables was to promote a so-Dionysius is not called tyrant, but is spoken ol cial and brotherly feeling amongst those who simply as ” Dionysius,” or as ” the first Dionysmet at them; and especially with a view to their ins.” The offensive appellation was not: to be becoming more confident in each other, so that bestowed on the ally of Lacedlemon and Agesiin the day of battle they might Stand more firmly laus. together, and abide by one another to the death. 29 Mitford’s mistake in supposing that. the With Dionysius, these common tables would be island at Syracuse was not the citadel; and arconfined to his guards, or to such of the sol-guing that Dionysius was not a tyrant, because diers as he could most rely on; they would be he resided amongst the “nautic multitude,” maintained at his expense, and would be used and not on the heights of Epipole, which Mitas a means of keeping up a high and exclusive ford imagines to have been the citadel, will be feeling amongst their members, as belonging to shown in a subsequent note.

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174 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXI. that he had no right to be where he was, he was full of suspicion and jealousy, and oppressed his subjects with taxes at once heavy and capriciously levied, not only that he might enrich himself, but that he might impoverish and weaken them, A government carried on thus manifestly for the good of one single governor, with an end of such unmixed selfishness, and resting mainly upon the fear, not the love, of its people; with whatever brilliant qualities it might happen to be gilded, and however free it might be from acts of atrocious cruelty, was yet called by the Greeks a tyranny. It was no part of the policy of such tyrants to encourage trade or agriculture, His taxes and slia-that their own wealth might be the legitimate fruit of the general tions.

wealth of their people. On the contrary, their financial expedients were no other than blind and brute exactions, which satisfied their immediate wants; it mattered not at what cost of future embarrassment. Aristotle names Dionysius’ government,30 as exemplifying the tyrant’s policy cf impoverishing his people by an excessive taxation. The direct taxes were at one time so heavy,31 that it was computed that in the course of five years, they equalled the entire yearly value of the property on which they were levied: then there was the old fraud of debasing the coin,32 the oppression of forced loans, which he paid in a depreciatedcurrency, direct robbery of his people under the pretence of ornamenting the temples of the gods, and an unscrupulous sacrilege, which appropriated the very offerings to the gods, so made, to his own individual uses. With such a system, it is not wonderful that plunder should have been one of his favorite resources. The sale of prisoners taken in war, one of the most important of the ways and means of the first CEesar, was so much a matter of ordinary usage in the ancient world, that it brought no peculiar obloquy on Dionysius. But the sack of the wealthy temple of the Mater Matuta on the Etruscan coast, was considered as little better than piracy,33 and it was reported that his settlemnent at Lissus, on the coast of Epirus, was mainly intended to further his design of plundering the very temple of Apollo at Delphi.34 We read of his colonies up. the Adriatic; but the only notice of any commerce carried on with those countries, mentions merely the importation of horses35 from the country of the Veneti, in order that they might run in the chariots of Dionysius at the great games of Greece and of Sicily. Every strong and able government, however oppressive, is yet sure to accomHe fortifies and enlarg-plish some works at once magnificent and useful; and thus the extoSyracuse. tended walls of Syracuse, which included the whole slope of Epipolie to its summit, in addition to the older city which the Athenians had bono Politica, V. 11.

is remarkable, as it seems to indicate that tne 31 Aristotle’s expression is, iv rivrs yeap Ereoiv official valuation of property at Syracuse, as at rti AtLvvsiou r)v obtifav &‘raaav eiaeslvoXivat v-Rome, took place every five years. vipaLve. This can only mean, I suppose, one of 32 This, and the following instance of Dionystwo things: either, as I have explained it in the ius’ exactions, are taken from the second chap  text, that Dionysius imposed a property tax of ter of the second book of the Cconomica, corntwenty per cent., so that in five years a man monly ascribed to Aristotle. This chapter, might be said to have paid taxes to the amount however, is clearly not Aristotle’s, but, as Nieof his whole income, or else that a man’s prop-buhr has shown (Kleine Historische Schriften, erty was valued much below its real worth; so p. 412), must have been a later work, written that twenty per cent. on the rated amount of in Asia Minor, and is a collection of all sorts of his property, not of his income merely, would financial tricks and extortions, which are recombe very much less than a fifth part of what he mended to the imitation of the satraps and offireally possessed. It might be thus possible cers of the monarchies of Alexander’s succesthat a man might have paid in five years a sum sors. And whoever reads the whole of the col -
equal to the rated amount of his whole prop-lection will find no reason to doubt the truth of erty; but that he should literally have paid a the stories about Dionysius, as being unprecesum equal to his whole real property seems to dented or unworthy of him. me an absurdity. To notice no other objections, 3s Diodorus, XV. 14. Strabo calls it the termwas it ever known that the money in any coun-ple of Ilithyia, or Lucina; and adds, that Diotry bore such a proportion to the value of the nysius plundered it in the course of an expediproperty in it as to render it possible in five tion to Corsica. V. 2, ~‘8, p. 226. years to convert all property into cash? For 34 Diodorus, XV. 13. the rest, the period of five years here mentioned 15 Strabo, V. 1, ~ -4, p. 212.

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C.AP. XXI.] WARS WITH CARTHAGE. 175 sieged, were the work of Dionysius.

These were built36 und(r the terror of a Carthaginian invasion; and his docks for two hundred ships, or, according to other accounts, for a far greater number, were constructed at once for defensive and offensive war against the same enemy. His works in the island of Ortygia had an object more directly selfish. This oldest and strongest part of the city of Syracuse, which had originally constituted the whole city, was now, since the town had spread over the adjacent parts of the mainland of Sicily, come to be regarded as the citadel. Here Dionysius fixed his residence,3”

and built a strong wall to cut off its communication with the rest of Syracuse; he also appropriated it exclusively to his own friends and his mercenary soldiers, allowing no other Syracusan to live in it. For the same reasons under the Roman government, the island was the residence of the Roman prietor and his officers,3s and the Syracusans were still forbidden to inhabit it. Dionysius had owed his elevation to the terror inspired by the arms of Carthage; and the great service which he rendered to Greece and to ir Foreign affair the world, was his successful resistance to the Carthaginian power, War. with Carthage *the I talian Greek. and opposing a barrier to their conquest of Sicily. The very difficulty of his task, and the varied fortune of his wars, shows plainly that had Syracuse been under a less powerful government, it must have shared the fate of Selinus and of Agrigentum. We do not know the causes which seem to have roused the Carthaginians to such vigorous activity against the Sicilian Greeks, immediately after the destruction of the Athenian armament. Had that great expedition been successful at Syracuse, it was designed to attempt the conquest of the Carthaginian dominions,39 and even of Carthage itself; and the Carthaginians are represented by Hermocrates40
as living in constant dread of the power and ambition of Athens. Yet four or five years afterwards we find them sending out to Sicily so large a force, that they might well have defied the hostility of the Athenians; and the conquest of Selinus, Himera, and Agrigentum, proved to the Syracusans that they were again incurring the danger, from which they had been delivered about eighty years before by Gelon’s great victory of Himera. In his first attempts to check the progress of the Carthaginians, Dionysius was unsuccessful. He was glad to conclude a peace with them, by First treatyof Dlonys. which they were to retain possession of their own colonies, and of ius with Carthage. the Sicanian tribes in the west of Sicily. The survivors4’ of the people whom they had recently conquered, of Himera, Selinus, and Agrigentum; as also the inhabitants of Gela and Camarina who had abandoned their homes during the war, and had fled first to Syracuse, and afterwards to Leontini, might now, it was stipulated, return to their own countries and live in peace; but they were to pay a tribute to the Carthaginians, and were to live only in open villages; their cities were to remain dismantled and desolate.. In the east of the island, Messana, Leontini, and all the Sikelian tribes were to be independent; these last were the old enemies of the Syracusans, and the Carthaginians naturally, therefore, made this stipulation in their favor.

Thus Dionysius was left master of Syracuse alone; stripped of its dominion over the Sikelians, stripped of its old allies, the other Dorian cities of Sicily; while the dominion of Carthage, which a few years before had been confined to thre o settlements at the western corner of the island, was now advanced almost to the eastern coast, and by means of the Sikelian e6

Diodorus, XIV. 18, 41, 42. may be sure that it was at no time the residence * Diodorus, XIV. 7. Those who understand of the poorest classes, such as composed the The nature of the Greek citadels, that they al-seamen of the state, but was appropriated to the ways contained the temples of the peculiar gods oldest and wealthiest families. of the people, and therefore were always the 38 Cicero, Verres, V. 32. He calls the island, oldest part of the city, will understand that Epi- ” Locus quem vel panci possint defendere.” polto could not have been, according to Greek 39 So Alcibiades told the Spartans; Thucyd. notions, the citadel of Syracuse. On the other VI. 90, and added, ToratTa 10 Trapa TO aKpt a hand, the strength of the island of Ortygia well arara ElaoT0, ng &IEVOaeorlGV, aKaK6are. fitted it for purposes of security, and although 40 Thucvd. VI.

34. its -walls were washed by both harbors, yet we 4’ Diodorus, XIII. 114.

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176 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXL tribes, whose independence had been just secured, it hemmed in, and in a manner overhung, the scanty territory which was still left to Syracuse. This treaty was concluded in the last year of the Peloponnesian war, according eprres….tobreakit. to the chronology of Diodorus. It was virtually no more than a truce, delaying the decision of the quarrel between the two contracting parties, till one of them should be in a better condition to resume it. Dionysius had been crippled by his military disasters, and the Carthaginians were suffering from a pestilence which was at this time fatally raging in Africa. No sooner, then, was the peace concluded, than Dionysius began to undo its work. It had declared the Sikelian tribes independent; he found, or made a pretence for attacking them:42 it had stipulated for the independence of Leontini; he compelled the inhabitants to leave their city,43 and to come and dwell as citizens in Syracuse. He also destroyed the Chalcidian cities of Naxos and Catana,44 and sold their inhabitants for slaves. He cultivated the friendship of Messana, Rhegium,45 and the Greek towns of Italy; with Locri in particular he established a right of intermarriage, and he availed himself of it to take a Locrian lady as his own wife. He was busy in making arms and artillery46 for the use of his armies, and in building ships, and arsenals to receive and fit them out becomingly. And after all his preparations were completed, finding that the pestilence was still raging in Africa,47 he determined to declare war against Carthage.

This was in the fourth year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, about eight years after the conclusion of the last treaty. Dionysius had chosen his own time; the plague had weakened the CarthaginiHe suddenly declares ans, and the declaration of war against them, unexpected as it w~ar on the Carthagini-… and lays eg to was, was preceded by a general plundering of their property,4s IMotya. and a massacre of their citizens in all the Greek cities of Sicily. Dionysius marched immediately towards the Carthaginian territories; the forces of the several Greek cities joined him as he advanced; and he laid siege to the city and island of Motya,49
one of the three settlements which Carthage possessed in Sicily5~ before her conquest of Selinus. Motya was one of a group of small islands which lie off the western coast of Sicily, immediately to the north of Marsala or Lilybaeum. It is about a mile and a half in circumference,51 and about three-quarters of a mile from the main land, with which it was connected by a narrow artificial causeway. Like Tyre and Aradus in point of situation, it was like them flourishing and populous: and its inhabitants, being themselves of Phoenician blood, were zealous in their resistance to the Greek invader. Attacked by an overwhelming force,52 and seeing their walls breached, and their ramparts swept, by engines and an artillery such as had never before been equalled, they did not yield even when the enemy had forced his way into their city, but availed themselves of their narrow streets and lofty houses to dispute every inch of his progress. The Greeks then brought up their movable towers, which had been built to match the height of the houses, and from these they threw out bridges to the roofs, and thus endeavored to board the enemy. Day after day this bloody struggle continued; the Greek trumpets regularly sounding a retreat when night fell, and calling off their combatants; till at length Dionysius turned this practice to his account, and as soon as the trumpets sounded as usual, and the Phcenicians supposed that the contest was at an end till the next day, he sent in a party of picked men, who, before the enemy suspected their design, had established themselves in a commanding situation from which they could not be dislodged again. Then the whole Greek army poured into the town by the moles or dykes 42 Diodorus, XIV. 7, 14. 48 Diodorus, XIV. 46. 43 Diodorus, XIV. 15. 49 Diodorus, XIV. 47. 44

Diodorus, XIV. 15. 0 Thucydides, VI. 2. 45 Diodorus, XIV. 44. 51 See Captain Smyth’s Memoir on Sicily. 46 Diodorus, XIV. 41. 2 Diodorus, XIV.

48-53.‘7 Diodorus, XIV. 45.

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CSLr. XXI.] SIEGE OF SYRACUSE 177 which they had thrown across from the main land to the shore of Motya, and the place was taken by storm. Neither age nor sex were spared by the conquerors; a few only of the inhabitants saved their lives by running to the temples of those gods whom the Greeks honored in common with the Carthaginians, and these were afterwards sold for slaves. The whole plunder of the town was given to the victorious soldiers. While the siege of Motya was going on, Dionysius had employed a portion of his army in endeavoring to reduce the remaining colonies or allies Dionyalos attacks th of Carthage. The Sicanian tribes,53 who were the principal inhab-Sicilin alieo of caritants of the interior in the west of Sicily, submitted without opposition. But five places held out resolutely: Soloeis and Panormus, both of them, as well as Motya, Phoenician settlements; Egesta, whose quarrel with Selinus first brought the Athenians into Sicily, and afterwards the Carthaginians; Entella, and Halicye. It was in vain that Dionysius ravaged their lands, destroyed their fruit-trees, and attacked their towns; they remained unmoved in their fidelity; and even after the fall of Motya, when the Greek power seemed so irresistible that the people of Halicyae then at last submitted to it, yet the other four still held out; and when Dionysius again ventured to besiege Egesta, the inhabitants sallied by night and set fire to his camp, and obliged him to abandon his enterprise with loss. Here ended the circle of Dionysius’ glory. The Carthaginians,54 provoked by the suddenness of his attack, by his having taken advantage of their Great Carthaginian ex. distressed condition, and by the inveteracy with which the Greeks pedition to Sicily. were pursuing all of their name and race, were roused to extraordinary exertion. An immense army was raised of Africans and Spaniards; but the Gauls, so constantly employed in the Punic wars, had not yet crossed the Alps, or become known to the civilized nations of the south; so that there were none of them in the armament now collected for the invasion of Sicily. As it was, however, the Carthaginian force was estimated by Timueus at 100,000 men, and it was commanded by Imilcon, the supreme military chief of the commonwealth. The expedition landed at Panormus, and every thing gave way before it. Motya was instantly recovered; the Sicanians left Dionysius to join their old friends, the Carthaginians; Dionysius himself retreated upon Syracuse; and the seat of war was removed almost instantaneously from the western to the eastern extremity of the island, from Motya and Egesta to Syracuse.

Imilcon advanced55 along the northern coast towards Messina, being anxious to possess that important place, and so intercept any succors which The Carthaginians bemight be sent to the aid of Dionysius, either from the Greek states aiege Syracuse. of Italy, or from Greece itself. He took Messina, defeated the Syracusans in a sea fight off Catana, and then, being completely master of the field, he proceeded to lay siege to Syracuse by sea and land; his ships occupied the great harbor, while with his army he held all the most important points on shore: the headland of Plemyriumn, which forms the southern side of the great harbor, the temple of Olympian Jupiter on the right bank of the Anapus, and the suburb of Neapolis, just without the walls of Acradina, and under the cliffs of Epipole. The position of Epipolke itself, which the Athenians had at first occupied with so much effect, and which they afterwards neglected to their ruin, was now secured against the enemy by the walls lately carried round its whole extent by Dionysius. Thus the Greek power in Sicily was reduced, as it were, to one little spark,. which the first breath seemed likely to extinguish; but on its pres-Critical state of ta, ervation depended the existence of Rome and the fate of the world. Greek power in Sicily. Had Carthage become the sovereign of all Sicily, her power, in its full and unde3 Diorlorus, XIV. 48-54. 5 Diodorus, XIV. 57-63. ” Diodorus, XIV. 54, 55. 12

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178 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXX cayed vigor, must have immediately come into contact with the nations of Italy; and the Samnite wars of Rome might have ended in the destruction of both the contending nations, when their exhausted strength had left them at the mercy of a powerful neighbor. But this was not to be, and Dionysius was inspired with resolution to abide the storm, that so he might fulfil that purpose of God’s providence, which designed the Greek power in Sicily to stand as a breakwater against the advances of Carthage, and to afford a shelter to the yet unripened strength of Rome. The condition of Dionysius seemed desperate. Blockaded by sea and land, Dionysius proposes to with a people impatient of his despotism, with a force of mnerceescape from Sicily. naries, who, the moment that he became unable to pay them, might betray him, either to the enemy without the walls or to his political adversaries within; he held a council with his friends in the citadel, and expressed his purpose of leaving Syracuse to its fate, and attempting to effect his own escape by sea. One of them boldly answered,56 “A king’s robe is a noble winding-sheet.” At these words the spirit of Dionysius rose within him, and he resolved to live or die a king. But his deliverance was effected by another’ power than his own. The spots where the small Sicilian rivers make their way into the sea are, The Carthaginian armame.ntcrippled by an during the summer, notoriously unhealthy: a malaria fever is alepidemic sickness. - most the certain consequence of passing a single night in any village so situated. The shore near the mouth of the Anapus, and the marshy plain immediately behind it, would be absolutely pestilential to an army quartered there during the heats of summer; and the Athenians, when besieging Syracuse seventeen years before, had severely suffered from its influence.” But now the season was unusually hot, and from the prevalence of epidemic disease in Africa about this period, it is likely that the constitutions of many of the Carthaginian soldiers would be more than usually susceptible of infection. Accordingly,58 the disorder which broke out in the besieging army more resembled the most malignant pestilence than any ordinary form of marsh or malaria fever. The patients were commonly carried off in five or six days; and the disease was either really so contagious, or was imagined to be so, that no one dared to visit the sick, or to pay them the most necessary attentions: and thus all who were taken ill were left to die without relief. This visitation broke both the power and the spirit of the Carthaginians. DioDionyiusdestroys their nysius59 now made a sally, and attacked them both by sea and land. He carried their post at the temple of the Olympian Jupiter, and that at Dascon, at the very bottom of the harbor, on the right of the Anapus, where the Athenians first effected their landing. Here he found their ships drawn up on the beach, and he instantly set fire to them. Meanwhile the Syracusan fleet advanced right across the harbor, and surprised the enemy’s ships before they could be manned and worked out from the shore to offer battle. Thus taking them at a disadvantage, the Greeks sunk or shattered them without resistance, or surrounded them and carried them by boarding. And now the flames began to spread from the ships on the beach to those which lay afloat moored close to the shore. These were mostly merchant ships, worked by sails like ours, and consequently, even while at anchor, they had their masts up and their standing rigging. As the flames caught these and blazed up into the air, the spectacle afforded to the Syracusans on their walls was most magnificent. The crews of the burning ships leaped overboard, and left them to their fate; their cables were burnt, and the blazing masses began to drift about the harbor, and to run foul of one another; while the crackling of the flames, and the crashing of the falling masts and of the sides of the ships in their mutual shocks, heard amidst volumes eaMXdv lkrSv lvrdcqeov i Trvpavvig. Isocrates. 6s Diodorus, XIV. 70, 71. Archidamus, ~ 49, p. 125. 69 Diodorus, XIV. 72-75.

“I Thtucydides, VII. 47.

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CRAP. XXI.] RETREAT OF THE CARTHAGINIANS. 179 of smoke and sheets of fire, reminded the Syracusans of the destruction of the giants by the thunder of Jove, when they had assayed in their pride to storm Olympus.“6 Thus called, as they thought, by the manifest interposition of heaven t6 finish the work, the very old men and boys of Syracuse could bear to look Rejoicings of the Syron idly from their walls no longer, but getting into the large punts acusans. or barges,6’ which were ordinarily used for ferrying men and cattle across the harbor, they put out to sea, to save and capture such of the enemy’s ships as the fire had not yet destroyed.

But the walls were crowded with fresh spectators, for as the report of the victory became more and more decided, the women, children, and slaves, all poured out from their houses, and hastened to enjoy with their own eyes the sight of this wonderful deliverance. - When the day was over, the Carthaginian naval force was almost utterly destroyed, while Dionysius encamped on the ground which he had won near the temple of Olympian Jupiter, having the remnant of the besieging army shut in between his position on one side, and the walls of Syracuse on the other. But Imilcon had no hope of continuing the contest with success any further. He offered all the treasure in his camp, amounting to three hun-Retreat of the Cartha, dred talents, to purchase the unmolested retreat of the remainder ginian”. of his armament. “This,” said Dionysius, “cannot be granted; but I will consent that the native Carthaginians shall be allowed to escape by night to Afrtca,” stipulating nothing for their subjects and allies. He foresaw that if the head were thus taken from the body, the body would instantly fall into his power; and he was not sorry to impress the Africans, Iberians, and Sikelians, with a strong sense of the selfish arrogance of the Carthaginians, who, thinking only of themselves, abandoned their allies to destruction without scruple. Accordingly, when the Carthaginians had escaped, the rest of the armament attempted to provide as they could for their own safety. The Sikelians and Africans were obliged to lay down their arms, after the former had endeavored in vain to make good their retreat to their own country; but the Iberians held together, and made so formidable a show of resistance, that Dionysius readily listened to their proposals of entering into his service. They became a part of his mercenary army; and while they helped to secure his power against his domestic enemies, they also added to the glory of his arms abroad: and in the strange vicissitudes of human fortune, these same Iberians, who had been enlisted in Spain, taken thence to Africa, and afterwards had crossed the sea to Sicily as invaders, were some years later sent over from Sicily to Greece,62 as a part of the auxiliary force sent by Dionysius to aid the Lacedsemonians; and fought with distinction in Laconia under the eye of Agesilaus, against the invading army of Epammiondas. Thus was Dionysius saved from imminent ruin, and the Greek power in Sicily was preserved. His subsequent wars with Carthage were of no State of the Cartlihagnimportance, for anai;st much variety of fortune ih particular en-ian”power Sitily gagements, the relations of the two states were never materially altered; the Carthaginians remained masters of all the western part of the island, while the eastern part continued to be under the dominion of Dionysius. After the destruction of this great armament, Dionysius felt himself able to carry on his plans of conquest against the Greeks of Italy. One of Do epares t his first measures was to people the important city of Messana. tit.t0 Nchee Italita The remains of the old citizens, who had been driven out by the Greeks. 60 Diodorus, XIV.

73. This whole description 61 Ta froOpe#?a. Diodorus, XIV. 74. This is one seems to have been taken from the history of of the touches which seem to argue that the Philistus, who was probably an eye-witness of writer of the description was at any rate a Syrathe scene: so that the comparison is not to be cusan, familiar with the harbor of Syracuse. No regarded as the mere flourish of a writer, far explanation is given by him, because the use of removed in time and space from the action which these r’opOpeia was to him so familiar, that ho coggested it, but as one which really arose in could not fancy that any was requisite. the minds of the Syracusans, amidst the excite-62 Xenophon, Iellenic. VII. 1, ~ 20. ment and enthusiasm of the actual spectacle.

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180 HISTORY OF ROME. LCHAP XXL, Carthaginians, returned to their home after Imilcon’s defeat; but their numbers were so thinned, that Dionysius added to them a large body of new citizens from Locri on the Italian coast, his old and firm ally, and from a Locrian colony,63 Me-. dama, on the Tyrrhenian sea, which had probably been lately conquered by the Lucanians. With these there were at first joined some exiles from old Greece, of the race of the old Messenians; but afterwards, to satisfy the jealousy of Lacedramon, they were removed from Messana, and founded for themselves the new city of Tyndaris.64 The principal object of Dionysius’

hostility among the Greek cities of Italy was Rhegium. The Rhegians had favored his political adversaBattle of the Hellepou.ru, and conquest of ries, and had personally affronted him by refusing to allow him the right of intermarriage with their citizens. But his ambition led him to desire the dominion of all the coast of Italy on the Ionian sea; and he entered into a league with the Lucanians, as has been already mentioned, hoping that they might exhaust the Greek cities, by their constant plundering warfare, and that he might then step in to reap the harvest. His defeat of the combined army of the Italian Greeks on the banks of the Helleporus,65
and his conquest of Rhegium,6~ Caulon,6’ and Hipponium,68 are the principal events of this contest. He enlarged Syracuse, by removing thither the whole, or a great part, of the population of the conquered cities; and his increased power and influence on the Italian coast facilitated those further plans of aggrandizement which have been already noticed, his settlements at Issa and Lissus, and on the coast of Picenum, his alliance with the Illyrians, and his trade in the Adriatic. Thus powerful at home and abroad, and possessing a far greater dominion than Dionysiussendschariots any prince or state in old Greece, Dionysius yet felt that Greece tud hewlytn priazn gef was, as it were, the heart and life of the civilized world, and that tragedy at Athens. no glory would be universal or enduring unless it had received its stamp and warrant from the genius of Athens. He sent chariots to Olympia, to contend for the prize at the Olympic games;6 he sent over also rhapsodists most eminent for the powers of their voice and the charm of their recitation to rehearse his poems; and-he Was repeatedly a candidate for the prize of tragedy at Athens. Alexander, indeed, scorned to contend for victory at the Olympic games unless kings could be his competitors; but in such matters there was a wide difference between a king and a tyrant, between the descendant of a long line of princes,7 sprung from Hercules, the son of Jove, and the humble citizen of Syracuse, whom his fortune had unexpectedly raised to greatness. There is a story that the public feeling at Olympia was so strong against Dionysius as a tyrant,” that the tents of his theori, or deputies to the Olympic assembly, were plundered, and the recitation of his verses drowned amidst the clamor and hisses of the multitude. But whether this be true or false, we know that at Athens his tragedies were by no means regarded as contemptible; he gained on different occasions the second and third prizes, and at last his tragedy, entitled “Hector Ransomed,”” was judged worthy of the highest prize. This evident desire of intellectual fame, united with the powers of earning it, tempted the philosophers of Greece to believe that they should find in Dionys63 Diodorus, XIV. 78. The present reading 66 Diodorus, XIV. 3. in the text of Diodorus is M6tpsvatovs, for which 7 Diodorus, XIV. 106.

Cluverius has conjectured Medpatovg. MEta-68 Diodorus, XIV. 107. uaietoJs would be still nearer the present reading, 69 Diodorus, XIV. 109. and Mialma is the name of the city in Strabo,‘o In an earlier age, however, an ancestor of the VI. 1, ~ 5, p. 256, and, it is said, on one of its great Alexander, the Macedonian king of the coins. Medama, or Mesma, is described as a same name, who reigned during the Persian inLocrian colony by Strabo, in the passage above vasion, was anxious to be admitted as a competquoted, and by Scymnus Chins, V. 307. itor for the prize at the Olympic games, even in 64 Diodorus, XIV. 78. the foot race, and he ran accordingly in the sta65 Polybius calls the river..” Elleporus,” I. 6.

dium. See Herodotus, V. 22. Diodorus calls it ” Helorus,” XIV. 104. I sus-

“I Diodorus, XIV. 109. pect that the true reading in Polybius would be‘2

Diodorus, XV. 74. tiO 111 a aerrlc 77,

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CLaAP. XXI.] MANNER OF LIVING OF DIONYSIUS. 181, ius a man who could sympathize with them in spite of his political His iLlercourse witb greatness, and would rejoice to associate with them on equal terms.

Isotrates andPlato. Plato visited Syracuse,73 and Isocrates,74 at a safer distance, addressed to Dionysius a letter of compliment from Greece. As long as they remained on the opposite shores of the Ionian sea, the philosopher and the tyrant might correspond with each other without offence. But many are the stories which show the folly of supposing that an equality of mind can triumph over the differences of rank and power. No man can associate freely with another, when his life is at the mercy of his companion’s’ caprice. Plato soon returned to Greece, with a lesson from some of the philosophers of Syracuse, ” that men of their profession would do well either to shun the society of tyrants,“5 or else in their intercourse with them, to study how they could please them most.” This advice is said to have been occasioned by a practical lesson given to Plato by Dionysius,~which ought to have rendered it superfluous; the story ran, that the tyrant was so offended with something that Plato had said, that he sent him forthwith to the slavemarket, and had him sold as a slave, but that the philosophers immediately redeemed him by a general subscription amongst themselves, and then urged him to quit Sicily. A similar story is told of the poet Philoxenus, whom Dionysius is said to have sent from his own table to his prisons in the quarries, because he had expressed an unfavorable opinion of the tyrant’s poetry. These stories may deserve but little credit for the particular facts; yet the intercourse between Frederick of Prussia and Voltaire was interrupted in a similar manner, and the presumption of literary men on the one hand, and the pride of rank and power on the other, are likely to lead to such results. That the despot of Syracuse should not scruple to send a poet to the quarries and to sell a philosopher in the slavemarket, is nothing wonder-His i ful. We may be more unwilling to believe the reports of the state of miserable fear to which suspicion could reduce one so able and so daring as Dionysius. “He could trust no man,” it was said,76 but a set of miserable freedmen, and outcasts, and barbarians, whom he made his body-guard. He fenced his chamber with a wide trench, which he crossed by a drawbridge; he never addressed the Syracusan people but from the top of a high tower, where no dagger could reach him; he never visited his wives without having their apartments previously searched, lest they should contain some lurking assassin; nay, he dared not allow himself to be shaved by any hands except his own daughters’; and even them he was afraid to intrust with a razor; but taught them how to singe off his beard with hot walnut-shells.” ~Much of this is probably exaggeration, but the Greek tyrants knew that to kill them was held to be no murder; and it is no shame to Dionysius, if his nerves were overcome by the hourly danger of assassination, a danger which appalled even the iron courage of Cromwell.

The Greeks had no abhorrence for kings: the descendant of a hero race, ruling over a people whom his fathers had ruled from time imme-Peculiar claracter of morial, was no subject of obloquy, either with the people, or with te ancient tyraaies. the philosophers. But a tyrant, a man of low or ordinary birth, who by force or fraud had seated himself on the necks of his countrymen, to gorge each prevailing passion of his nature at their cost, with no principle but the interest of his own power, such a man was regarded as a wild beast that had broken into the fold of civilized society, and whom it was every one’s right and duty by any means, or with any weapon, presently to destroy. Such monsters of selfishness Christian Europe has rarely seen. If the claim to reign by ” the grace of God” “S

Diodorus, XV. 7. though the fact of his having corresponded 74 Whether the letters professing to be writ-with them may be true notwithstanding. ten from Isocrates to Dionysius and Philip of 75 Diodorus, XV. 7. Act TOV
aobov TOn rupadv, Macedon, and published at the end of his ora-votE Jtf s cKara i Js rsora byLMXtv. tions, are genuine, may well be doubted; al-76

Cicero, Tusculan. Disputat. V. 20.

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182 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXII. has given an undue sanction to absolute power, yet it has diffused at the same time a sense of the responsibilities of power, such as the tyrants, and even the kings of the later age of Greece, never knew. The most unprincipled of modern sovereigns would yet have acknowledged that he owed a duty to his people, for the discharge of which he was answerable to God; but the Greek tyrant regarded his subjects as the mere instruments of his own gratification; fortune, or his own superiority, had given him extraordinary means of indulging his favorite passions, and it would be folly to forego the opportunity. It is this total want of regard for his fellow-creatures, the utter sacrifice of their present and future improvement, for the sake of objects purely personal, which constitutes the guilt of Dionysius and his fellow-tyrants.. In such men, all virtue was necessarily blighted; neither genius, nor courage, nor occasional signs of human feeling, could atone for the deliberate wickedness of their system of tyranny.. Brave and able as Dionysius was, active, and temperate, and energetic, he left behind him no beneficial institutions; he degraded rather than improved the character of his countrymen; and he has therefore justly been branded with infamy, by the accordant voice of his own and of after ages; he will be known forever as Dionysius the tyrant, CHAPTER XXII. CARTHAGE-BARBARIANS OF

WESTERN EUROPE-EAST OF EUROPE-GREECE-. MACED ONIA-ILLYRIA.’” Ceterum-qui mortales initio coluerint, indigence an advecti, parum compertum-.”-TAcITvs Agricola, XI. THE enlarged researches of our own times, while they make us more sensible Difficulties of ancient of the actual extent of our ignorance, yet encourage us with the history. hope that it will gradually be diminished. But he who attempts to write history in the interval between this awakened consciousness of the defects of our knowledge, and that fuller light which may hereafter remove them, labors under peculiar disadvantages. A reputation for learning was cheaply gained in the days of our fathers, by merely reading the works of the Greek and Roman writers, and being able to repeat the information which they have communicated. But now we desire to learn, not what existing accounts may have recorded of a people or a race, but what that people or race really was, and did; we wish to conceive a full and lively image of them, of their language, their institutions, their arts, their morals; to understand what they were in themselves, and how they may have affected the fate of the world, either in their own times, or in after ages. These, however, are questions which the ancient writers were often as unable to answer as we are; happier, it may be thought, than we in this, that they had no painful consciousness of ignorance. To repeat what the Greek and Roman writers have left on record of Carthage, and its dominion in Spain and Africa, would be an easy task, but at the same time most unsatisfactory. We look around for other witnesses, we question existing-languages, and races, and manners, in the hope of gleaning from them some fuller knowledge of extinct nations, than can be gained from the scanty accounts of.foreigners or enemies. The.internal state of Carthage may fitly be reserved for a later period of this Carthage. history. It will be enough now to fill up, so far as I can, that

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CHAP. XXII.] DOMINION OF CARTHAGE. 183 sketch of her dominion and foreign relations, which has been begun in some measure in the two preceding chapters. In the middle of the fourth century before the Christian era, the Carthaginians possessed the northern coast of Africa, from the middle of the Extent of the Carthagreater Syrtis to the pillars of Hercules, a country reaching from giniEa doninion in Af19 degrees, east longitude, to 6 degrees, west; and a length of r.c. coast which Polybius’ reckoned at above sixteen thousand stadia. But unlike the compactness and organization of the provinces of the Roman empire, this long line of coast was, for the most part, only so far under the dominion of the Carthaginians, that they possessed2 a chain of commercial establishments along its whole extent, and with the usual ascendency of civilized men over barbarians, had obliged the native inhabitants of the country, whether cultivators of the soil or wandering tribes, to acknowledge their superiority. But in that part where the coast runs nearly north and south, from the Hermrean headland, or Cape Bo13n, to the lesser Syrtis, they had occupied the country more completely. This was one of the richest tracts to be found;3
and here the Cartlaginians had planted their towns thickly, and had covered the open country with their farms and villas. This was their,‘rg0ioix’s, the immediate domain of Carthage, where fresh settlements were continually made as a provision for the poorer citizens;4
settlements prosperous, indeed, and wealthy, but politically dependent, as was always the case in the ancient world; insomuch that the term,resgoi xos, which in its origin expressed no more than “men who dwelt not in, but round about a city,” came to signify a particular political relation, theirs, namely, who enjoyed personal freedom, but had no share in the government of their country. Distinct from these settlements of the Carthaginians themselves were the sister cities of Carthage, founded immediately, like herself, by the Phceni-P,enicia colonies in cians of Tyre and Sidon, although her fortune had afterwards so Africa. outgrown theirs. Amongst these Phoenician colonies were Utica,5 more famous in Roman than in Carthaginian history, Adrumetum,6 the two cities known by the name of Leptis, situated, the one near the western extremity of the great Syrtis, and the other on the coast between the lesser Syrtis and the Hermsean headland; and Hippo, a name so closely connected in our minds with the piety and energy of its great bishop, Augustine. These were the allies of Carthage, and some of them were again at the head of a small confederacy of states,7 who looked up to them for protection, as they in their turn looked up to Carthage. They enjoyed their own laws, and were independent in their domestic government; but in their foreign relations they found, in common with all the weaker states of the ancient world, that alliance with a greater power ended sooner or later in subjection.

The Phoenician colonists, who founded Carthage, at first paids a tribute to the native Africans on whose land they had settled, as an acknowl-conditionoftheAfricau edgment that the country was not their own. But in process of eobjectsofCo’ttlge. time they became what the Europeans have been in later times in India, no longer dependent settlers, but sovereigns; and the native Africans, driven back from the coast and confined to the interior, were reduced to the condition of strangers on 1

Polybius, III. 39. of Basel; and the disputes between the citizens 2’Ona yfypanrat 7ro)lopara j l.roplta ivr7i A1t364 of Basel and the inhabitants of Liechstal, and aro rS; ElprToi0S TS. reap”Eorcepidas eEXp’Hpa-the other countrytowns, seemed, to those familKXEidcv ~rifXt’v AtLo’ji rdVra EarL Kapxrloviwv. iar with ancient history, like a revival of the poScylax, Periplus, p. 51, 52. Ed. Hudson. litical relations of Lacedlmon and Carthage. a Polybius, III. 23. Dioclorus, XX. 8. Scy-5 Justin, XVIII.

4. lax, p. 49. 6 Sallust, Bell. Jugurth. 22, 80. 4Aristotle, Politica, VI.

5. Within the last 7 In the second treaty between Rome and ten years an exact image of the relation of the Carthage, the contracting parties on the one ancient cEptOLKOt to their r6Atg, and of the irrita-side are, “
the people of Carthage, the people of tion occasioned by it, has been exhibited to the Tyre, and the people of Utica, wzit7 ther allies.” notice of Europe on more than one occasion in Polybius, III. 24. Switzerland.

Liechstalwas one ofthe zrsepeoKidts 8 Justin, XVIII. 5.

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184 HISTORY OF ROME. [0C1AP. XXI! their own soil, They understood and practised agriculture, but we know not how far they were allowed to retain the property of the land, or to what extent the rich Carthaginians had ejected them, and employed them as tenants and cul-. tivators of the soil of which they had been once proprietors. At any rate, the Africans were in the condition of a Roman province; they9 were ruled despoti cally by the Carthaginian officers sent amongst them, and were subject to taxes, and to a conscription of their youth to serve as soldiers, at the discretion of their governors. In the first Punic war, they were taxed to the amount of fifty per cent. on the yearly produce of their land, and the oppression to which they were subjected made them enter readily and zealously into the quarrel of the mercenary soldiers, during their famous war with the Carthaginians. The contrast between Carthage exercising absolute dominion over her African Differoncesbetween the subjects, and Rome surrounded by her Latin and Italian allies, situation of Carthage and gradually communicating more widely the rights’ of citizens and Rome with respect totheirsubjectsandal-ship, so as to change alliance into union, has been often noticed, 8ie’. and is indeed quite sufficient to account for the issue of the Punic wars. But this difference was owing rather to the good fortune of Rome and.to the ill fortune of Carthage, than to the wisdom and liberality of the one and the narrow-mindedness of the other. Rome was placed in the midst of people akin to herself both in race and language; Carthage was a solitary settlement in a foreign land. The Carthaginian language nearly resembled the Hebrew; it belonged to the Semitic or Aramaic family. Who the native Africans were, and to what family they belonged, are among the most obscure questions of ancient history. But it is one of the consequences of that wider view of the connection of races and languages, which we have learnt of late to entertain, that the statements to be found in the traditional or mythic reports of the origin of nations, appear in some instances to contain in them a germ of truth, and we do not venture, as formerly, to cast them aside as mere fables.

Thus in that strange account of the peopling of Africa, which Sallust‘0
copied from Carthaginian books, the stream of migration is described as having poured into northern Africa at its western, not at its eastern extremity, by the straits of Gibraltar, not by the isthmus of Suez and by Egypt. And we read that the invaders were Medians and Persians, who had marched through Europe into Spain, as a part of the great army of Hercules. They found the north of Africa possessed by an older race of inhabitants, the Gwetulians and Libyans, of whose origin no account is given. But the story of the expedition of Hercules, and of the Medians and Persians” following in his army, and entering Africa by crossing over thither from Spain, may at least lead us to inquire whether any affinity can be traced between the language of the Berbers, the descendants of the ancient Mauritanians, and that of the Basques, the descendants of the old Iberians; and whether the languages of the native tribes of north Africa, whether agricultural or wandering, may not be supposed to have belonged either wholly or in part to the Indo-Germanic family, rather than to the Semitic. These are the points in which we are standing half way between the equally extreme credulity and skepticism of the last two centuries, and that fuller knowledge which may be the portion of our posterity. But whatever may be discovered as to the African subjects of Carthage, they were become so distinct from their masters, even if they were originally sprung from a kindred race, that the two people were not likely to be melted together into one state; and thus they remained always in the unhappy and suspicious relation of masters and of slaves, rather than in that of fellowcitizens, or even of allies., Polybius, I. 72. that is, in what is now Hungary, were said by 1o Bell. Jugurthin. 20. Uti ex libris Punicis, some, he tells us, to have been a colony of the qui regis Hiempsalis dicebantur, interpretatum MIedes, at which he naturally wonders. It is so nobis est. difficult, in these stories, to distinguish what is 11 The Sigynne, a people whom Herodot.us mere confusion or invention from what contains describes, V. 9, as living beyond the Danube, a germ of truth, under more or less of disguise.

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CHAP. XXII.] THE HALF-CASTE AFRO-PH(ENICIANS. 185 The dominion of Carthage in Africa, as it resembled in many other respects that of the British in India, had produced also, as in our Indian empire, a numerous half-caste population, sprung from intermar-Phoeicians, or people riages between the Carthaginians and the native Africans. This of f-cAte. mixed race was known by the name of Liby or Afro-Phcenicians;12 but whether they were regarded by Carthage as a source of strength, or suspected as dangerous enemies, we have no sufficient information to determine. Perhaps they were thought to be dangerous at home, but-useful and trustworthy abroad; and thus they were sent as colonists to Spain,‘3 and to the more remote parts of the coast of Africa, without the Pillars of Hercules, just as the poorer citizens of Carthage itself were sent, as we have seen, to settlements nearer home. If we can trust the text and the authenticity of the Greek version now existing of the voyage of Hanno, these Afro-Phcenician colonies were planted on a very large scale; for that voyage was undertaken for the purpose of settling no fewer than thirty thousand Afro-Phoenicians14 along the shore of the Atlantic southward of the straits of Gibraltar. In the seventh century before the Christian era, % Samian ship15 bound for Egypt was caught in a violent storm, with the -vind blowing Iberia, or Spoin: Phb. strongly from the east. The ship was carried altogether out of nicin colony of Gadir, her course, the wind continued to blow from the east, and at last orGadee. she was actually driven through the Pillars of Hercules, and the first land which she succeeded in making was the coast of Tartessus or Tarshish, the southwestern coast of Spain. The Samians found that the storm had proved their best friend; they returned home enriched beyond all their hopes, for the port of Tarshish, says Herodotus, was at that time fresh‘6 and undisturbed; the gold of its neighboring mines was a treasure not yet appreciated by its possessors; they bartered it to the Samian strangers in return for the most ordinary articles of civilized living, which barbarians cannot enough admire. This story makes us feel that we are indeed living in the old age of the world. The country then so fresh and untouched has now been long in the last stage of decrepitude: its mines, then so abundant, have been long since exhausted; and after having in its turn discovered and almost drained the mines of another world, it lies now like a forsaken wreck on the waves of time, with nothing but the memory of the past to ennoble it. In the middle of the fourth century of Rome, the coast of Spain,l7 both on the ocean and on the Mediterranean, was full of Carthaginian trading settlements, but these were mostly small, and of no great celebrity. Gadir, or Gades, on the other hand, a colony founded directly from Tyre,”’ had been long since famous. Here was one of the most celebrated temples of the Tyrian Hercules, and its trade and wealth were considerable; the neighboring country being rich in mines, while the sea yielded an inexhaustible supply of fish, which was commonly sold in the Athenian markets as early as the Peloponnesian war.‘9 But except Gades, the Greek seamen knew of no other place of importance on the coast of Spain at this period, till they came north of the Iberus, to the country which was then inhabited by the Ligurians. Here there was the Greek settlement of Emporion, ~ an offshoot from the Phocsean colony of Massalia. If Saguntum was really a city of Greek or Tyrrhenian origin, founded by colonists from Zacynthus and Ardea, it seems to have retained no marks of the Greek character; it had no seaport, and though it was itself near the coast, yet it was not of sufficient importance to attract the notice of the Greek navigatorn.’ The great Spanish peninsula itself, and its original inhabitants, the various tribes of the Iberian race, were as yet but little known to the rest of the world. Sicil12 Polybius, III.

33. 17 Scylax, Periplus, p. 1. Is Scymnus Chins, V. 195, 196.‘8 Strabo, III. prope fine;. 14 Itanno, Periplus, p. 1. Ed. Hudson. 9 Pollux, VI. 48.

Eupoli, quoted by Stephan6 Herodotus, IV. 152. nus Byzant. in rduEspa.

i6’Aspat ov. 20 Scylax, Periplus, p. 1.

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186 HISTORY OF ROME, [CmAP. XXIL Native Iberians; their ian antiquarians2’

derived the oldest part of the population of their race and character.

island, the Sicanians, from the northeastern coast of Spain. The Iberians had for some time been accustomed to serve in the Carthaginian armies; their name occurs amongst the various nations who composed the great host of Hamilcar22 when he invaded Sicily in the time of Gelon, and was defeated in the famous battle of Himera. The Iberians were known to the Athenians23 as amongst the most warlike of the barbarians of the west, whom they purposed to employ in conquering their Peloponnesian enemies, had success at Syracuse enabled them to fulfil their more remote designs; and we have seen Iberians distinguished above all the other soldiers in the same service, in the great Carthaginian expedition which Imilcon led against the tyrant Dionysius. Another circumstance removed them even more than their remarkable courage from the common mass of barbarians. Writing was common among them; and some of their tribes24 possessed written records of their past history, not composed in verse, besides numerous poems, and large collections of laws and institutions in a metrical form, amounting, it was said, to about six thousand lines. We ourselves have, in some degree, a national interest in the Iberians, if it be true that colonies of their race crossed the Bay of Biscay, and established themselves on the coast of Cornwall. But their memory has almost utterly perished; we know not with what race of mankind they were connected; and although the Basque dialect, still spoken on both sides of the Pyrenees, is supposed to be a remnant of their language, yet its relation to other languages appears to have been not yet ascertained, so as to inform us to what family it belongs. It may be hoped that this, as well as the deciphering of the Etruscan monuments, may be amongst the discoveries reserved for our own generation, or for that of our children. ]From the Pyrenees to the frontiers of Etruria,25 the coast of the Mediterranean The Ligurians. was occupied by the Ligurians, a people distinguished by the Greeks both from the Iberians and from the Kelts, although they are supposed to have been connected with the latter nation in their race and language. As the Ligurians dwelt on the coast, they became known to the Carthaginians; and thus Ligurians26 are named together with Iberians amongst the soldiers of Hamilcar’s expedition to Sicily, at the beginning of the fifth century before the Christian era. In the time of Scylax, a few years later than our present period, the Ligurians and Iberians were mixed together on the coast, between the Pyrenees and the Rhone, and the exclusive dominion of the Ligurians only extended from the Rhone to Etruria. But Thucydides mentioned it as an ascertained fact,27 that at a very remote period they had dislodged the Sicanians from their land on the Sicanian river in Iberia, and that these, 1flying before their conquerors, went over and settled in Sicily. We cannot certainly tell what river is 21

Thucydides, VI. 2, following Antiochus. country there are three distinct dialects, and 22 Herodotus, VII. 165. that with regard to one of these nothing satis23 Thucydides, VI. 90. factory had been published when Von Hum24 Strabo, III. p. 139. Here again Niebuhr’s boldt wrote, while the lexicon or vocabulary of sagacity has corrected the common reading, another was far from perfect. I notice this, bev6[tovs EtPJErpovs naKlacXXiov ETCrv, which, as he cause words may exist in these dialects which observes, would not be Greek, into v6eovS AfarL-may go far to establish the resemblance of the aX%&itv’xiv. Basque language to others, or to prove its diWhen this page was written, I had not seen versity; and may explain those names in the the excellent work of the lamented William Von ancient geography of Spain which have hot been Humboldt, ” on the earliest inhabitants of hitherto interpreted. The Iberians, in HumSpain,”

although I was aware generally of its boldt’s judgment, were a people quite distinct character, and of the conclusion which it endeav-from the Kelts; but they may have had the ored to establish. He considers it to be cer-same degree of connection with them which subtain that the present Basque language is subsisted between all the nations of the great Indostantially the same with the ancient Iberian: Germanic family. He does not believe in the the names of places in the ancient geography Iberian extraction of any part of the inhabitants of Spain being, for the most part, not only sig-of the British Islands. nificant in Basque, but exhibiting in their sound, 2a Scylax, p. 2. Herodotus speaks of “the and in their omission of some letters, and their Ligurians who live above Massalia.” V 9. oombinations of others, the peculiarities of the 26

Herodot. VII. 165. oxisting language. ItappearsthatintheBasque 27

Thucydides, VI. 2.

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CHAP. XXII.] THE KELTS, OR GAULS. 187 meant, nor what limits Thucydides assigned to Iberia; but a migration to Sicily, rather than to Corsica or Sardinia, becomes probable, in proportion as we place the Sicanians further to the south, and nearer to the trading settlements of the Carthaginians or Phoenicians. Perhaps the Ligurians advanced along the coast from east to west, expelling or conquering the Iberian tribes; till at last, when the force of their irruption was spent, the Iberians recovered their former country, wholly between the Iberus and the Pyrenees, and partially between the Pyrenees and the Rhone. At any rate, it should be remembered that the Iberians, and not the Kelts, were the inhabitants of the country between the Pyrenees and the Garonne and the Cevennes, as is shown even to this day, by the existence of the Basque language in the south of France no less than in Spain. It may be true, indeed, that the Kelts or Gauls had long before the fourth century of Rome crossed the Alps, and established themselves in that country, which now forms the Lombard portion of the Austrian Thy he elre a dominions in northern Italy. It may be true also that Keltic tribes little known. were to be found in the heart of Spain; for, before civilization has asserted its power, nations, like rivers, are. continually changing their boundaries, and take their own course almost at pleasure. But as the Kelts had most certainly neither crossed the Apennines, nor reached as yet the shores of the Adriatic, they had no connection with the civilized world; the Carthaginians had no opportunity of enlisting them into their armies, nor had the Greek traders acquired any direct knowledge of them. Their name was known only through the reports of those Phoenicians‘8 who’

navigated the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay, on their way to the tin mines of Britain. And this explains the strange description of their position given by Herodotus,29 {‘ that the Kelts dwell without the Pillars of Hercules, and that they border on the Kynesians, who live the farthest to the west of all the people of Europe.” This is clearly the language of some Phoenician Periplus of the western coasts of France and Spain: the Kynesianss~ must have lived on the coasts of Portugal, Gallicia, and Asturias; perhaps on that of Gascony and Guienne: beyond these, as the voyager pursued his course along the land, he came to the country of the Kelts who occupied the whole coast north of the Garonne, and were, very probably, intermixed with the Iberian Kynesians on the coasts of Gascony and Navarre. The Greeks, when they read this account, little suspected that these same Kelts reached from the shores of the ocean inland as far as the Alps, and, possibly, nearly to the head of the Adriatic; and that while they heard of them only as dwelling without the Pillars of Hercules, they were advanced in the opposite direction, almost within the ordinary horizon of Greek observation, and in a very short time would unexpectedly appear like a wasting torrent in the heart of Italy. The narrow band of coast occupied by the Ligurian and Venetian tribes was as yet sufficient to conceal the movements of the Kelts from the notice of the civilized world. Thus immediately before that famous eruption which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii, the level ridge31 which was then Vesuvius excited no suspicion; and none could imagine that there were lurking close below that peaceful surface the materials of a fiery deluge, which were so soon to burst forth, and to continue for centuries to work havoc and desolation. We can trace with great distinctness the and character in different parts of his philosophperiod at which the Kelts became familiarly ical works. known to the Greeks.:Herodotus only knew 29 II. 33, IV. 49. of them from the Phocenician navigators: Thu-30 There is no mention of these Cynesians, so cydides does not name them at all: Xenophon far as I remember, in any ancient writer, except only notices them as forming part of the aux-in the two passages of Herodotus quoted above.

iliary force sent by Dionysius to the aid of La-Niebuhr places them to the north, rather than cedaemon. Isocrates makes no mention ofthem. to the west, of the Kelts (Kleine Histor. SchrifBut immediately afterwards, their incursions ten, p. 142); but I do not see why this’is necesinto central and southern Italy on the one hand, sary. The account in the text seems sufficiently and into the countries between the Danube to explain the description in Herodotus. and Macedonia on the other, had made them 31

Vicina Vesevo orajugo. Since the erupobjects of general interest and curiosity; and tion no one would ever have called the top of Aristotle notices several points in their habits Vesuvius a “‘jugum.l”

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188 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXI][ Fromr the countries:f western Europe, on which the first faint dawn of historof ical light had as yet scarcely broken, we turn to the heart of the Lacedermon. Olynthian civilized world, to those republics of Greece which had already confederacy. reached their highest point of glory and advancement, and were now feeling the first approach of decay, like a plant when its seed is almost ripe, and ready to be shed or wafted by the winds to a distance, there to multiply the race of its parent. According to the synchronism of Polybius,32 the invasion of Rome by the Gauls took place in the same year with the conclusion of the peace of Antalcidas, that is, in the second year of the ninety-eighth Olympiad. Probably it should be placed a few years later; but at any rate, it falls within the,period of the Lacedaemonian supremacy in Greece, after the humiliation of Athens by the result of the Peloponnesian war, and before the rise of the power of Thebes. Never was dominion wielded by such unfit hands as those of the Spartans. Living at home under an iron system, which taught each successive generation that their highest virtue was to preserve and not to improve the institutions of their fathers, the Lacedoemonians were utterly unable to act the part of conquerors; for conquest, being the greatest of all possible changes, can only be conducted by those who know how to change wisely;33 a conqueror who is the slave of existing institutions, is no better than a contradiction. Thus the Spartans had no idea of turning their triumph over Athens to any other account than that of their own pride and rapacity; neither the general intercourse between nation and nation, nor commerce, nor intellectual nor moral excellence, derived any benefit from their ascendency. It was therefore unnatural, and fulfilled no object of God’s providence, except that of being an instrument for the chastisement of others; so that it could only sow the seed of future wars, till, having heaped up the measure of insult and oppression, it at last drew down its just judgment. But the growth of that spirit of organization and self-government, which the high intelligence of the Greek mind could not but foster, was seen in the formation of the Olynthian confederacy.34 Among the Chalcidian and Bottikean towns of the peninsula of Pallene and its neighborhood, places whose fate it had been hitherto to be the mere subjects of some greater power, we now witness the growth of an independent political system, of which the head was not to be Sparta nor Athens, but Olynthus. This was a proof that the vigor of the Greek character was de. veloping itself in a wider circle than heretofore, and prepares us for the change so. soon to be effected by the genius of Philip and Alexander, when the centre of the power and outward activity of Greece was to be found in Macedon, while Athens still remained the wellspring of its intellectual vigor. The eastern coast of the Adriatic is one of those illfated portions of the earth Eastern coast of tho which, though placed in immediate contact with civilization, have Adriatic. Moloassian remained perpetually barbarian.

Unvisited, and indeed almost inaccessible to strangers from the robber habits of the population, the Dalmatian provinces of Austria, no less than those of Montenegro and Albania, which are not yet reunited to Christendom, are to this hour as devoid of illustrious names and noble associations, as they were in the fourth century before the Christian era.

From the gulf of Ambracia, the northwestern boundary of Greece, up to the head of the Adriatic, the coast was occupied by the Molossians, Thesprotians, Chaonians, and beyond these, by the various tribes85 of the great Illyrian nation, amongst whom Herodotus included even the Henetians or Venetians, at the northern extremity of this whole region. In remote times, before the Hellenic race began to assume a character so distinct from all its 32 I. 6. ians, pp. 6, 7. And so also does Livy, X. 2. 33’

Havxados /aplyv 7r Ti cKisvcrao vdltpca But Herodotus, as I have said, reckons even ipLtorae’ rpob roXXa c e avayKago#E[vos lUvat roXXAs the Venetians as Illyrians, I. 196, and Strabo ca’ rs Ervrcxsviases &ZE.

Thucyd. I. 71. calls the whole eastern coast of the Adriatic, s’ Xenophon, Hellenica, V. 2, ~ 12, et seqq. Illyricum, as far as the very head of the gulf. r6 Scylax distinguishes the Venetians, as well VII. pp. 313, 314. as the Istrians and Liburnians, from the Illyr

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CHAP. XXII.] MOLOSSIANS, THESPROTIANS, ETC. 189 kindred nations, the Molossians, Thesprotians, and Chaonians, all of them, it is probable, Pelasgian tribes, were both, in their religion and in their traditions of their heroes, closely connected with the Greeks. The ancient temple of Dodona, once no less famous than Delphi became afterwards, belonged to the Thesprotians; the son of Achilles was said to have reigned over the Molossians; and even within historical memory, the names of Molossian kings and chiefs are of Greek origin, such as Alcon, one of the suitors of the fair Agariste, the daughter of Clisthenes of Sicyon, and still later, Admetus, the protector of Themistocles in his disgrace, and Alcetas, the ally of Dionysius of Syracuse. But the mass of the people were considered to be barbarian, and their fortunes were distinct from those of Greece, till the brilliant reign of Pyrrhus, more than a century after our present period, for a time united them. The Illyrians were already notorious for their piracies, and it was remarked of them, that some of their tribes were governed’ by queens.G Their Iyian queen Teuta, and her wars with the Romans, will give me an opportunity of noticing them more fully hereafter; and so rapidly is our knowledge increasing, that ere long we may possibly gain some clue to assist us in discovering the race and language of the Illyrians, points which at present are involved in the greatest obscurity.

We are within five-and-twenty years of the accession of Philip to the throne of Macedon, but so entirely was the Macedonian greatness his own personal work, that nothing as yet gave sign of what it was Amyntasthe father of so soon to become. His father, Amyntas, was at this time king,.lp and unable even to cope with the Olynthian confederacy, which had lately grown up in his neighborhood. Many of the cities of Macedonia were won by the Olynthians,31 and Amyntas was most rejoiced to obtain the aid of Lacedaemon to establish him on his throne by putting down this formidable enemy. The Macedonians38 were not allowed to be Greeks, although they were probably of a kindred stock, and although the Greek language was now in universal use among them. But their kings were of the noblest Greek blood, being Heraclidse from Argos, claiming descent from Temenus, one of the three hero chiefs of the race of Hercules, who had established themselves in Peloponnesus by the aid of the Dorians. The people were stout, brave, and hardy, and more numerous than the citizens of the little Greek commonwealths; so that Philip afterwards found no difficulty in raising a considerable army, when he began to aspire to the honor of making himself the first power in Greece. But as yet, though Archelaus had made roads through the country,39 and had collected large supplies of arms to arm his people, the friendship and the enmity of Macedon were of little value, and none could have imagined that the fatal blow to the independence of Greece was to come from a kingdom which as yet scarcely belonged to the Greek name, and in the struggles for dominion between Athens and Lacedaemon, had been only a subordinate auxiliary.

Further to the east, the great Persian monarchy still existed unimpaired in the extent of its visible dominion, although ready at the first State of the Peian touch to fall to pieces. All of Asia, of which the Greeks had any monarchy. knowledge, from the shores of the _Egayean to the Indus and the Araxes, from the Erythraean sea southwards to the Caspian and the chain of Caucasus, obeyed, to speak generally, the great king. In Africa, however, it was otherwise: Egypt S6 Atl3upvol yvvasKOKpaToVYTat. Scylax, Periplus, saying, that he himself was of Greek origin, alp. I. This is on the assumption that the Libur-luding to his supposed descent from Temenus nians were either Illyrians, or, at any rate, of a the Heraclid. This would have been needless, kindred stock. had his birth as a Macedonian made him a 37 Xenophon, Hellenica, V. 2, ~ 13, 3, ~ 9. Greek. Again, Thucydides distinguishes the 38 Alexander, the son of Amyntas, when he Macedonians from the Greeks who were settled went over with some secret information to the on their coast, and even expressly includes Greek camp before the battle of Platsea, is them amongst the barbarians, IV. 124, 126. represented by Herodotus (IX. 45) as account- $ Thucydides, II. 100.

ing for his interest in the welfare of Greece by

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190 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIII had been for some years in revolt, was again governed by a dynasty of its native princes, and had defied the efforts of the Persian kings to reconquer it. And this example, together with the long war carried on against the Persians by Evagoras, the tyrant of the little state of Salamis, in Cyprus, and the belt of Greek cities encircling the whole coast of Asia Minor, from Trapezus on the Euxine to Cnidus by the Triopian cape, was tending gradually to dissolve the Persian power. The great king’s hold on Caria and Cilicia was loosened, and when Isocrates wrote his Panegyrical Oration, in the beginning of the hundredth Olymlpiad,40 Tyre was in the possession of the king’s enemies, and its naval force strengthened for a time the arms of Evagoras. Such was the state of the’ civilized world, when the Kelts or Gauls broke Conclusion, through the thin screen which had hitherto concealed them from sight, and began, for the first time, to tske their part in the great drama of the nations. For nearly two hundred years they continued to fill Europe and Asia with the terror of their name; but it was a passing tempest, and if useful at all, it was useful only to destroy. The Gauls could communicate no essential points of human character in which other races might be deficient; they could neither improve the intellectual state of mankind, nor its social and political relations. When, therefore, they had done their appointed work of havoc, they were doomed to be themselves extirpated, or to be lost amidst nations of greater creative and constructive power; nor is there any race which has left fewer traces of itself in the character and institutions of modern civilization. CHAPTER

XXIII, MISCELLANEOUS-PHYSICAL HISTORY. ” Postrema vero partitio historie civilis ea sit, ut dividatur in meraim aut mixtam. Mixturae:elebres due: altera ex scientiA civili; altera prsecipne ex naturali.”-BACON, De Augmentis Scientiar. II. 10. A GREAT work might be written on the connection between the revolutions of nature and those of mankind: how they act each upon the other; Imperfection of the mnaterials of physical iiis-how man is affected by climate, and how climate is again altered tory. t ry o by the labors of man; how diseases are generated; how different” states of society are exposed to different disorders, and require different sorts of diet; how, as all earthly things are exhaustible, the increased command over external nature given by increased knowledge, seems to have a tendency to shorten the period of the existing creation, by calling at once into action those resources of the earth which else might have supplied the wants of centuries to come; how, in short, nature, no less than human society, contains tokens that it had a beginning, and will as surely have its end. But, unfortunately, the physical history of ancient times is even more imperfect than the political history; and in the place of those exact and uninterrupted records of natural phenomena, from which alone any safe conclusions can be drawn, we have only a few scattered notices; nor can we be sure that even these have recorded what was most worthy of our knowledge. Still, these scanty memorials, such as they 40 Isocrates, Panegyric. ~ 188, p. 74.

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OnAP. XXIII.] CHANGE IN THE CLIMATE OF ITALY. 191 are, must not be neglected; and as we gain a wider experience, even these may hereafter be found instructive. The first question with regard to the physical state of ancient Rome is, whetner the climate was such as it is at present. Now here it is impos-The clime of Italy sible not to consider the somewhat analogous condition of America was anciently colder in at this day. Boston is in the same latitude with Rome; but the t t severity of its winter far exceeds not that of Rome only, but of Paris and London. Allowing that the peninsular form of Italy must at all times have had its effect in softening the climate, still the woods and marshes of Cisalpine Gaul, and’

the perpetual snows of the Alps, far more extensive than at present, owing to the uncultivated and uncleared state of Switzerland and Germany, could not but have been felt even in the neighborhood of Rome. Besides, even on the Apennines, and in Ecruria and in Latium, the forests occupied a far greater space than in modern times: this would increase the quantity of rain, and consequently the volume of water in the rivers; the floods would be greater and more numerous, and before man’s dominion had completely subdued the whole country, there would be large accumulations of water in the low grounds, which would still further increase the coldness of the atmosphere. The language’ of ancient writers, on the whole, favors the same conclusion, that the Roman winter, in their days, was more severe than it is at present. It agrees with this, that the olive, which cannot bear a continuance of severe cold, was not introduced into Italy till long after the vine: Fenestella2 asserted that its cultivation was unknown as late as the reign of Tarquinius Priscus; and such was the notion entertained of the cold of all inland countries, even in the latitude of Greece, that Theophrastus3 held it impossible to cultivate the olive at the distance of more than four hundred stadia from the sea. But the cold of the winter is perfectly consistent4 with great heat in the summer. The vine is cultivated with success on the Rhine, in the latitude of Devonshire and Cornwall, although the winter at Coblen.tz and Bonn is far more severe than it is in Westmoreland; and evergreens will flourish through the winter in the Westmoreland valley far better than on the Rhine or in the heart of France. The summer heat of Italy was probably much the same in ancient times as it is at present, except that there’It is by no means easy to know what weight in the 58th volume of the Philosophical Transi, to he given to the language of the poets, nor actions. Gibbon, also, after stating the arguhow far particular descriptions or expressions ments on both sides of the question, comes to -ilay have been occasioned by peculiar local cir-the same conclusion. Miscellaneous Works, ainstances. Pliny’s statement, Epistol. II. 17, Vol. III. p. 246. He quotes, however, the Abbe that the bay-tree would rarely live through the de Louguerue, as saying that the Tiber was winter without shelter, either at Rome, or at frozen in the bitter winter of 1709. his own villa at Laurentum, if taken absolutely, 2 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XV. 1. would prove too much; for although the bay is s Pliny, Hist. Natur. XV. 1. less hardy than some other evergreens, yet how 4 It is a common notion that climate follows can it be conceived that a climnate in which the latitude, and that a northern country will be olive would flourish, could be too severe for the cold, and a southern one warm, as compared bay? There must either have been some local with each other throughout the year. But this peculiarity of winds or soil, which the tree did is by no means a universal rule; on the connot like, or else the fact, as is sometimes the trary, climate in England is more affected by case, must have been too hastily assumed; and the longitude of a place, than by its latitude; men were afraid, from long custom, to leave and the winters are often mildest in those parts the bay unprotected in the winter, although, in where the summers are least genial. The whole fact, they might have done it with safety. Yet eastern coast, from Kent to Caithness, is much the elder Pliny, XVII. 2, speaks of long snows colder in winter than the western; and this to being useful to the corn, which shows that he such a degree, that Kent is not only colder than is not speaking of the mountains; and a long Cornwall, but colder than Cumberland, or Arsnow lying in the valleys of central or southern gyleshire. On the other hand, the eastern coast Italy would surely be a very unheard-of phe-in summer enj Dys a much greater share of steady nomenon now. Again, the freezing of the riv-fine weather and sunshine than the western. ers, as spoken of by Virgil and Horace, is an Wall-fruit will ripen in the neighborhood of Edimage of winter, which could not, I think, nat-inburgh far more surely than in Westmoreland,: urally suggest itself to Italian poets of the pres-and wheat grows luxuriantly as far north as ent day, at any point to the south of the Apen-Elgin, while it is a rarity or. the coast of Arnines. Other arguments, to the same effect, gyleshire. may be seen in a paper by Daines Barrington,

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192 HISTORY OF ROME. LOHAP. XXIII. were a great number of spots where shade and verdure might be found, and where its violence would, therefore, be more endurable. But the difference between the temperature of summer and winter may be safely assumed to have been much greater than it is now.

It then becomes a question whether the greater cold of the winter, and the Thisperlapshadan ef-greater extent of wood and of undrained waters which existed in fe0t on the healthiness m of the neighborhood sof the times of the Romans, may not have had a favorable influence Rome. in mitigating that malaria which is now the curse of so many parts of Italy, and particularly of the immediate neighborhood of Rome. On a subject so imperfectly understood, even by those who have had the fullest experience, it were most unbecoming in a foreigner to speak otherwise than with the greatest diffidence. We know, however, that the Campagna at Rome, which is now almost a desert, must, at a remote period, have been full of independent cities; and although the greater part of these had perished long before the fourth century of Rome, yet even then there existed Ostia, Laurentum, Ardea, and Antium on one side, and Veii and Caere on the other, in situations which are now regarded as uninhabitable during the summer months; and all the lands of the Romans, on which they, like the old Athenians, for the most part resided regularly, lie within the present range of the malaria. Some have supposed that, although the climate was the same as it is now, yet The rangofthe mla-the Romans were enabled to escape from its influence, and their ria less extensive for-safety has been ascribed5 to their practice of wearing woollen next erly than at pre to the skin, instead of linen or cotton. But not to notice other objections to this notion, it is enough to say that the Romans regarded unhealthy situations with the same apprehension as their modern descendants; it is one of the first cautions given by Cato’ and Varro’ to a man going to purchase land, that he should buy only where the air is healthy; “otherwise,” says Varro, ” farming is nothing else than a mere gambling with life and property.” The truth seems to be, that the malaria, although well known and extremely fatal, was much more partial than at present, and that many spots which are now infected were formerly free from it. “The whole of Latium,” says Strabo,8 A” is a flourishing and very productive country, with the exception of a few spots near the coast, which are marshy and unhealthy.” And again, when speaking expressly of the Campagna between the Alban hills and Rome,9 he says, ” that the parts towards the sea are not so healthy; but that the rest is a good country to live in, and well cultivated accordingly.” Now, although this is probably going too far, for the unhealthy spots could not have been confined altogether to the seacoast, yet with every allowance for exaggeration and careless writing, this is a description of the Campagna which no man in his senses would think of giving now. On the other hand, Cicero”0 and Livyl both speak of the immediate neighborRome itself, then as hood of Rome as unhealthy, but at the same time they extol the thy than itos..

sleudiate positive healthiness of the city itself; ascribing it to the hills, which neighborhood, are at once airy themselves, and offer a screen to the low grounds from the heat of the sun. Bunsen, also, from an experience of many years, gives a favorable account of the healthiness of the city itself. “The site of Rome,” he says, ” taken generally, may be called healthy.” It is true, that one of the most unhealthy parts of modern Rome, the Piazzi di Spagna and the slope of the Pincian hill above it, was not within the limits of the ancient city. Yet the praise of the healthiness of Rome must be understood rather com5 By Brocchi, in his “Discorso sulla condi-9 V. 3, ~ 12, p. 239. zione dell’ aria di Roma negli antichi tempi,” lo De Republic, II. 6. “Locum delegit printed at the end of his work on the Geology (Romulus) in regione pestilenti salubrem.”

of Rome. ” Compare VII. 38. “In pestilente atque C6 ato, de Re RusticA, II. arido circa urbem solo;” and V. 54. ” Salu7 Varro, de Re Rustica, II.

4. berrimos colles.” 8 V. 3, ~ 5, p. 231.

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CIAP. XXIII.] SUPPOSED CAUSES OF THE MALARIA. 193 paratively with that of the immediate neighborhood than positively. Rome, in the summer months, cannot be called healthy, even as compared with the other great cities of Italy, much less if the standard be taken from Berlin or front London.

Again, the neighborhood of Rome is characterized by Livy as a “
pestilential and parched soil.” The latter epithet is worthy of notice, because The cmpghaspe the favorite opinion has been that the malaria is connected with hapse become les henlthy from the winters marshes and with moisture. But it is precisely here that we may having become milder, and from the diminufind, I think, the explanation of the spread of the malaria in mod-tion in the quantity of ern times. Even in spring, nothing can less resemble a marsh than rain the present aspect of the Campagna. It is far more like the down country of Dorsetshire, and as the summer advances it may well be called a dry and parched district. But this is exactly the character of the plains12 of Estremadura, where our soldiers suffered so grievously from malaria fever in the autumn of 1809. In short, abundant experience has proved, that when the surface of the ground is wet, the malaria poison is far less noxious than when all appearance of moisture on the surface is gone, and the damp makes its way into the atmosphere from a considerable depth under ground. After a wet and cold summer in 1799, when the whole face of the country was nearly flooded with water, the British army remained the whole autumn in one of the most unhealthy parts of Holland, without suffering in any remarkable degree from malaria fever.

But in 1809, when the summer had been hot and fine, every one remembers the deadly effect in the autumn fevers on the soldiers who were holding Walcheren. If, then, more rain fell in the Campagna formerly than is the case now; if the streams were fuller of water, and their course more rapid; above all, if, owing to the uncleared state of central Europe, and the greater abundance of wood in Italy itself, the summer heats set in later, and were less intense, and more often relieved by violent storms of rain, there is every reason to believe that the Campagna must have been far healthier than at present; and that precisely in proportion to the clearing and cultivation of central Europe, to the felling of the woods in Italy itself, the con-‘sequent decrease in the quantity of rain, the shrinking of the streams, and the disappearance of the water from the surface, has been the increased unhealthiness of the country, and the more extended range of the malaria. It must be observed also, that the present desolation of the Campagna, and even that comparative want of population which prevailed in it Causes of its gradual during the later times of the Roman republic and under the em-desolation. pire, are not wholly to be attributed to physical causes. The aguish districts of England continue to be inhabited, nor have the terrors of the yellow fever driven men away from the unhealthiest situations of the West Indies, or from Vera Cruz, Acapulco, or Carthagena. The old cities of the Campagna would have continued to defy the malaria; their population would have been kept down, indeed; many of their children would have died young, and the average length of human life would have been far short of threescore years and ten; but men do not readily leave their country, and they would have continued, as their fathers had done before them, to struggle with disease and death. When, however, political causes had destroyed the cities of the Campagna one after the other, and the land became the property of Roman citizens; when again, at a later period, the small properties disappeared, and whole districts fell into the hands of a few individuals;; then it was natural that those who could afford to live where they chose, should 12

The view here given of some of the phe-of his description of Rome. An unprofessional nomena of marsh or malaria fevers was obtained man’s judgment of a medical work is worth litfrom a paper by Dr. Ferguson of Windsor, ” on tie; but the subject of Dr. Ferguson’s paper is the nature and history of the Marsh Poison,” one in which I have long felt a lively interest; which was read before the Royal Society of Edin-and all that I have observed myself, or heard burgh in 1820. I directed [Bunsen’s attention from medical men, in answer to my inquiries as to it, and he has made much use of it in his own to matters of fact, has been in agreement with paper on the “Aria Cattiva,” in the first volume his statements. 13

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194 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIII.L not fix themselves in a spot of even partial unhealthiness, and thus a great part of the Campagna was left only to the slaves by whom it was cultivated. In modern times, when slave labor was no longer to be had, and there were no attractions strong enough to induce a free population to migrate from their homes to an unhealthy district, the Campagna has remained a wilderness, and its harvests are reaped by a temporary immigration of laborers from other parts of the country. To repeople it under such circumstances is far more difficult than to keep up a population already existing; and if, as I believe, the physical state of the Campagna has become more and more unfavorable, it seems likely, without some extraordinary advances in our knowledge of the malaria, and in our ability to combat it, to remain a wilderness forever.‘3 The disorders produced by malaria, whether more cr less fatal, so regularly accompanied the return of hot weather, that they were not likely Various epidemic disordersnoticedithe an-to be recorded in the annals. The diseases which were noticed nals. there were of a very different character, and belonged rather to another class of phenomena, those extraordinary sicknesses which, in obedience to a law hitherto undiscovered, visit the earth at different periods, prevail more or less extensively, and acting independently, as it seems, of any recognized causes of disease, are also beyond the reach of all known remedies. The first half of the fourth century of Rome was one of these calamitous periods, and the pestilences which occurred at the beginning of it have already been noticed. Seven others are recorded between the years 318 and 365; that is to say,‘4 in 319, 320, 322, 327, 343, 356, and 363. They are described in general terms, with the exception of those of the years 327
and 363, which are ascribed to unusual droughts; and said also to have nearly resembled each other in their symptoms. The epidemic of 32 7 first, as we are told, attacked the cattle, the herdsmen, and others who tended the cattle, and lastly it became general. It appears to have been wholly inflammatory, and to have shown itself particularly on the skin; first, in the form of a violent rash,‘5 accompanied with extreme irritation, and afterwards in the shape of erysipelas of a very malignant kind. This visitation took place just after the conclusion of the peace of Nicias, and we do not hear of any coincident prevalence of pestilence in Greece.

The epidemic of 363‘1 is described in similar terms; it was brought on by the same causes, an exceedingly hot and dry summer; and the symptoms were the same, an eruption terminating in large and painful ulcers, accompanied with such irritation, that their patients tore their flesh even to the bone. The date of this disorder falls about the beginning of the ninety-ninth Olympiad, that is to say, it coincides with the Olynthian war; and as it arose 13 This opinion should be expressed with the prietors disposed to follow a new system, at greatest hesitation and diffidence, because Bun-variance with their old habits, it must be allowed sen believes that the Campagna is reclaimable that the duke of Zagarolo’s experiment was made by encouraging human habitation in it; and he under circumstances unusually favorable. The thinks thatif thegreatlandholders were tolet out country round Zagarolo is high ground; it their property on leases to a number of small forms a sort of shoulder, connecting the Alban farmers, who would thus naturally create a resi-hills with the Apennines, and forms the divordent population, the unhealthiness of the air tium aquarum, or watershed, of the feeders of would, in a great measure, be obviated. It is said the Tiber on the one-hand, and of the Garig%hat the breaking up of the surface of the ground liano on the other. Its character also is wholly is found to lessen the virulence of the lmalaria; different from the general aspect of the Camand the fires which necessarily accompany hu-pagna; it is not a country of long swelling slopes man dwellings, are another known antidote to notched as it were here and there with deep it. As a proof of this, 13unsen appeals to the narrow stream beds; but a succession of nearly great improvement thus effected by the duke parallel ridges, rising to a considerable height, of Zagarolo in the neighborhood of that little with valleys rather than gorges between them.

town, which stands on the edge of the Cam-To all appearance, therefore, it was more easily paena, a-few miles fromPalestrina, about a mile reclaimable than the great mass of the Camon the left of the road coming from Rome. The pagna. air, which was decidedly unhealthy, has been Livy, IV. 21, 25, 30, 52. V. 13, 31. purified; and the whole district, by having 5 Dionysius, XII. 3. Fragm. Mai. been peopled, has become actually capable of 16 lionysius, XIII. 4. Fragm. Mai. Livy, supporting a population in health and prosper-V. 31. Dionysius appears to put this epidemic itv.

Ilowever, without reckoning on the moral a year earlier than Livy, namely, 362. improbability of finding the great boly of pro

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CHAP. XXIII.] VOLCANIC LAKES-LAKE OF ALBA. 195 from local causes, we cannot be surprised that we hear no mention of its having extended into Greece. But the epidemic of 322 and of the years almost immediately preceding it, was contemporary with the great plague of Athens: and that of 356 coincided, according to the chronology of Diodorus, with the violent sickness which destroyed Imilcon’s army before Syracuse, and had been preceded by three or four years of epidemic disease in Africa. If from diseases we turn to the phenomena of the weather, with which they are, in all probability, closely connected, we find the years 327 and 363

Phenomenaofthe wonmarked, as has already been observed, by excessive droughts; and thier. Greatfrostofthb the summer of 356 is said by Diodorus‘7 to have been of the same year 355. character. On the other hand, the winter of 355 had been one of unusual severity;“s the Tiber was choked up with ice, the snow lay seven feet deep, where it was not drifted; many men and cattle were lost in it, and many of the cattle were killed by the extreme cold, or starved from want of pasture, the resources by which we now provide for their subsistence during the winter being then little practised. It is added that’the fruit-trees, by which are meant the figs and olives in particular, either perished altogether, or suffered so severely that they did not bear for a long time afterwards; and that many houses were crushed by the weight of snow which lay on them, or carried away by its melting when the frost at last broke up. There is also a notice in Diodorus of the winter of 321,‘9 which is described as having been excessively wet, so that the fruits of the following season never ripened properly, and the corn was considered unwholesome. The period about the year 322 was remarkable in Greece for the frequency and severity of earthquakes; the numerous earthquakes which, Volcanic phenomena. from their occurring so nearly together, were remembered afterwards Earthquakes as an epoch, happened, says Thucydides,20 at this time. In the same way the Romans were alarmed in the year 319 by reports2’ of frequent earthquakes in the country immediately adjoining Rome, and many houses were thrown down by the shocks. It is probable some phenomenon of this sort occasioned also the great overflow of the Alban lake during the war with Veil; an event remarkable in itself, and still more so as having led to the famous work existing to this day; the tunnel by which th9 water of the lake is carried through the range of hills which encircle it, and from thenrce is discharged into the Campagna. The lakes of Alba and Nemi, like others in the neighborhood of Rome, are of a peculiar character. In their elevation, lying nestled as it were The volcanic lakes of high up in the bosom of the mountains, they resemble what in tme. gunebho thof Cumberland and Westmoreland are called tarns; but our tarns, lakeofAlba. like ordinary lakes, have their visible feeders and outlets, their head which receives the streams from the mountain sides, and their foot by which they discharge themselves, generally in a larger stream, into the valley below.

The lakes of Alba and Nemi lie each at the bottom of a perfect basin, and the unbroken rim of this basin allows them no visible outlet. Again, it sometimes happens that lakes so situated have their outlet under’ ground, and that the stream which drains them appears again to the day after a certain distance, having made its way through the basin of the lake by a tunnel provided for it by nature. This is the case particularly where the prevailing rock is the mountain or metalliferous limestone of Derbyshire, which is full of caverns and fissures: and an instance of it may be seen in the small lake or tarn of Malham in Yorkshire, and another on a much larger scale in the lake of Copais in Bceotia. But the volcanic rocks, in which the lake of Alba lies, do not afford such natural tunnels, or at “:IV. 70. or since, down to his time. I cannot find any’s Livy, V. 13.

Dionysius, XII. 8. Fragm. particulars of the freezing of the Tiber in 1709, Ma;. Bunsen observes that ice in the Tiber is already noticed in note 1. n.ow as unknown a phenomenon as it would be 19 XII. 58. betveen the tropics. The winter of 355 is in-20 III. 89. derd described by Dionysius as one altogether 21 Livy, IV. 21. unpasraleled in the Roman annals, either before

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196 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIII least they are exceeding small, and unequal to the discharge of any large quantity of water; so that if any unusual cause swells the lake, it can find no adequate outlet, and rises necessarily to a higher level. The Roman tradition reported that such a rise took place in the year 357; it was caused probably by some volcanic agency, and increased to such a height, that the water at last ran over the basin of hills at its lowest point,22 and poured down into the Campagna. Traces23 of such an outlet are said to be still visible; and it is asserted that there are marks of artificial cutting through the rock, as if to enlarge and deepen the passage. This would suppose the ordinary level of the lake in remote times to have been about two hundred feet higher than it is at present; and if this were so, the actual tunnel was intended not to remedy a new evil, but to alter the old state of the lake for the better, by reducing it for the time to come to a lower level.

Possibly the discharge over the edge of the basin became suddenly greater, and so suggested the idea of diverting the water altogether by a different channel. But the whole story of the tunnel, as we have it, is so purely a part of the poetical account of the fall of Veii, that no part of it can be relied on as historical. The prophecy of the old Veientian, and the corresponding answer of the Delphian oracle, connecting the draining of the lake with the fate of Veii, must be left as we find them; only it is likely enough that any extraordinary natural phenomenon, occurring immediately after the visitation of pestilence, and in the midst of a long and doubtful war, should have excited unusual alarm, and have been thought important enough to require an appeal to the most famous oracle in the world. But other questions of no small difficulty remain: the length of the tunnel, according to the lowest statement given, exceeds two thousand one hundred yards;24 according to others it exceeds two thousand six hundred;25 and one estimate makes it as much as two thousand eight hundred:26 its height varies from seven feet and a half to nine or ten feet; and its width is not less than four feet. Admitting that it was wholly worked through the tufo,27 which is easily wrought, still the labor and expense of such a tunnel must have been considerable; and in the midst of an important war, how could either money or hands have been spared for such a purpose? Again, was the work exclusively a Roman one, or performed by the Romans jointly with the Latins, as an object of common concern to the whole confederacy? The Alban lake can scarcely have been within the domain of Rome; nor can we conceive that the Romans could have been entitled to divert its waters at their pleasure without the consent of the neighboring Latin cities. But if it were a common work; if the Latins entered heartily into the quarrel of Rome with Veii, regarding it as a struggle between their race and that of the Etruscans; if the* overflow of the waters of their national lake, the lake which bathed the foot of the Alban mountain, where their national temple stood and their national solemnities were held, excited an interest in every people of the Latin name, then we may understand how their joint labor and joint contributions may have accomplished the work even in the midst of war; and the Romans, as they disguised on every occasion the true nature of their connection with the Latins, would not fail to represent it as exclusively their own.‘R Dionysius, XII. 11. Fragm. Mai. 2 Westphal says it is worked through lava. 23 Sir W. Gell, Topography of Rome, &c. Vol. Sir W. Gell says it is excavated generally in the I. 3. 43. tufo. Mr. Meason, whose authority is considWestphal. Rlmische Kampagne, p. 25. erable, as he had had much practical acquaint22 Sir W. Gell, Topography of Rome, p. 39. ance with mining, and went into the tunnel for 26 Mr. Laing Meason, quoted by Sir W. Gell about 130 yards from the lake, speaks of the in a note to p.

53 of his Topogr. of Rome, Vol. I. work as clit in the tufo.

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CHAPTER XXIV, THE GAULS INVADE CENTRAL ITALY-BATTLE OF THE ALIA-BURNING OF

ROME-RANSOM OF THE CAPITOL AND OF THE CITY-RETREAT OF THE GAULS. ” Hark!

the Gaul is at her gates!” COWPER.’ Aurea censaries ollis, atque aurea vestis: Virgatis lucent sagulis; tum lactea colla Auro innectuntur: duo quisque Alpina coruscant Gsesa manu, scutis protecti corpora longis.”

VMGmI, LEn. VIII. 658. THE fourth century before the Christian sra brought the Gauls, as we have seen, for the first time within the observation of the civilized world. ommon account o They then crossed the Apennines, and overran central and south-the sett lement of ths ern Italy; they then also broke in upon the Illyrian’ tribes, estab-Gaulish tribes in Italy.

lished themselves between the Danube and Greece, and became known to the kings of Macedon.2 But whether it was in this same century that they had first crossed the Alps as well as the Apennines, is a question much more difficult to answer. If we follow the wellknown account of Livy,3 we must fix their passage of the Alps two hundred years earlier: it was about six hundred years before the Christian zera, according to this statement, that there happened a vast emigration of the inhabitants of central Gaul; one great multitude, said the story, crossed the Rhine, and sought a home amidst the wilds of the Hercynian forest; another made its way over the Alps, descended into the plain of the Po, encountered and defeated the Etruscans, who were then the masters of the country, near the river Ticinus, and founded the city of Mediolanum. After this other tribes of central Gauls, entering Italy by the same course, and finding their countrymen already in possession of all to the westward of the Adda, penetrated still deeper, and extended the Gaulish settlements as far as the Adige. Again, at a later period, but how much later we are not told, the Boii4 and Lingones set out from the east X Justin, XXIV. 4. This is the great expedi-as having entered Italy last of all the Gauls, are tion which Scylax alludes to, when he describes also included amongst the tribes of the first the Gauls on the northwestern coast of the swarm who founded Mediolanum. Both these Adriatic, as ” men who had stayed behind from circumstances seem to show, that in the view their expedition;”

a7roXE)00ivrts rTg. The fol-of the author of this account, all the migrations lowing words, Eri arEv@v, appear to me to be into Italy took place nearly continuously, and corrupt. were the result of one and the same cause. 2 In the very beginning of the reign of Alex-This also seems to agree best with the fact, that ander, when a Gaulish embassy came to con-the last comers, instead of attempting to disgratulate him on his victory over the Getie. lodge those who had arrivedbefore them, passed Arrian, Exp. Alex. I. 4. on quietly to a more distant settlement. This 3

Livy, V. 34, 35. is very conceivable, if all had left their country 4 The Lingones came from the neighborhood from one and the same impelling cause, and in of Langres, that high tableland which looks the course of one generation; but had the Boil down on the infant Marne to the north, and on and Lingones entered Italy a century or a centhe streams which feed the Saone to the south. tury and a half later than the founders of MeThe situation of the Boii in Gaul is not known; diolanum, and from causes wholly unconnected their nation is only to be traced in the countries with their migration, they would, in all probato which it had emigrated, in Germany and bility, have tried to establish themselves beItaly. It is remarkable that the story speaks of tween the Ticinus and the Adda, and would a simultaneous migration into Germany and have paid little regard to the tie of a common Italy; and we find Boii in both of these coun-extraction, when distance of time and place had tries. Again, the Senones, who are mentioned done so much to weaken it.

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198 HISTORY OF ROME. [CAPr. XXIV and northeast of Gaul, made their way to the lake of Geneva, ascended the valley of the Rhone, crossed the Alps by the pass which now bears the name of the Great St. Bernard, and as the whole country on the north of the Po was already occupied, these new adventurers passed that river, and drove out the Etruscan and Umbrians from their possessions between the Po and the Apennines, from the neighborhood of the modern cities of Parma, Modena, and Bologna. Last of all, but again the time is not specified, came the Senones from the same quarter. of Gaul, and following the track of the Boii and Lingones, crossed as they had done both the Alps and the Po, reached the coast of the Adriatic, and finally spread themselves along its shores from the neighborhood of Ravenna to that of Ancona. The geographical part of this account appears to deserve our full belief; but Its chronology is auspi-it does not follow that its chronology is equally trustworthy. The ciOUS.

D narrative itself seems to imply that all these migrations were nearly continuous, and it is for many reasons most probable5 that they were so; yet it is not credible that the Senones should have been settled on the coast of the Adriatic6 for two hundred years before they crossed the Apennines; and there is a preponderance’ of evidence to prove that their inroad into Etruria followed close upon their first establishment in north Italy. It is impossible to say at how early a period tribes of Gauls may have passed over the Cottian Alps, and settled in the valleys and plains of Piedmont. But the general overthrow of the Etruscan power between the Alps and the Apennines has every appearance of having been Partly for the reasons given in the preced-their country by the Gauls. This is the intering note, and also, because a general burst of pretation of Dionysius’ words, as Midller undermigration at one particular period is more prob-stands them. (Etrusker, Vol. I. p. 153, note able amongst a barbarianm people than a succes-78.) Niebuhr, however, understands them difsion of migrations to the same quarter, during ferently; and the language is not sufficiently a term of two hundred years. precise to enable us to be certain as to the wri6 They crossed the Apennines, according to ter’s meaning. The words are, Tvupnvpdv ol rEs I)iodorus and the author of the little work, Tav’Iv6ov K6XroV KarOLKoUVr7E, 1KEiOE O’

aUk() ro”De Viris Illustribus,” because their settle-KEXriyv eXa0EvTrs avl X~p6vy(, Kai abv atvrow’O~l ment on the Adriatic was parched and barren: PrpKot ire Kai AaivoL KaL uvXvos rTv aXXwv fiap3dpco they surely would have discovered this in less I7rrXEdpisroav &aveEev (Triv KMIrv).

lNiebuhr think, timne than a hundred years. iNiebuhr notices that this means, “those Etruscans who then the general rapidity of barbarian incursions; were dwelling on the Ionian gulf, but who in they advance further and further till they meet the course of time were afterwards driven from with some invincible obstacle. And those who thence by the Gauls.” Muller objects that if this had exterminated the Etruscans from the north were the meaning, Dionysius must have writof the Apennines, would have had nothing to ten ol TrTE pyea KearoLKoiVTES, arepov a iE{Xa0evrTE. deter them from attacking the same enemies in This would have been clearer, undoubtedly; their southern possessions in Etruria Proper.

but Dionysils does not write with the perfect 7 Diodorus, XIV. 113.

Dionysils, XIII. 14, clearness of Isocrates or Demosthenes, and the 15.

Fragm. Mali. Pimy, Hist. Natur. III. 17, words a-v xp6vco are meant to express the same where he says that:he Gauls destroyed the thing as M’iller’s virTepov. But after all, what Etruscan city of M1elpuam in northern Italy in can be made of-the passage under any interprethe same year and day on which the Romans tation? “The Etruscans on the Ionian gulf,” took Veil. Justin, XXIV. 4, and XX. 5, and that is, on the Adriatic, could not have been even Livy himself, in two passages referred to driven out by the Gauls as early as the sixtyby Niebuhr, V. 17, and 37, where he makes the fourth Olympiad, for all allow that the Senones, Etruscans speak of the Gauls as a people whom who expelledthe Etruscans from the coast, enthey had never seen, who were recently become tered Italy after all the other Gauls; and their their neighbors, and with whom they knew not invasion was so recent, that Scylax speaks of whether they were to have peace or war; and the Etruscans, as well as of the Umbrians and where in the same way he speaks of the Gauls Daunians, as still dwelling on the shores of the as a new enemy to the Romans, who were come Adriatic even in his time. Nor is there any upon them from the shores of the ocean and the reason for considering the expedition against extremities of the earth. The only plausible ar-Cuma as occasioned by the expulsion of the ingument for the more ancient settlement of the vaders from their own country by another eneGauls in Italy (for little stress is to be laid on my. The Umbrians and l aunians who took their pretended alliance with the Phocean exiles part in it were certainly never driven out from who were founding Massilia), is to be found in their country by the Gauls; and it is more the statement of Dionysius, VII. 3, which some probable that the Etruscans, who are named as understand as saying that the Greek city of the first people in the confederacy, were not a C’uma in Campania was besieged in the reign band of fugitives but were rather attempting, of Tarquinius Superbus by some Etruscans who in conjunction with their dependent allies, to had dwelt on the shores of the lIonian gulf, and extend their dominion still further over Italy; who had been in the course of time driven from for this was the period of their greatest power.

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CHAP. XXIV.] DIVISIONS OF THE KELTIC RACE. 19. effected suddenly, speedily, and not earlier than the middle of the fourth century of Rome, when some causes, to us unknown, set the whole Keltic or Gaulish nation in motion, and drove them southward and eastward to execute their appointed work of devastation and destruction. Another question next presents itself. Can we recognize these Gaulish invaders of Italy as belonging to either of the existing divisions of the To wh, t Klti e Keltic race? Were they Gael, or were they Kymry? or did they did the Gauls, who in. belong to some third division, distinct from each of these, which v y, bong has since utterly perished? Much has been written upon the subject of the Kelts and their language; but we seem as yet unable to connect our knowledge of the existing Keltic races with the accounts which we have received of them from the writers of antiquity. Diodoruss tells us that the Romans included under one common name of Gauls two great divisions of people: the one consisting of the Keltic ditinto tribes of Spain, of the south and centre of Gaul, and of the north tween the Gauls and of Italy; the other embracing those more remote tribes which lived on the shores of the ocean, and on the skirts of what he calls the Hercynian mountains, and eastward as far as Scythia. This last division, he says, were the proper Gauls, while the others were to be called Kelts. Niebuhr supposes that Diodorus learnt this distinction from Posidonius, and it is undoubtedly well worth noticing. Diodorus further says, that to these more remote tribes belonged the Kimbri, whom some writers identified with the old Kimmerians; and that these Kimbri were the people who took Rome, and sacked Delphi, and carried their conquests even into Asia. It may be doubted, however, whether there be not in this statement a show of knowledge greater than the reality. Keltme and Galatue are Kelt and Gaul are but undoubtedly only different forms of the same name; the first was different forms of the the form with which the Greeks were earliest acquainted, at a time when their knowledge of the Kelts was confined to the tribes of Spain and Gaul. The great Gaulish migration of the fourth century before Christ, introduced the other and more correct form “

Galat;e;” yet many writers’ continued to use the old orthography, and in fact, with the exception of the Galatians of Asia Minor, the other Gauls, in all parts of the world, are generally called by the Greeks according to their old form of the name, not Galatee, but Keltre. These names, therefore, would in themselves rather show that the invaders of Italy and Greece were the same people with the old inhabitants of the west of Europe, than establish any diversity between them. But when we find from Ceesar,‘0 that the Gauls on the shores of the ocean, that is, on the coasts of the British channel and the North sea, the Yet the distinction of Gauls whom he calls Belgians, were distinguished both in language Diodorus is partly true, and customs from the Gauls of the interior; when we consider that these more remote Gauls included, according to Diodorus, the people called Kimbri, and when we see that the people now calling themselves Kymry, namely, the Welsh, do actually differ in language and in customs from the Keltic tribes in Ireland and Scotland, the statement of Diodorus does appear to contain a real truth, and we begin to recognize in the Keltue and GalatEe of his geography two great divisions of the same race, analogous to the Gael and Kymry existing at this day in Great Britain. Yet the gleam of light thus gained is almost instantly overclouded. The Gauls of the north of Italy appear, according to every testimony,” to have been the Diodorus, V. 32. is, of the Galatin of Diodorus, and not of the re9 Aristotle ascribes to the Kelt’e a peculiarity mote inhabitants of Gaul and Spain. in national manners, which Diodorus reports of 10 De Bello Gallico, I. 1. the Galatae. And in those notices of Keltic 11 Polybius, II. 15. TpavaodArtvo? yne iiv oev 3ua manners and character which occur in several rsv ro T yirvovs aXX(a ai T7i0 ro6rnOv ruasopav po; places of his works, he must have been speak-aayoperovrai. Ing of the Kelts of Pannonia and Thrace, that

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200 HISTORY OF ROME. [CIHAP. XXIV but involved in much same people with the Gauls of the centre of France, or in the landifficulty. guage of Diodorus, with the Keltae. The names of their tribes, the Senones,12

Lingones, Insubres, Cenomani, can be connected at once with particular districts of Keltic Gaul, which bore, it may almost be said which bear to this day, the same names, and from which their origin is distinctly traced. We find among them no traces of Belgian or Kimbrian names, or of their having come from the shores of the Northern ocean,‘3 or the Hercynian mountains. How then can it be said that the invaders of central Italy were not Keltse, but Galatie; not Gael, but Kymry? It has been maintained, indeed, that14 the Boii, Lingones, and Senones, the The Gaulswho invaded tribes which were the last to enter Italy, and which crossed the The Gaul s who,nvaded Italy a.mefrom Keltic Alps, not by the passes to the west of Turin, but by the Great St. Bernard, were of a different race from the earlier invaders, and that while those were Gael, these who came last were Kymry. But the Roman writers, and Polybius, who was well acquainted with the Cisalpine Gauls, acknowledged no such diversity. And though we cannot ascertain the country of the Boii, yet the Lingones and Senones both fall within the limits assigned by Caesar to Keltic Gaul, as distinguished from the country of the Belgee or Kymry. If, however, we are disposed to rely on the statement of Diodorus and Appian, But possibly the Kim-that the Gauls who invaded Greece were Kimbri, it may be very havri, tr Kymry, may possible that there was a more general movement among the invasion with them. Keltic tribes in the fourth century of Rome, than the Greek or Roman writers were aware of. The Kymry, breaking in upon the Gael from the east and north, may have persuaded or forced some of their tribes to join them in their march southwards; the two nations may have poured into Italy together, and while the Gaelic tribes settled themselves on the Po or on the coast of the Adriatic, the mass of the Kymrians may have pressed forward round the head of the gulf, and so penetrated into Pannonia and Thrace. Not could we deny the possibility of some Kymrians having remained in Italy with the Gael; and if we believe that the name of Brennust5 was really borne by the leader of the attack on Rome, and that this word is no other than the Kymrian “

Brenhin,“‘6 which signifies king or leader, then we must conclude that although the mass of the invaders were Gael, yet that not only were there Kymrians joined with them, but that a Kymrian chief commanded the whole expedition. This may have been so, but I can hardly think that there is sufficient evidence to require us to believe that it was so. Again, though I have called the Gauls of north Italy Gael, and have supDifficulty of identifying posed that those who passed on to Illyricum and Thrace may have the anguage of the been Kymry, yet I am far from concluding that in the language Gauls who invaded Italy with any existing of the former we snould have recognized the exact Erse and Gaelic etictt dialect. of Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, or in that of the latter the a2 The Senones came from the neighborhood mentioned the attack on Rome, as we know, of Sens on the Yonne, the Lingones from that but not with its details; and it is not likely that of Langres: the Insubres came from a district they should have given the name of the Gaulish in the country of the.Edui, between the Loire leader. In fact, Diodorus, whose narrative, as and Saone; and the Cenomani from the neigh-Niebuhr supposes, is copied from Fabius, does borhood of Le Mans. not give it at all. It is very likely that the name m3 The expression in Livy already referred to, of Brennus was borrowed from the story of the “that the Gauls came from the shores of the Gaulish attack on Delphi, as so many of the emocean,” must not be alleged here, inasmuch as bellishments of the Roman history have been the ocean is there used merely in opposition to taken from the famous stories of the history of the Mediterranean, and may quite as well be Greece. understood of the Bay of Biscay as of the Ger-16 Dr. Pritchard, whose authority in such man Ocean or the Baltic. questions is of the highest order, believes that‘4 By Thierry in his Histoire des Gaulois, Vol. Brennus is not the Welsh “Brenhin,” but raI. p. 44, &c. ther the proper name Bran, which occurs in It must be remembered always that Fabius, Welsh history. I know not whether this name the oldest Roman historian, wrote about two ever prevailed amongst the Irish or the Gael of hundred years after the Gaulish invasion, and Scotland. borrowed largely from the Greek writers. They

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CaAP. XXIV.] THE KELTIC LANGUAGES. 201 exact form of the modern Welsh. The Keltic languages, which still exist in these islands, are in all likelihood the solitary survivors out of the multitude of languages or dialects, once spoken by the various branches of the great Keltic family, from the Atlantic to the sources of the Danube, from the Mediterranean to the northern extremity of the British isles. Length of time and remoteness of place introduce wonderful changes in a language; so that no one could expect to find an exact resemblance between the Keltic spoken in the fourth century before the Christian sera, by the Gauls of France and Italy, and the actual language of the inhabitants of Ireland and the north of Scotland. We may, therefore, find names of places and persons” among the ancient Gauls, which no Keltic language in its present state will enable us to interpret. Much more may it be impossible to trace such words in the written Welsh, or Erse, or Gaelic; although an exact acquaintance with the various spoken dialects in the several parts of Ireland or Wales might even now enable us to discover them. There are many German words‘8
lost in our written English, which either exist in the names of places or in some of our provincial dialects; and doubtless the converse of this might be observed by any one who was familiar with the spoken dialects of Germany. For the language of the civilized nation was once no more than the dialect of some particular tribe, till some intellectual or political superiority of those who spoke it, caused it to be adopted in writing in preference to its sister dialects, and thus made its peculiarities from henceforth the common rule. Now, it may well happen in two nations speaking a common language, that the dialectsl9 which shall 17 Dr.

Pritchard tells me that he cannot trace’ occupied by the Keltiberians.

IIumboldt refers the terminations magus, briga, and briva, in to the termination bria, which is met with in any of the existing Keltic languages. Although the geography of Thrace, as in the town of SeI am myself ignorant of those languages, yet I lymbria and Mesembria. He thinks that the can see that Thierry’s pretended explanations Basque “iri” and “uri” are connected with of Keltic names of places are often quite extrav-both; and that we can go no further than to agant. Bodencus, according to Polybius, was say that there was an old root bri or bro, exthe name given by the people of the country to pressing land, habitation, settlement, with the river Po (Polyb. II. 16); and this word, ac-which also the Teutonic burg and the Greek cording to Pliny, Hist. Natur. III. 16, signifies:rtpyo; may have been originally connected. In bottomless, “fundo carens.” Metrodorus of the Welsh and Breton languages “bro” is still, Scepsis, from whom Pliny borrowed this ac-he says, not only a cultivated field, but genercount. said indeed that Bodencus, or Bodincus, ally a country or district; and the Scholiast on as it is in our copies of Pliny, was a Ligurian Juvenal, Sat. VIII. 234, explains the name of word; but there was a town, Bodincomagus, Allobrogse as signifying strangers, men from which has evidently a Keltic termination. Can another land, “quoniam brogse Galli agrum Bodincus, or Bodencus, be reasonably explained dicunt, alla autem aliud.” Briva is supposed by the present Welsh or Irish languages? Again, to mean bridge; but Von Humboldt agrees with the same Metrodorus derived Padus from the Dr. Pritchard in saying, that there is no simiGaulish Pades, which, he said, signified a pine-lar word of a like signification known to exist tree. Can this be traced in modern Keltic? It in any of the surviving Keltic languages. shouldbe observed, that in explaining the names I find brog and brug in O’Brien’s Irish Dicof places, and especially of terminations, it is tionary as signifying ” a grand house or buildnot enough to produce Welsh or Irish words of ing, fortified place, a palace or royal residence.” similar sound, and capable of forming some-O’Brien connects it with briga and the Thracian thing of a significant word; but their combina-Bria. I also find the substantive “
brugaide” tion must be agreeable to the usages of the in O’Brien’s Dictionary, as signifying “a huslanguage; and with regard to terminations, it bandmen, ploughman, or farmer.” should be shown either that they are common‘8Dorf,’ a village,” is a wellknown instance; in names of places in KC!tic countries now, or a word which now exists in English only in the that some word of similar signification is so form of “thorpe,” a common termination of the used. Attempts have been made within these names of places in several counties, and somefew years by Welsh and German antiquaries to times a name by itself. Again, the German explain the names of ancient towns in Italy from ” bach,” a stream or brook, is in common use the Keltic and Teutonic languages; and in in the north of England, where the brooks or either case it has not been difficult to find words streams are invariably called becks. of similar sound both in Welsh and German, 19 Many curious instances of this might be which when combined give a possible significa-given. Horse and pferd are the classical Engtion. But in all these cases we see at once that lish and German words for the same animal; of two different derivations one must be wrong; but horse exists in German under the form ros, and it mostly happens, I think, that both are so. and is to be met with in poetry, and also someVon Humboldt notices the terminations of times on the signs of inns, as if it were now magus, briga, and briva, as undoubtedly Keltic. either an old or a merely provincial or familiar The first and last of them do not occur in Spain; word. And, on the other hand, the English out Briga is frequently met within the limits form of pferd, which is pad, has sunk still lower,

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202 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. XXIVI ultimately prevail in each, shall not be those which most nearly resemble once another; and thus, at an advanced period of their history, their languages shall present a far greater dissimilarity than existed between them in their infancy. Thus, as we follow the stream of time backwards towards its source, it is natTh difference b ural that the differences, not of dialect only, but even of language, tween languages were should become less and less; so that what are now distinct main anciently less marked thanthe, have become. branches of one great stock, may at a very remote period have ater ti-e. formed the as yet undivided elements of one common trunk. There must have been a time when the KelticT2 and Teutonic languages were parted far less widely than we find them now; even within historical memory, when the Keltic and Teutonic tribes were intermixed with each other, within the limits of what is now Germany, and when they were so confounded together in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans, as to be regarded only as one great people,2’ the real differences of manners and language may have been much less than they became afterwards, when their limits were more distinctly marked. What was working in the wide extent of central Europe during so many centuries of which no memorial remains, we should vainly seek to discover. Accident, to use our common language, may have favored the growth of improvements in some remote tribe, while the bulk of the people, although nearer to the great centre of human civilization, may have remained in utter barbarism; and thus Caesar’s statement may be perfectly true, that druidism, of which we find no traces amongst the Cisalpine Gauls, was brought to its greatest perfection in Britain, and that the Gauls in his own time were in the habit of crossing over thither as to the best and purest source of instruction in its mysteries. There is one point, however, in which the difference between the Keltic race Physical character of in ancient and modern times has been unduly exaggerated. The the Gauls. Greek and Roman writers invariably describe the Gauls22 as a tall and light-haired race in comparison with their own countrymen; but it has been maintained that there must be some confusion in these descriptions between the Gauls and the Germans, inasmuch as the Keltic nations now existing are all darkhaired. This statement was sent to Niebuhr by some Englishman; and Niebuhr, taking the fact for granted on his correspondent’s authority,, was naturally much perplexed by it. But had he travelled ever so rapidly through Wales or Ireland, or had he cast a glance on any of those groups of Irish laborers, who are constantly to be met with in summer on all the roads in England, he would have at and is merely a cant or ludicrous word in our and genuine specimens of the peculiarities of present language. the Gaulish race, and says that the Romans 20 It is quite manifest from Dr.

Pritchard’s called them Germani, “true,” “genuine,” to excellent work on the origin of the Keltic na-intimate that they were genuine Gauls: d; av tions, that the Keltic and Teutonic languages yvtntouv raidras epd;euv flOVJEXet. VII. 1, ~ 2, belong to one common family, which is com-p. 290.

monly called the Indo-Germanic. This appears 22 Diodorus calls them EtV‘4KE61, XEUKoI and raS not only from their containing a multitude of ic6pas ~aveoOi. V. 28. Ammianus Marcellinus common words, but from a surer evidence, the calls them ” candidi et rutili,” XV. 12. Virgil analogy in their grammatical forms. speaks of their ” aurea coesaries,” and ” lactea In order to judge of the connection between colla,” En. VIII. 658, 9.

Strabo says that the one language and another, something more is ” Germans differ a little from the Gauls in being necessary than the being merely able to write more tall and more light haired,” ri nXr;ovacp,/ and to speak those two languages. Sir W., Be-rov peyiovus Ka2 ris favOrros. VII.

p. 290; and tham, in his work called “the Cymry and the again he describes the Britons as “less light Gael,” gives a list of Welsh and Irish pronouns, haired than the Gauls,” IV. p. 200. Polybius to show that the Welsh language has no con-also speaks of their “great stature,” II. 15; and nection with the Irish. Whereas that very list Livy mentions their “procera corpora, promisfurnishes a proof of their affinity to any one see et rutilate comne,” XXXVIII. 17. Now after who has been accustomed to compare the vari-such multitudes of Gauls had been brought into ous forms assumed by one and the same origi-the slave market by the conquests of the dienal word, in the several cognate languages of the tator Caesar, the writers of the Augustan age, same family. even though they might never have crossed the 21 Dionysius divides the country of the Kelts, Alps, must have been as familiar with the apKtCtAri, into two great divisions, which he calls pearance of a Gaul as the West Indians are with Gaul and Germany, XIV. 2. Fragm. Mai. Stra-that of a negro. A mistake so general on a poisnt bo describes the Germans as the mnost perfect so obvious is utterly impossible.

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CHAP. XXIV.] ACCOUNTS OF THE GAULISH INVASION. 203 once perceived that his perplexity had been needless. Compared with the Italians, it would be certainly true that the Keltic nations were, generally speaking, both light-haired and tall.23 If climate has any thing to do with the complexion, the inhabitants of the north of Europe, in remote times, may be supposed to have been fairer and more light-haired than at present; while the roving life, the plentiful food, and the absence of all hard labor, must have given a greater development to tile stature of the Gaulish warrior who first broke into Italy than can be looked for amongst the actual peasantry of Wales or Ireland. The Gauls then from beyond the Alps were in possession of the plain of the Po, and had driven out or exterminated the Etruscans, when in the year of Rome 364, they for the first time crossed the Apen-Apennin., an. d attack nines, and penetrated into central Italy. On the first alarm of m this irruption24 the Romans sent three of their citizens into Etruria to observe their movements; and these deputies arrived at Clusium just at the time when the Gauls appeared before its walls, and began, after their usual manner, to lay waste the country. The citizens made a sally, and the Roman deputies went out with them; they engaged with the Gauls, and one of the deputies encountered and slew a Gaulish chief. Roman patricians, said the Roman story,25 could not be confounded with Etruscans; the Gauls instantly perceived that there were some strangers of surpassing valor aiding the citizens of Clusium; they learned that these strangers were Romans, and they forthwith sent deputies to Rome to demand that the man who had thus fought with them, and slain one of their chiefs, when there was no war between the Gauls and the Romans, should be given up into their hands, that they might have blood for blood. The senate thought that the demand of the strangers was reasonable, and voted that the deputy should be given over into their hands; but his father, who was one of the military tribunes for the year, appealed to the people from the sentence of the senate, and being a man of much influence, persuaded them to annul it. Then the Gauls, finding their demand rejected, broke up in haste from Clusium, and marched directly against Rome.26 Thus the very outset of this Gaulish invasion, even as related by Diodorus, who gives the story in its simplest form, is disguised by the national vanity of the Romans. It is impossible to rely on any of counts of the Gaulisl the details of the narrative which has been handed down to us; the Romans were no doubt defeated at the Alia; Rome was taken and burnt; and the Capitol ransomed; but beyond this Nwe know, properly speaking, nothing. We know that falsehood has been busy, to an almost unprecedented extent, with the common story; exaggeration, carelessness, and honest ignorance, have joined more excusably in corrupting it. The history of great events can only be preserved by contemporary historians; and such were in this case utterly wanting. But as we have an outline of undoubted truth in the story, and as the particulars which are given are exceedingly striking and in many instances not improbable, I shall endeavor at once to present such a view of the events of the Gaulish war as may be clear from manifest error, and to preserve also some of its most resa I should not have ventured to speak so con-points. According to Livy, the three deputies fidently merely from my own observation; but were all demanded by theGauls; nothing is said Dr.

Pritchard, who has for many years turned of their father being,military tribune, but it is his attention to this question, assures me that said that they themselves were immediately he is perfectly satisfied as to the truth of the elected military tribunes for the ensuing year. fact here stated. To me it is only surprising Diodorus does not name them; according to that any one should have thought of disputing Livy they were three brothers, sons of M. Fait. bius Ambustus. Now no Fabius appears in the 24

Diodorus, XIV. 113. list of military tribunes for the year 364, either 25

Livy, V. 36. Nec id clam esse potuit, quam according to Diodorus or Livy; and though the ante signa Etruscorum tres nobilissimi fortis-list for 365, as given by Diodorus, is very corsimique Romanvejuventutis pugnarent; tantum rupt, yet there are no traces of its ever having eminebat peregrina virtus. contained the names of more than two Fabii at. 2I Diodorus, IV.

113, 114. This story, it the most. will be observed, differs from Livy’s in several

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204 HISTORY OF ROME. L[CAr. XXIV markable details, which may be true, and are at any rate far too famous to be omitted. We know that the Gauls needed no especial provocation to attack Clusium, or The Gauls advance up-to penetrate beyond Rome into the south of Italy. Wherevei on Rome. there was a prospect of the richest plunder, there was to them a -sufficient cause for hostility. But the cities of Etruria, surrounded by their massive walls, were impregnable except by famine; so that after the open country had been once wasted, the Gauls would naturally carry their arms elsewhere. From Clusium the valley of the Clanis would conduct them directly to the Tiber; that river, so far from its mouth, would be easily fordable; and then all the plain of Latium lay open to their attack. The season was now the middle of summer; the new military tribunes, who at this period came into office on the first of July, had just been elected; and expecting the Gauls to advance upon Rome, and supposing that they would approach by the right bank”7 of the Tiber, they summoned to the field the whole force of the commonwealth, they called on their Latin and Hernican28 allies to aid them, and having thus collected all their strength, they marched out of Rome on the road to Etruria, intending to receive the enemy’s attack in the neighborhood of Veii, which was now a sort of frontier fortress of the Roman territory, and which might serve as the base of their operations. The whole army thus assembled amounted, according to the statement of Plutarch,29 to forty thousand men. But the Gauls meantime had crossed the Tiber into Umbria, and were moving hey ros the Tiber, along the left bank of the river, through the country of the Saand enter the country of bines, towards the plain of Latium. The Roman writers, who pretend that their only object was Rome, and that as soon as they heard that their demand for satisfaction was rejected they hastened from Clusium to attack the Romans, forget that this is inconsistent with another part of their story, namely, that the deputies who had gone to Clusium were, as if in mockery of the Gauls, elected military tribunes immediately after the refusal to give them up. For as the tribunes did not enter on their office till the first of July, and the battle of the Alia was not fought till the sixteenth, the pretended hasty march of the Gauls from Clusium to Rome, a distance of about about a hundred miles,30 must have taken up more than a fortnight. But in all likelihood the Gauls went on plundering the country before them, without aiming exclusively at Rome: according to Diodorus, they had waited in Etruria before they began their march southwards, long enough to receive large reinforcements3’ from beyond the Apennines; and the provocation given them by the Romans was, we may suppose, gladly seized as a pretence for extending their attacks from the country of their old enemies, the Etruscans, to that of the other nations of central Italy. When it was discovered that the Gauls were already on the left bank of the Tiber, and advancing by the Salarian road, which was the old communication be2 Diodorus states positively that the Roman and did not serve in war; *r..at is, of proletariarmy marched out across the Tiber. It is true ans and erarians. According to Diodorus, the that he seems to have supposed the Alia to have left wing of the Roman army, consisting of the been on the right bank of the Tiber; but this bravest soldiers, amounted to 24,000: that is, confusion arose probably from his finding no it contained the four regular legions spoken of notice of the Romans recrossing the river before by Dionysius, which amounted together to the battl3. His first statement is probable, and 12,000 men, and of an equal number of the alseems to me to explain the extreme suddenness lies. This would leave about 16,000 men for with which the battle on the Alia took place. the raw and inferior troops, res arOv,0vsrdrov;, 28 “The Gauls,” says Polybius, ” defeated the who in the battle formed the right of the RoRomans and those who were drawn up in the man army. field along with them.“‘PoWJrdevs Kai roi;E peri 30 Polybius underrates the distance at a three Tourty Xwaparaseayvous. II. 18. These could have days’ journey. II. 25. Strabo calls it eight been no other than the Latin and Hernican al-hundred stadia. V. p. 226. The itineraries as lies corrected make it one hundred and two, and a Camillus, 18. According to Dionysius, one hundred and three miles, and it cannot be XIII. 19, there were four legions of picked and much less. experienced soldiers, and a still more numerous S1 XIII. 114. free of those who commonly stayed at home

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CHAP. XXIV,] BATTLE OF THE ALIA. 205 tween the land of the Sabines and Rome, then the Romans were The Roman. tanle post naturally thrown into the greatest alarm. The Tiber, for many on the Alia miles above Rome, is not fordable; as there were no towns on the river there were probably no bridges, and boats could not be procured at such short notice for the passage of so large an army. The Romans therefore were obliged to go round by Rome, and without an instant’s delay march out by the Salarian road, in order to encounter the enemy at as great a distance from the city as possible. They found the Gauls already within twelve miles of Rome; the little stream of the Alia; or rather the deep bed through which it runs, offered something like a line of defence;32 and accordingly the Romans here awaited the attack of their enemy. Their right was posted on some high ground,33 covered in front by the deep bed of the Alia, and with a hilly and wooded country protecting its flank; while the left; consisting of the regular legions, filled up the interval of level ground between the hills and the Tiber, and its extreme flank was covered by the river. There seems in all these dispositions nothing of overweening rashness or of folly; it is doubtful what was really the disproportion of numbers Battle of the between the two armies; if the Gauls had but recently been reinforced, the Roman generals may have supposed the enemy’s numbers to have been no greater than they were at Clusium; and to fight was unavoidable, if they wished to save their country from devastation. But the Gaulish leader showed more than a barbarian’s ability. With the bravest of his warriors he assailed the right of the Roman position: the soldiers of the poorer classes, unused to war, and untrained in the management of their arms, were appalled by the yells, and borne down by the strength of their enemies; and their wooden shields were but a poor defence against the fearful strokes of the Keltic broadsword. The right of the Romans was broken and chased from its ground; the course of the river had obliged the left of the army to be thrown back behind the right, so that the fugitives in their flight disordered the ranks of the regular legions; and the Gauls pursuing their advantage, the whole Roman army was totally routed. The vanquished fled in different directions; those on the left34 plunged into the Tiber, in the hope of swimming across it and escaping to Veii; but the Gauls slaughtered them in heaps on the banks, and overwhelmed them with their javelins in the river, so that a large part of the flower of the Roman people was here destroyed. The fugitives on the right fled towards Rome; some took refuge in a thick wood35 near the road, and, there lay hid till nightfall; the rest ran without stopping to the city, and brought the tidings of the calamity. The Gauls did not pursue the fugitives far: we hear as yet nothing of that cavalry for which they were afterwards so famous; probably be-The Gauls pas the cause they had not yet been long enough in Italy to have supplied night on the field of themselves with the horses of that country; and the breed of btte’

Transalpine Gaul, like that of Britain, was too small to be used except for the 2 It is well known that to identify the famous cigliana Vecchia is placed about two miles nearer Alia with any existing stream is one of the hard-to Rome. Both descriptions are given in such est problems of Roman topography. Virgil and detail that this diversity is rather perplexing.

Livy agree in placing it on the left bank of the 33 Livy, V. 38. Diodorus, XIV. 114. Tiber; and Liivy’s description seems as precise 34 Livy, V. 38.

Diodorus, XIV. 114, 115. as possible, for he says that the armies met, “
ad 35 Festus in “L ucaria.” The wood, accordunclecimum lapidem, qua flumen Alia Crustu-ing to this statement, was between the Salarian minis montibus prealto defluens alveo haud road and the Tiber. This shows that Sir W. multum infra viam Tiberino amni miscetur.” Gell has rightly marked the old Salarian road V. 37. And Westphal accordingly says that on his map, where he makes it turn to the right ” something less then eleven miles from Rome, over the hills away from the Tiber, about two there is a small brook with high banks,” and miles beyond Castel Giubileo. Had the road that ” on the right of the road at this spot you followed the low grounds near the river, there see the village of Marcigliana Vecchia.” p.

127. could scarcely have been a wood between it and But I cannot reconcile this with Sir W. Gell’s the Tiber, for the ground must have been then map, or with his description in his article on the as now, nothing but a great expanse ofmeadows Alia in his topography of Rome; for there Mar

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206 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIV. drawing of their war-chariots. Besides, they were themselves wearied with their march, and with their exertions in the battle; and it was of importancet to each man to collect and exhibit his trophies, the heads of the enemies whom he had slain; for these were the proof that the warrior had done his duty in the battle,> and was entitled to his share of the spoil: these were to be carried home, and preserved to after ages in his family, as a memorial of his valor. Thus, according to the account of Diodorus, the Gauls passed the night after their victory on the field of battle. But the Romans found it impossible to defend their city; as the flower of the The Romanaresolve to citizens of the military age, who had escaped from the battle, had defend the Capito. retreated to Veii. It is probable that a large proportion of these were not sorry to have this opportunity of effecting what they had before attempted in vain, and wished to remain at Veii as their future country.

Of the remaining inhabitants of Rome, the greater part dispersed, as the Athenians had done before the approach of Xerxes;37 they took refuge with their families, and such of their effects as they could remove, in many of the neighboring cities. But it was resolved, as at Athens, to maintain the citadel,as for this, as in all the cities of the ancient world, was in a manner the sanctuary of the nation: it was the spot in which the temples of the nation’s peculiar gods were built; and to this every feeling of patriotism, whether human merely or religious, was closely connected. This was the home of the true gods of Rome, and the citadel of the true Roman people, before the stranger commons, with their new gods, had pretended to claim the rights of Roman citizens; and many a patrician, indignant at the retreat of the legions to Veii, and regarding this desertion as another proof that the commons were no genuine sons of Rome, retired into the Capitol with a resolution never to abandon that country and those gods, which he felt and might justly claim to be indeed his own. But the citadel might be taken; the genuine Romans who defended it might The Vestal Vir be massacred; the temple of the three guardian powers of Rome, with the eternal fire Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, of the Capitol, might be profaned and withdrnw to ce.C o destroyed. Still there had been a time when other gods had possessed the Capitol, and yet even then there was Rome, and there were Romans. Other powers and other rites were the pledge of Rome’s existence, and if they failed, she must be lost forever. The flamen of Quirinus,39 the deified founder of the city, and the Vestal Virgins, who watched the eternal fire, the type and assurance of its duration, must remove their holy things beyond the reach of the enemy, or if all could not be removed, what was left must be so hidden that no chance should ever betray it. Accordingly the Flamen and the Virgins of Vesta buried some of theit holy things in the ground, in a spot preserved afterwards with the strictest care from every pollution; and whatever they could remove, they carried with them to Agylla or Caere. They went on their way, said the story,40 on foot; and as they were ascending the hill Janiculum, after having crossed the river and left the city, there overtook them on the ascent, a man of the commons, L. Albinius by name, who was conveying his wife and children in a carriage to a place of safety. But when Lucius saw them, he bade his wife and children to alight, and he put into the carriage in their room the holy virgins and their eternal fire; “For it were a shame,” said he, “that I and mine should be drawn in a carriage, while the Virgins of Vesta with their holy things were going on foot.” So he conveyed them safe in the carriage to Caere.:o Diodorus, XIV. 115. V.

29. Strabo, IV. the heads of their enemies resemble what is rep. 197. The practice of cutting off the heads of lated of the Gauls, I have ventured to transfer their enemies, and of preserving them in their to the latter people this custom also. houses, is ascribed directly to the Gauls. The S

Diodorus, XIV. 115. Livy, V. 40. presenting them to the general], as a title to a Diodorus, XIV. 115. Livy, V. 39. Florus share of the spoil, is mentioned by Herodotus says that the force which garrisoned the Capitol as a Scythian custom (IV. 64); but as in other did not exceed a thousand men, I. 13. respects the Scythian customs with regard to 39 Livy, V. 40. 40

EiVy, V. 40.

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CHAP. XXIV.] THE GAULS ENTER ROME. 207 Meantime the Gauls, it is said, hesitated for one whole day4-to attack the city, suspecting that the apparent absence of all preparations for de-The a enter. ome fence was but a snare to entice them to venture on an assault rashly. Thus the Romans gained a respite which was most needful to them; and when, on the third day after the battle, according to the ancient mode of reckoning, the enemy did force the gates and enter the city, the mass of the population had already escaped, and the Capitoline Hill was, as well as circumstances would allow, provisioned and garrisoned. When the Gauls entered, their chiefs it appears established themselves on some of the houses on the Palatine Hill,42 exactly opposite to the Capitol; and in the rest of the city the work of plunder and destruction raged freely. The mass of the commons had fled from Rome with their wives and children, or having escaped from the route of the Alia had taken refuge The old petricians denat Veii. The flower of the patricians, and of the citizens of the vote themselIves to richer classes of an age to bear arms, had retired into the Capitol, deor their country. to defend to the last that sanctuary of their country’s gods. The flamen of Quirinus and the Vestal Virgins had departed with the sacred things committed to their charge out of the reach of danger. But there were other ministers of the gods,43 whom their duty did not compel to leave Rome, whom their age rendered unable to join in the defence of the Capitol, and who could not endure to be a burden upon those whose strength allowed them to defend it. They would not live the few remaining years of their lives in a foreign city, but as they could not serve their country by their deeds, they wished at least to serve it by their deaths. So they, and others of the old patricians who had filled the highest offices44 in the commonwealth, met together; and M.

Fabius, the chief pontifex, recited a solemn form of words, which they each repeated after him, devoting to the spirits of the dead and to the earth, the common grave of all living, themselves and the army of the Gauls together with themselves, for the welfare and deliverance of the people of the Romans and of the Quirites.45 Then, as men devoted to death, they arrayed themselves in their most solemn dress; they who had’held curule offices, in their robes of white with the broad scarlet border;46
they who had won 41 Diodorus makes them hesitate for two death for his country, intended to offer himself whole days, and thus to enter the city on the to the powers of death, as a willing victim on fourth day after the battle, according to the an-the part of his own countrymen, that the other cient manner of reckoning. The cause of the victims required by fate might be taken from delay may indeed be a little misrepresented; the army of the enemy. To have prayed for after so great a victory, the conquerors indulged victory simply, without any sacrifice on the part themselves for one whole day, as we can readily of the conquerors, was a tempting of Nemesis; suppose, in excess, and in plundering all the but if the sacrifice was first offered, then the surrounding country; and if their leader had wrath of Nemesis would be turned against the pushed on to Rome, yet the force which he enemy, that they too might have their portion could induce to follow him might be so small, of evil. The devoted offered himself ” diis as to make him afraid to commence an attack manibus tellurique.” Livy, VIII. 9. Strictly, upon so large a city. But it seems certain that the dii manes were the spirits of a man’s own the delay was of one day only, and not of two. ancestors, but they are addressed here as repPolybius says that the Gauls took Rome three resentatives of the powers of death generally. days after the battle, that is after the interval Tellus is of course the notion of the grave. of one whole day. A, 18. And the statement 40 The toga pretexta, or bordered toga. The of Verrius Flaccus, preserved by Gellius, V. 17, toga, it is well known, was rather a shawl than and which has all the precision of a quotation a robe, but the word shawl would suit so ill from some official record, says, “post diem ter-with our associations of ancient Rome, that it tium ejus diei urbem captam esse.” would not be worth while to introduce it. The 42 Diodorus, XIV. 115. triumphal toga, toga picta, was like a rich In43 TO rdv tiXXw’v oErY 1pEit, is Plutarch’s ex-dian shawl worked with figures of various colpression, after mentioning the departure of the ors; it was thrown over the tunica palmata, the Vestal Virgins. Camillus, 21. coat or frock worked with figures of palm 44 Qui curules gesserant magistratus. Livy, branches, probably in gold. The sella curulis V. 41. was, as its name imports, the seat or body of 45 Plutarch, Camillus, 21. Livy mentionsthis the chariot, dispos, and when’sed by the cuaccount, though he does not expressly adopt it. rule magistrates at their tribunals, implied that V. 41. I have borrowed the “carmen devotio-they shared in the imperium or sovereign nis,” the form in which the old men devoted power held of old by the kings, one mark of themselves, from the story of Decius in the which was the being borne in a chariot instead great Lutin war. He who devoted himself to of walking on foot.

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208 HISTORY OF ROME. [C(IAP. XXIV triumphs, in their robes of triumph overlaid with embroidery of many colors and with palm branches of gold, and took their seats each on his ivory chair of magistracy in the gateway of his house. When the Gauls saw these aged men in this array of majesty, sitting motionless amidst the confusion of the sack of the city, they at first looked upon them as more than human,47 and one of the soldiers drew near to M. Papirius, and began to stroke reverently his long white beard.

Papirius, who was a minister of the gods, could not endure the touch of profane barbarian hands, and struck the Gaul over the head with his ivory sceptre. Instantly the spell of reverence was broken, and rage and the thirst of blood succeeded to it. The Gaul cut down the old Papirius with his sword; his comrades were kindled at the sight, and all the old men, according to their vow, were offered up as victims to the powers of death.

The enemy now turned their attention to the Capitol. But the appearance of Blockade of the Capi-the Capitoline Hill in the fourth century of Rome can ill be judged tol. of by that view which travellers obtain of its present condition. The rock, which is now so concealed by the houses built up against it, or by artificial slopings of the ground, as to be only visible in a few places, formed at that time a natural defence of precipitous cliff all round the hill; and there was one only access to the summit from below, the clivus or ascent to the Capitol. By this single approach the Gauls tried to storm the citadel, but they were repulsed with loss;48 and after this attempt they contented themselves with blockading the hill, and extending their devastations over the neighboring country of Latium. It is even said that they penetrated into the south of Italy; and a Gaulish army is reported to have reached Apulia,49 whilst a portion of their force was still engaged in blockading the Roman garrison in the Capitol. Meantime, the Romans who had taken refuge at Veii had recovered from their Night assalt on the first panic, and were daily becoming more and more reorganized. Capitol repulsed by. It was desirable that a communication should be opened between Manlius. them and the garrison of the Capitol; and a young man named Pontius Cominius50 undertook the adventure. Accordingly, he set out from Veii, swam down the Tiber, climbed up the cliff into the Capitol, explained to the garrison the state of things at Veii, and returned by the same way unhurt. But when the morning came, the Gauls observed marks on the side of the cliff, which told them that some one had made his way there, either up or down; and the soil had in places been freshly trodden away, and the bushes which grew here and there on the face of the ascent had been crushed or torn from their hold, as if by some one treading on them or clinging to them for support. So, being thus made aware that the cliff was not impracticable, they proceeded by night to scale it. The spot being supposed to be inaccessible, was not guarded; the top of the rock was not even defended by a wall. In silence and in darkness the Gauls made their way up the cliff; no sentinel perceived them; even the watch-dogs, said the story,51 heard them not, and gave no alarm. But on the part of the hill by which the enemy were ascending, stood the temple of the three guardian gods of the Capitol and of Rome, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; and in this precinct there were certain geese kept, which were sacred to Juno; and even amidst their distress for food, the Romans, said the old story, had spared the birds which were protected by the goddess. So now in the hour of danger, the geese heard the sound of the enemy, and began to cry in their fear, and to flap their wings; and M. Manlius, whose house was in the Capitol hard by the temple, was aroused by them; and he sprang up and seized sword and shield, and called to his comrades, 47 Primo ut deos venerati deinde ut homines war with the Greeks of southern Italy. He endespicati interfecere.

Auctor de viris illustr.. listed some of them, and these were perhaps in Camillo. the very Gauls whom he afterwards sent into 48 Livy, V. 43.

Greece to aid the Lacedoemonians against!,ifs ~4 Diodorus, XIV. 117. It was apparently minondas. Justin, XX. 5. this portion of the Gauls which offered its serv-5D Diodorus, XIV. 116. ices to Dionysius while he was engaged in his 61 Livy, V. 47. Diodorus, XIV. 116.

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CHAP. XXIV.] RETREAT OF THE GAULS. 20O and ran to the edge of the cliff.

And behold a Gaul had just reached the summit, when Marcus rushed upon him and dashed the rim of his shield into his face, and tumbled him down the rock. The Gaul, as he fell, bore down those who were mounting behind him; and the rest were dismayed, and dropped their arms to cling more closely to the rock, and so the Romans, who had been roused by the call of Marcus, slaughtered them easily, and the Capitol was saved. Then all so honored the brave deed of Marcus Manlius, that each man gave him fiom his own scanty store one day’s allowance of food, namely, half a pound of corn, and a measure containing five ounces in weight of wine.52 Historically true in the substance, these stories are yet, in their details, so romantic, that I insensibly, in relating them, fall into the tone of the poetical legends. Six months,53 according to some accounts, seven or even eight months,/4 according to others, did the Gauls continue to blockade the Capitol. The TheGaulsreceive sumI sickness of a Roman autumn did not, we are told, shake them from of s,ney fraom the Rtheir purpose; the plunder which might be gained in other yet blockade. unxvasted districts of Italy, did not tempt them to abandon it. But is it possible to believe that barbarians could have shown such perseverance, or that in one day of preparation, provisions could have been carried into the Capitol in sufficient quantities to hold out even for a small garrison, during a siege of six or eight months?5” Thus much, however, may safely be believed, that the garrison of the Capitol was at last reduced to extremity;56 they offered to ransom themselves by the payment of a large sum of money, and the Gaiils were disposed, it is said,57 to accept the offer, because they heard that the Venetians, that nation of Illyrian blood who dwelt around the northern extremity of the Adriatic, had made an inroad into their own country beyond the Apennines. They consented, therefore, to the terms offered by the Romans; and a thousand pounds’

weight of gold were to be collected from the offerings in the Capitoline temple, and from the treasures which had been carried into the Capitol before the siege from every part of Rome, that for this ransom the blockade might be raised. Even in accepting these terms, the Gaulish leader felt that he was admitting to mercy enemies whom he had wholly in his power. His weights, said the Roman story,58 were unfair; the Roman tribune of the soldiers, Q. Sulpicius, complained of the fraud, but the Gaul threw his heavy broadsword into the scale; and when the tribune again asked what he meant, he replied in words which may be best represented by an analogous English proverb, “It means that the weakest must go; to the wall.“59 Thus, according to the true version of this famous event, the Gauls returned’ from their inroad into Italy loaded with spoil and crowned with Corruptions of the true glory. That as soon as they were known to be retreating, the na-otely of the retreat of tions whom they had overrun should have recovered their courage, and have taken every opportunity to assail them on their march home, is perfectly probable; nor need we doubt that these attacks were sometimes successful, that many stragglers were cut off, and much plunder retaken. These stories were exaggerated, as was natural; and by degrees the Romans claimed the glory of them for themselves. We can almost trace the gradual fabrication of that monstrous falsehood which in its perfected shape so long retained its hold on Roman history. After the retreat of the Gauls from Rome, their countrybZ

“Quartarios vini.” Livy, V. 57. The 55 If the Gauls stayed in Eome for so long a quartarius, or the fourth part of the sextarius, time, they must have left it in the middle of winwas the twenty-fourth part of the congius; and ter. Now it is said that they hastened on their as the congius contained ten pounds’ weight of way homewards, because their own country was water, the quartarius contained five ounces. It invaded by the Venetians; but barbarians would was a little more than the half of the Greek co-scarcely choose the depth of winter for an enter~ tyle. prise of this sort. ”’ Florus, I. 13.‘6 Diodorus, XIV. 116. 14 Polybius, II. 22, and Plutarch in Camill. 30, 5 Polybius, II. 18. Bay, “‘seven.”

Servius,,En. VIII. 652, says 58 Livy, V. 48. ” eight.” 59, Vae victis esse.” 14

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210 tHISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXV men who had advanced into Apulia, returned from their expedition, and found the Romans in too weak a condition to do them any harm; but as they were on their march through the Roman, territory, the people of C(ere, or Agylla, laid an ambush for them, and cut off, it is said, the whole party.60 To enhance the merit of this success, the Gauls who were cut off were next made to be the same party who had besieged the Capitol;6` and it was added that the people of Caere recovered the very gold which had been paid for the ransom of Rome. But the glory of such a trophy could not be left’to strangers; the victory was soon transferred to the Romans; and it was Camillus who found the Gauls, a long time after their retreat from Rome, employed in besieging a city”2 in alliance with the Romans, who defeated them utterly, and won from them all their spoil. Lastly, the story was to be more entirely satisfactory to the Roman pride; Rome63 was never ransomed at all; Camillus appeared with the legions from Veii just as the gold was being weighed out; as dictator he annulled the shameful bargain, drove the Gauls out of Rome at the sword’s point, and the next day defeated them so totally on their way home, eight miles from Rome, on the road to Gabii, that he left not a single man alive to carry to their countrymen the tidings of their defeat. Such a falsification, scarcely to be paralleled in the annals of any other people, justifies the strongest suspicion of all those accounts of victories and triumphs which appear to rest in any degree on the authority of the family memorials of the Roman aristocracy. What was the real-condition of Rome and the neighboring countries after this first Gaulish tempest had passed away; how the second period of Roman history begins in a darkness almost as thick as that which overhangs the beginnings of the first, but a darkness peopled by few of those forms, so beautiful though so visionary, which gave so great a charm to the times of the kings; how faintly we can trace the formation of that great fabric of dominion and policy which, when the light of day breaks, we find well-nigh in its complete proportions, it will be my endeavor to make appear in the succeeding portion of this history. CHAPTER XXV. aISTORY, FOREIGN AND

DOMESTIC, FROM THE YEAR 865 TO 878-ROME AFTER THE RETREAT OF THE GAULS-ITS

WEAKNESS, AND THE GREAT MISERY OF THE COMMONS-POPULARITY AND DEATH OF M.

MANLIUS-WARS WITH THE NEIGHBORING NATIONS.‘Ahrtvatwv de rT Kotvdv, breuc avra(1 0o /3dpfapo, Es TjnS X‘4paS ciariAov, E0KOpoCL0vrTO Eial;S $3s, 6rEcgSero raitag Kda yvvatKag Kal r74v 7riptoSoav KaTaaaKrsvrv, Kal rIpV

7rFAv dv6OIKOcOPtEV XapgtOEcevgovro. THUcYDIDEs, I. 89. LIVY begins his history of the period after the invasion of the Gauls by conThe Roman history 1i trasting what he calls its greater clearness and certainty with the *tillfull of uncertainty. obscurity of the period which had preceded it. True it is, that 60 Diodorus, XIV. 117. home till the first beginning of spring, Camillus 6’ Strabo, V. p. 220. may then have obtained some advantages over 62 Diodorus, XIV. 117. The name of the city these last in their retreat, and may have obis wholly corrupt, OsadUKoOV. tained a triumph. In this case the exaggeration as Livy, V. 49. If the Gauls who were be-or confusion was easy, that the Gauls, after a sieging the Capitol received their ransom, and stay of eight months in Rome, were atlast driven withdrew from Rome before the end of the au-out by Camillus; the period of their stay in turn, while others of their countrymen remained Italy being mistaken for that of their occupation in Italy through the winter, and did not return of Rome.

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CHAP. XXV.] RESTORATION OF THE CITY. 211 there was no subsequent destruction of public records such as had been caused by the burning of the city; and although many invaluable monuments perished in the great fire of the Capitol in the times of Sylla, yet these might have been, and in some instances we know that they had been, previously consulted by historians, so that all knowledge of their contents was not lost to the writers of the Augustan age. Yet still no period of Roman history since the first institution of the tribunes of the commons is really more obscure than the thirty years immediately following the retreat of the Gauls. And the reason of this is, that when there are no independent contemporary historians, the mere existence of public documents affords no security for the preservation of a real knowledge of men and actions. The documents may exist, indeed, but they give no evidence: they are neglected or corrupted at pleasure by poets and panegyrists; and a fictitious story gains firm possession of the public mind, because there is no one to take the pains of promulgating the truth. And thus it has happened that the panegyrists of Camillus and of the other great patrician families, finding ready belief in many instances from national vanity, have so disguised the real course of events, that at no other period of Roman history is it more difficult to restore it. The Gauls were gone, and the ruins of Rome were possessed again by the Romans. The Flamen of Quirinus and the Vestal Virgins returned TheRomansroceed to from Coere; and the eternal fire, unextinguished by the late ca-restor thoir emty. roposol for removing to lamity, was restored to its accustomed place in the temple of Vesta..Sads Cmolue topre But the fugitives who had fled to Veii from the rout at the Alia, mainat Rone and who formed a large proportion of the Roman people, were most unwilling to leave the city which for several months had been their only country; at Veii they had houses already built, and perhaps they were not sorrn to escape from the ascendency of the patricians, and to settle themselves in a new city of which they would be the original citizens.’ Thus Rome was threatened anew with the dangers of a secession, with such a division of the strength of the commonwealth as must have insured its ruin; for some of the patricians would, no doubt, have removed to Veii, while others, with their clients, would as certainly have remained at Rome. At this period the name and ability of Camillus were most effectual in putting an end to the dissension, and in determining that the proposed secession to Veii should be utterly abandoned: but by what means or at what time his exile was reversed we cannot discover. It may be true,” that while the Gauls were in possession of Rome he had encouraged the people of Ardea, where he had become a citizen, to take up arms against the Gaulish plundering parties; he’may also, in slsuh a time of necessity, have been chosen commander by some of the Romans who had fled from the city, and with them he may have done good service, both in cutting off the enemy’s stragglers, and, perhaps, in harassing their rear after they began to retreat. And if after these exploits he had led back his party to Rome rather than to Veii, and had thus proved that even in banishment his heart was true to his old country, there is no doubt that he would have been received as joyfully as the Athenians under similar circumstances received Alcibiades;3 his exile would have been speedily reversed, and his entrance into Rome, like Cicero’s in aftertimes, would have been celebrated with general rejoicings. Still more would this have been the case, had he really during his exile repaired to Veii, and brought back to Rome after the retreat of the Gauls any considerThat is, they would be the burghers or pa-received. But a sense of his great services, and tricians of Veii, and around them a new plebs of the necessities of the commonwealth, overor commons would, in process of time, be formed, powered all other considerations, and the peojust as they themselves had grown up beside pie did receive him with enthusiasm.-See Xenthe patricians of Rome. ophon, Hellenic. I. 4. How refreshing is it, a See Livy, V. 43, 44. after the vagueness and uncertainties of the Ro3 When Alcibiades returned to Athens in the man traditions to turn for a moment to the nar25th year of the Peloponnesian war, after his suc-rative of a contemporary historian, even when, cesses in the Hellespont and in Thrace, he had like Xenrphon, he is far below the hig hest never been formally recalled from exile, and standard of xcellence! ioubied, at first, it is said, how he should be

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212 HISTORY OF ROME. rCHAP. XXV able poit tion of the soldiers who had made Veil their refuge. Then may have followed the discussion whether these soldiers should return to their countrymen at Veii, or whether all should unite once more at Rome. Then Camillus and the patricians opposed to the secession would naturally appeal both in the senate4 and the forum to all the local attachments and religious feelings of which Rome alone could be the object; and when the excitement was great, and the smallest thing would incline men’s wavering minds either the one way or the other, it may be true5 that they received as an omen from heaven the casual words of a centurion, who, passing through the comitium with his century, and having occasion to halt in front of the senate-house, called aloud to the standard-bearer, “Pitch6 thy standard here, for this is the best place to stop at.” The secession, in whatever manner, having been prevented, and the mass of The remaining monu-the commons having consented to remain at Rome, although many tmen itybegis to be re-nd still refused to quit Veii, the senate proceeded to reconstruct, as built. well as they could, the shattered fabric of the commonwealth. The sites of the temples’ were retraced as well as was possible amidst the ruins, their limits were again duly fixed by the augurs, and ceremonies were performed to expiate the pollution which they had undergone by having been profaned by the barbarians. Some relics which it was impossible to replace, were said to have been miraculously preserved; the lituuss or augural crook of Romulus, with which he was supposed to have marked out the quarters of the heavens, when in answer to his augury the gods sent him the famous sign of the twelve vultures, was discovered unhurt, so ran the tradition, under a heap of ashes. Then the day’ in which the route of the Alia had taken place, the day after the ides of July, or the 16th, according to our reckoning, was pronounced by the pontifices to be a day of ill-omen; and no sacrifice could acceptably be offered, nor any business prosperously done, on that day forever. A11‘0 remaining records were sought for; the laws of the twelve tables, some laws ascribed to the kings, and some treaties with foreign nations, such as those with Carthage and with the Latins, were found to be still in existence; and parts of the laws were again fixed up in some pla’ce where they were accessible to the people at large; but the sacred or religious law, it is said, was not made public; the pontifices alone were to be acquainted with it. The city was to be rebuilt with all diligence; at present even the walls had been partially broken down, and the streets were a mere heap of ashes. There was no plan to show their old direction: men built wherever they found a spot clear of rubbish, and the’

first houses so erected, determined in great measure the position of the rest. Each citizen, no doubt, bHuilt upon his own hill, and, generally speaking, in his own quarter or parish, if I may use the expression, according to the division of the city marked by the sacraria or chapels of the Argei. But within these limits, the old distinctions of property were not duly observed, and there was a sort of scramble for the ground; so that the city was built irregularly, and the direction” of the cloacza did not correspond with that of the streets. Meanwhile the government offered to furnish”’ roofing materials for the new houses at the public expense: and Niebuhr conjectures that these were chiefly obtained by unroofing the houses of Veil, and thus rendering the proposed seat of the secession uninhabitable, while it was made to 4See the speech ascribed to Camillus in Livy, 12 Livy, V. 55, tegula publice prvebita est. We V. 51-54. know from Cornelius Nepos, quoted by Pliny, 5 The story is given by Livy, V.

55, and by Hist. Natur. XVI. 10, ~ 86, that the houses in Plutarch, Camillus, 32. Rome were roofed with wood (shingles), down 6 Signifer, statue signum hic manebimus op-to the time of the war with Pyrrhus.

Either, nime. then, tegula is a general word in this passage of 7 Livy, V.

50. Livy, signifying roofing materials, whether of 8 Plutarch, Camillus, 32. Dionysius, XIV. 5. shingles or of tiles; or if it mean tiles strictly, Fragm. Mai. we must suppose that the people did not like’ Gellius, V. 17.

Livy, VI. 1. the labor of fetching them from Veil, and pre-‘ Livy, VI. 1.

ferred to use wood, according to their former U Livy, V. 55. practice.

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CHAPA. XXV.] NEIGHBORING PEOPLE ATTACK THE ROMANS. 213 contribute at tne same time to the rebuilding of Rome. Stone and timber might also be quarried and felled by any man from any public lands, provided he gave security that he would complete his house within the year. But with all these aids the building fell heavily upon the mass of the people; it was delayed also by the attacks of foreign enerhies: the securities given for completing it within the year would in many instances be forfeited; and hence began again the old system of borrowing from the patricians, speedily to be followed, as before, by a train of intolerable distresses and oppressions. In the small states of Greece and ancient Italy, the loss of a great battle caused a sensible diminution of the population of free citizens. The defeat Four new tribes added at the Alia had been bloody: many lives must have been lost in totheRomanpeople. after skirmishes with the Gauls, and in their devastations of the surrounding country; and many fugitives who had taken refuge in the neighboring cities may have preferred remaining in their new homes. On the other hand, there was a large subject‘3 population, chiefly, it is probable, of Tyrrhenian, that is, of Pelasgian origin, in the recently conquered territories of Veii, of Capena, and, as Livy adds, of Falerii. From these it was resolved to make up the losses occasioned by the Gauls, and to convert subjects, who would infallibly have soon revolted, into citizens, who would be a most seasonable accession of strength. Accordingly, they were admitted in a body to the full rights of Roman citizens: each head of a family had his portion of seven jugera of land duly granted to him in full property, and set with landmarks, according to the rules of the agrimensores, which constituted the legal freehold tenure of the Romans; and to show the great number of new citizens thus admitted, four new tribes‘4 were formed out of them, and they thus constituted nearly a sixth part of the whole people in political weight, and, probably, a larger proportion in point of actual numbers. The tribes were thus increased from twenty-one to twentyfive. I have noticed these measures without regard to the exact chronological order in which they are said to have occurred. They are all placed, Theneighboringpeople however, with the exception of the creation of the four new tribes, atta’k theelRo. Ca-t in the first year after the retreat of the Gauls: in that year the cian and Etrucans. new citizens were admitted, and received their grants of land: although the creation of the new tribes, in which they might exercise their franchise politically by voting at the comitia, is said to have happened two years” later. The magistrates still, as before the Gaulish invasion, came into office on the first of July;`6 thus the military tribunes who had commanded at the siege of the Capitol, were still in office for some months after the retreat of the Gauls; but they were not allowed to hold the comitia” for the election of their successors, because of the supposed ill-luck of their magistracy; they resigned therefore, and the comitia were held by an interrex, a fact which of itself confutes the story of Camillus’ pretended dictatorship: for had he been dictator throughout the year, according to the tales of his exploits,“8 the comitia would naturally have been held by him, and there would have been no need of an interregnum. But immediately after the appointment’ of the new tribunes, that is, about the season of harvest, the favorite season for the plundering incursions of the Peloponnesians into Attica, the 13 Livy, VI. 4, calls the new citizens, ” qui mans themselves, and their language and reliVeientium Capenatiumque ac Faliscorum per ea gion both bore a considerable affinity to those bella transfugerant ad Romanos.’ Indiviual of Rome. deserters could not be numerous enough to form 14 Livy, VI. 5. four tribes; but when the cities of Veii and Ca-15 That is, it took place at the next census, pena were hard-pressed, their territory, inhab-which was taken in the year 368; the preceding ited chiefly by a subject population, rEpiteorg in censors having been appointed in the year 363. the political language of Greece, would be likely Livy, V. 31. to revolt or submit to the Romans. The new 6

They continued to do so, it is said, for at citizens could scarcely have been Etruscans, as least sixty years after this period. See Livy, the difference of language would then have pre-VIII. 20. sented a serious barrier to their union with the 17 Livy, VI. 1. Romans; but if they were Tyrrhenian Pelas-1” See Livy, VI. 1, and Plutarch, Camillus, 31. gians, they were of the same stock as the Reo

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214 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXV Romans were alarmed by the reports of hostile attacks on every side; their for. lorn condition, it is said, tempting even the smallest of the neighboring states to assail them. If we are to believe one tradition which has accidentally been preserved to us,“9 the people of Ficulea, Fidence, and other places round about, appeared in arms under command of Livius Postumius, the dictator, as he is called of the Fidenatians, and caused such a panic that the Romans fled before them; and the anniversary of this flight, the nones or 7th of July, was celebrated ever afterwards under the name of the day of the people’s flight.0 This, however, is an uncertain story,2’ in some respects improbable, and connected at any rate with circumstances which are clearly fabulous. It is more credible that the late destructive inroad of the Gauls should have shaken all old political relations, and that the Romans could no longer rely on the aid of the Latins and Hernicans. Emboldened by their knowledge of this, the Volscians took up arms, and advanced into Latium as far as the neighborhood of Lanuvium,22 which stood on a sort of spur of high ground, running out from the very southern extremity of the Alban Hills. Here they encountered the Roman army commanded by the military tribunes, and were so superior in numbers that they presently confined the Romans within their camp. The tidings of their danger were carried to Rome; Camillus was named dictator, and he, taking the field with every man who could bear arms, hastened from Rome by a night-march,23
and appeared at daybreak on the rear of the Volscians. Then the Roman army under the military tribunes made a sally, and the Volscians, attacked both in front and rear, were totally routed. Scarcely was this danger repelled, when the dictator learned that an Etruscan army, probably from Tarquinii, had attacked the Roman frontier on the opposite side, on the right bank of the Tiber, and was besieging Sutrium. Camillus hastened to its aid, but on his way,24 said the story of his exploits, he met the citizens of Sutrium in forlorn plight, they having been obliged to surrender their city, and having saved nothing but their lives. They fell on their knees before him, told him their sad case, and craved his assistance. He bade them be of good cheer, saying that it was now the turn of the Etruscans to wail and weep. Then he advanced upon Sutrium, and found, as he had expected, that the enemy kept no watch, and were thinking of nothing but plunder: he instantly forced his way into the place, and made a great slaughter, and a still greater number of prisoners; and Sutrium was thus, according to the story, ” lost and recovered in a day again.“25 It is impossible to tell how much of exaggeration is mixed up with these details; but there is no reason to doubt that Camillus by his genius in this memorable year did truly save his country from destruction.

The enemies of Rome were checked, and time was gained for the state to recover from its disorder and distress, and to meet its rivals on more equal terms. The very existence of the Roman people in after-ages prov~s how well they must have defended themselves 19 By Varro, Ling. Lat. VI.

I8, ea. Miiller, of Tutula and the female slaves, which is eviand partly by Macrobius, Saturnal. I. 11. dently fabulous. 20 Poplifugia. 22

Diodorus, XIV. 117. Livy, VI. 2. 21 It is uncertain, because a different account 23 The resemblance of this story to that of of the origin of the Poplifugia is given by Mac-Cincinnatus is obvious, and is very suspicious. robius Saturnal. III. 2, and by Dionysius, II. Livy merely describes the victory of Camillus, 56, anlC because we know how little reliance is without saying anything ofthe previous danger. to be placed on stories pretending to account Plutarch makes the Latins to have joined the for the origin of old traditional usages or festi-Volscians, but he expressly says that Camillus vals. It is improbable, because Fidenie hadbeen marched to relieve the army of the military tribtaken and colonized by the Romans forty years unes, which was besieged by the enemy.-Caearlier, and from that time forward plays no millus. 34. part in history, and because Ficulea is never 24 Livy, VI. 3. Plutarch, Camillus 35. mentioned at all after the times of the Roman 26 The very passage from which this line is kings. Nor can we conceive how Fidenee should taken, in Shakspeare’s Henry VI. Part I. shows have had a dictator, which was a title peculiar how little reliance can lie placed on a poetical to the Latin towns; unless, indeed, we suppose version of events in themselves historical. The that it had joined some Latin confederacy since line refers to the capture of Rouen by the Maid the fall of the Roman power, and was now be-of Orleans and its recovery by Talbot on the come Latin.

Further, the story of the Fidena-same day; both the capture and recapturebeing, tian dictator is mixed up with the famous legend as every one knows, alike purely imaginary.

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CHAr. XXV.] EXTENT OF THE ROMAN FRONTIER. 215 when attacked by two enemies at once in the hour of their most extreme helplessness and depression. It were a mere wearying of the reader’s patience to follow Livy through the details of the petty wars of this period-details which cannot be regarded as historical, and which, even though true, would be of little value. It will be enough to trace generally Rome’s foreign relations down to the time of her great internal regeneration. On the right bank of the Tiber, the Roman frontier neither advanced nor receded. Nepete and Sutrium, which had submitted to Rome three Extent of the Roman or four years before the Gaulish invasion,26 and were the border frontier. Its limit totowns of the Roman dominion, were twice, according to the story of Camillus, attacked by the Etruscans; once, as we have seen, in 366, and again in 369. They were both, according to the same authority, taken in 369, and immediately recovered.” It appears that the Etruscans, who were engaged in this affair, were the people of Tarquinii; and finding the strength of Rome greater than they had expected, they were probably glad to conclude a truce for a certain number of years; which was no less welcome to the Romans, as they saw that they should have enemies enough on their hands on their opposite frontier. On the left bank of the Tiber we hear of wars with the Volscians generally, almost every year, and particularly with the people of Antium. its limits on the left The scene of action was commonly the neighborhood of Satricum, bank of the Tiber. a town which lay between Velitrwe and Antium.28 Satricum had originally been one of the thirty cities of the Latins; it had then been conquered by the JEquians and Volscians, had afterwards been taken by the Romans, and had lastly, a little while before the Gaulish invasion, revolted from them,29 and was now again become Volscian. It is said to have been retaken by Camillus in 369,~0 and a Roman colony was sent to occupy it in the following year..

Again, however, it was lost in 373,3’ and held for five years by the Volscians; after which time, when the people of Antium made peace with the Romans, and Satricum was to have been restored, it was burned, out of indignation by the Latins,32 who had been allied with the Antiatians against Rome, and now found themselves deserted. Thus, on this side, the Roman frontier had considerably receded from the point which it had reached thirty years earlier. Then Anxur had been conquered, but now even Satricum could not be maintained, a place less than thirty miles distant from Rome. The loss of Anxur is nowhere expressly acknowledged; but it must have fallen either in the year 358, when we read of its being besieged by the Volscians;33 or else it must have been lost, as well as Bola,34 amidst the calamity of the Gaulish invasion; for it is not possible that it could have been retained by the Romans whilst the Volscians were fighting year after year at Satricum, nearly five-and-twenty miles nearer to Rome. But the peculiar feature of Rome’s foreign relations, after the retreat of the Gauls, consisted in her altered position with respect to the Latins. Altered relations a Hitherto, during all the wars with the.Equians and Volscians, the RomewthLatium.

alliance of the Latins and the Hernicans with the Romans had remained unbroken. It is true that some of the thirty Latin cities which had concluded the original treaty with Sp. Cassius in 261, had since been conquered by the -Equians and Volscians:35 and thus as Niebuhr supposes, that treaty had long since been vir2r See chap. xviii. 31 Livy, VI. 22. 27

Livy, VI. 9, 10. 32 Livy, VI. 33. 28 Its position is unknown: the Italian anti-11 Livy, V. 16. quaries fix it at a little place called Conca, on the 14 Camillus is made to recover Bola from the edge of the Selva di Nettuno, in the supposed.Equians, in the year 366. Livy, VI. 2. It line of the old road from Velitrse to Astura and must therefore have been previously lost. Anrtium. But nothing exists beyond a few 35 Of the thirty Latin cities enumerated by shapeless ruins, which can determine nothing.

Dionysius, eight are mentioned by Livy or DiWestphal, p. 40. onysius as having been conquerecd by the Vols9 Diodorus, XIV. 102. scians under the command of Coriolanus; Velso Livy, VI. 8, 16. itrce also became Volscian in the course of th,

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216 HISTORY OF ROME.’ [CHAP. XXV tually at an end: and while some of the Latin states were become ~Equian or Volscian, or had drawn around themselves a distinct confederacy of the small towns in their immediate neighborhood; others, like Tusculum, were, from the equal, become no more than the dependent allies of Rome: for instance, Prseneste, as Niebuhr thinks, must from its position have become IEquian, and Tibui stood aloof, and formed the centre of a small confederacy of its own. It does not, however, appear to me that we are compelled to adopt this supposition by the reason of the case; and external testimony,3” such as it is, seems to be against it. The A3]quians may have poured out upon the Campagna through that breach in the Apennine wall which lies open close below Praeneste, and may have occupied Pedum in the plain, and Lavici on the roots of the Alban Hills; nay, they may have even taken Bola within the mountain-range itself, and yet the impregnable strength of Prinneste, which, at a later period, so long defied the whole power of Sylla, may have remained in perfect security; and as the Hernicans were unconquered, and yet lay quite on the rear of the AEquians when they established themselves on Algidus, so Tibur and PrEeneste, safe in their mountainholds, may have continued to belong to Latium, though almost isolated from the mass of the Latin people by the conquests of the Opican nations. On the other hand, it is very likely that amid the ruin of the Latin cities around them, many small Latin communities may have gathered under their protection; and that thus the disproportion in strength between them and the other remaining states of the Latin confederacy would have become greater than it had been before. This of itself, when Rome had been so crushed by the Gauls, would lead to an altered relation between them and the Romans. By the treaty concluded with Sp. Cassius, Rome stood as one contracting party, and the whole Latin confederacy as another: of the plunder or conquest made by the allied nations, the share of Rome alone was to be equal to that of all the Latin cities together; the allied armies were to be commanded alternately by a Roman and a Latin; but each particular Latin state would enjoy the command many times less often than Rome. Thus when Rome had sunk in power, and Preeneste had risen, it would seem fair that they should stand towards each other on a different footing; that Prmneste should be no longer a mere single member of the state of Latium, but should itself treat as state to state with Rome. Be this as it may, we find that after the Gaulish invasion, the treaty of Sp. Wars with the Latin Cassius, both with the Latins and Hernicans, was either imperfectly states.-Pr.ne.te.

observed, or altogether violated for a period of nearly thirty years.

Latin and Hernican volunteers in great numbers are said to have joined the armies of the Volscians;37 then the Latins generally, without any mention of particular states, are described as at open war with Rome,38 in alliance with the Volscians; and Lanuvium,39 and above all, Prseneste,40
are especially noticed as taking a prominent part in these hostilities. On the other hand, Tusculum,4” though on one occasion suspected, remained generally true to Rome: and so also did wars with the Opican nations; and others of the as their share ofthe spoil in 342. (Livy IV. 51.) thirty which are not noticed again in history, The Latin and Hernican lands are ravaged by were, in all probability, destroyed. the.Equians or Volscians in 346 (Livy, IV. o Livy says that ” the Latins and Hernicans, 55), in 345

(id. IV. 53), and the Hernican lands since the battle at the lake Regillus, had re-in 342. (Id. IV. 51.) The Latins and Hernimained faithful to Rome for nearly a century cans announce the intended invasion of the without interruption.” VI. 2. This, as a gen-Opican nations in 332
and 324 (Livy, IV. 26, 37), eral statement, and one clearly in some respects and in 292 it is expressly mentioned that the inaccurate, may not ble entitled to much weight; lands ravaged by the Volscians were those of but a variety of incidental notices in the ac-the Prienestines, Gabians, and Tusculans (Livy, counts of the several years, seem to imply that III.

8): the three people belonging all alike at the alliance between the three nations, Romans, that period to the Latin confederacy. Latins, and Hernicans, lasted without any ma-: Livy, VI. 7, 13. terial change down to the Gaulish war. Latins 38 Livy, VI. 30, 32, 33, and Hernicans joined Camillus against Veii in 39 Livy, VI. 21. 859. (Livy, V. 19.) Ferentinum, when taken 0 Livy, V. 21, 22, 27, et seq. 30. from the Volscians, was given to the Hernicans I Livy, VI. 21, 25, 26.

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CHAP. XXV.] INTERNAL DISTRESS. 217 Gabii and Lavici.42 It may be well conceived how greatly this altered disposition of the Latins added to the distress of the Roman commons. For some years past Latium had borne the brunt of the ravaging incursions of the JIEquians and Volscians; its aid had enabled the Romans to carry the war at times into the enemies’

country, while their own territory had rested in security. But now we read of the Roman territory being ravaged in all directions by the Volscians;43
and on one occasion44 the Prsenestines, having laid waste the country between the Tiber and the Anio, a quarter most likelyto have escaped the attacks of other enemies, at last even crossed the Anio, and advanced as far as the very walls of Rome. Under such circumstances any gleam of victory would be doubly welcomed; and an inscription in the Capitol45 long recorded the successful campaign of T. Quinctius Cincinnatus, who having been appointed dictator to repel this invasion of the Prsenestines, marched out against them, defeated them in a battle on the very banks of the ill-omened Alia, chased them into their own country, and stormed nine of their townships in as many days. But such successes, like those with which the Saxon kings of England sometimes relieved the disasters of the Danish invasions, were attended by no permanent fruits. The Pruenestines were in the field again the very next year;46 and the aspect:of the Roman foreign affairs continued to be overclouded down to the very end of that period with which we are concerned in the present chapter. But the prospect at home was not overclouded merely; it was the very deepest darkness of misery. It has been well said that long periods of Intern distress. Suf general suffering make far less impression on our minds, than the ferings of the Roman short sharp struggle in which a few distinguished individuals per-O. ish; not that we over-estimate the horror and the guilt of times of open bloodshedding, but we are much too patient to the greater misery and greater sin of periods of quiet legalized oppression; of that most deadly of all evils, when law, and even religion herself, are false to their divine origin and purpose, and their voice is no longer the voice of God, but of his enemy. In such cases the evil derives advantage, in a manner, fromthe very amount of its own enormity. No pen can record, no volume can contain, the details of the daily and hourly sufferings of a whole people, endured without intermission, through the whole life of man, from the cradle to the grave.

The mind itself can scarcely comprehend the wide range of the mischief: how constant poverty and insult, long endured as the natural portion of a degraded caste, bear with them to the sufferers something yet worse than pain, whether of the body or the feelings; how they dull the understanding and poison the morals; how ignorance and ill-treatment combined are the parents of universal suspicion; how from oppression is produced habitual cowardice, breaking out when occasion offers into merciless cruelty; how slaves become naturally liars; how they whose condition denies them all noble enjoyments, and to whom looking forward is only despair, plunge themselves, with a brute’s recklessness, into the lowest sensual pleasures; how the domestic circle itself, the last sanctuary of human virtue, becomes at: length corrupted, and in the place of natural affection and parental care, there is 3o be seen only selfishness and unkindness, and no other anxiety on the part of the parents for their children, than that they may, by fraud or by violence, prey in their turn upon that society which they have found their bitterest enemy. Evils like these, long working in the heart of a nation, render their own cure impossible: a revolution may execute judgment on one generation, and that, perhaps, the very one which 42 Livy, VI. 21, 25, 26. 43 Livy, VI. 31. From Jove and all the gods this favor did be44 Livy, VI. 28. fall 46 Livy, VI.

29, and Festus in Triens.” The That Titus Quinctus, sometime Rome’s captaininscription, as Niebuhr has restored it, ran general, thus: Nine towns did in nine days assault and take Juppiter, atque Divi omnes hoc dederunt, withal. Ut Titus Quinctius dictator Romanus 46 Livy, VI. 30.

Oppida novem diebus novem caperet.

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218 HISTORY OF ROME. [CrAP. XXV was beginning to see and to repent of its inherited sins; but it cannot restore life to the morally dead; and its ill success, as if in this line of evils no curse should be wanting, is pleaded by other oppressors as a defence of their own iniquity, and a reason for perpetuating it forever. But it was the blessing of Rome, that this course of evils was, in her case, Causes of tlee distress; checked in time, when it had brought suffering only on one generaasenty of insolvent debt-tion, before it had entailed moral corruption on the remotest poseor. terity. Twenty years41 of poverty and oppression, could we present to ourselves each individual case of misery, would seem a fearful amount of evil; but, happily, twenty years’ suffering in the life of a nation are but like an attack of fever, severe indeed while it lasts, but too short to weaken the constitution permanently. Mere poverty, moreover, is an evil, the sense of which varies greatly according to differences of time and place; its actual privations depend much on climate; their intolerableness arises from contrast; where none are extravagant or luxurious, poverty must almost sink to beggary before its sting is felt acutely. The actual distress endured by the Roman commons in the loss of their houses, and the destruction of their cattle and fruit-trees, few of which could have escaped the hands of the Gauls during their long occupation of the city and territory of Rome, although severe for the time, would, nevertheless, have been diminished by the sense of its being the common portion, and would in time have been altogether relieved. But the attacks of foreign enemies rendered the tributum, as a war-tax, constant and heavy; and other taxes were imposed to defray the expense of building up the rock of the Capitol with large blocks of stone,45 and probably of rebuilding the temples generally; whilst the obligation of completing the houses in the city within twelve months, was a pressure on the means of the less wealthy, coming at the very time when they were least able to meet it. Thus, as we have seen, debts were unavoidably contracted; and when there was a general demand for money, it was not possible that any positive law could keep the rate of interest low.

Whether the enactment of the twelve tables, which fixed its yearly rate at one-twelfth of the principal, was actually repealed, or only disregarded by common consent, we cannot tell, but the re-enacting that rate49 a few years later is a proof that at this period it was not observed; and it is expressly mentioned that the principal5~ of debts was sometimes paid many times over in interest before they were of five years’ standing. It is not necessary to repeat the details of the extreme severity of the law towards insolvent debtors; they have been already noticed; but as the distress was far greater now than at any former time, this severity must have been more extensively felt than ever: every patrician house was become a private jail; but a jail in which the prisoners were kept to hard labor for the jailer’s benefit, or were, at his caprice, loaded with irons and subjected to the lash. - Imprisonment for debt in its mildest form, and amidst the manifold money Aggravations of their transactions of a great commercial country, in which the debtor misery fronm particular must often be paying the penalty of his own imprudence, is yet beginning to shock the feelings of modern times, as being liable to the evil of confounding together misfortune and crime. How then should we regard the treatment of the Roman commons, whose debts were incurred by no 7 The period, according to Niebuhr’s chro-of the hill towards the Forum, where the renology, was one of eighteen years, from 3865 to mains of the Tabularium still exist. 883: according to the common chronology, it The ” saxtum quadratum” of the Roman wrilasted twenty-three years, trom 365 to 3888. ters, is the “Steintuf” of the German geolo48 Livy, VI. 4. ” Capitoliumt saxo quadrato gists; the “‘Tufa litoide” of Brocchi: it is a substructumest.” This mustmeanthatwhere volcanic conglomerate, found in Rome itself, the cliff had been proved to be accessible, and and is the stone employed in the Cloaca. thus have been more or less of an inclined plane, 49 Livy, VII.

16. it was so built up with large blocks of stone as 50 Livy VI. 14.

“Multiplici jam sorte exsoto enlarge the upper surface of the hill, and luta, mergentibus semper sortem usuris.” This nmake it perpendicular with the bottom of it. is said of the year 370, only five years after the Siinilar substructions have enlarged the surface Gaulish invasion.

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CEos. XXV.] CONDUCT OF M. MANLIUS. 219 fault of their own, but were the consequence of an overwhelming national calamity, and -of the want of consideration shown by the government for their state of distress? Yet it is remarkable that the severity of the law in itself seems even now to have excited no complaint; nor do we find that the tribunes extended their protection to the multitude of innocent debtors who were daily dragged oft to labor amongst slaves in their creditor’s workhouse; what excited general discontent was, in the first place, the high rate of interest exacted by the patricians, who thus seemed to make their profit out of the general misery; and next the harshness of obliging the commons to pay heavy taxes for the public service, while the state’s domain land, the natural resource in extraordinary national emergencies, was appropriated to the benefit of individuals, and whilst the taxation itself was highly arbitrary, being regulated according to an old valuation of the property of the citizens,” and making no allowance for the enormous losses which had since so greatly reduced its amount. Above all, there was the intolerable suspicion that the taxes thus hardly wrung from the people were corruptly embezzled: a tax had been imposed to replace twofold the treasures borrowed from the temples to purchase the retreat of the Gauls; and it was whispered5 that this money, instead of being restored to the gods, was secretly kept back by the patricians for their own use. Thus the evils of the times and the public irritation were great; but before they found their true and wholesome remedy, they gave occasion M. Manli.s comes forto one of those false shows of relief, which only aggravate the dis-taerd poth protector o ease. M. Manlius, the preserver of the Capitol from the Gauls, solventdebtors. was jealous of the high reputation of Camillus,53 and alienated from the patricians generally, because his share of the high offices of the commonwealth was not such as his merits claimed. Thus he was ready to feel indignant at the severities practised against the debtors; and his better feelings also, the loftiness of his nature, and his sympathy with brave men, were all shocked by the scenes which he daily witnessed. One day54 he saw a centurion, who had served with him, and whom he knew to be a distinguished soldier, now dragged through the Forum on his way to his creditor’s workhouse. He hastened up, protested against the indignity, and himself paid the debt on the spot, and redeemed the debtor. The gratitude and the popularity which this act won for him, excited him to go on in the same course: he sold by public auction the most valuable55 part of his landed property, and declared that he would never see a fellowcitizen made a bondsman for debt, so long as he had the means of relieving him. So well did he fulfil this promise that he was said to have advanced money to no fewer than four hundred debtors, without requiring any interest to be paid to him; and thus to have discharged their debts, and saved them from bondage. Such generosity obtained for him the unbounded affection of the people; he was called the ” Father of the Commons;” and his house in the Capitol was always beset by a multitude of citizens, to whom he spoke of the cruelty of their creditors, and of their fraud and sacrilege in appropriating to themselves the money paid by the people to replace the treasures borrowed from the gods for the ransom of the Capitol. A dictator had been”5 already appointed early in the year, with the double purpose of employing him against the Volscians abroad, and, if need should be, against the attempts of Manlius at home. The office had been conferred on A. “1 See Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 675. conquered only eleven years before. But the 62 Livy, VI.

14. Ager Veiens came down to the Tiber, and por63 Livy, VI. 11. Plutarch, Camillus, 30. tions of it may have been conquered in earlier 54 Livy, VI.

14. One is rather too much re-wars, or even in the earlier years, of the final minded here of the story of the brave old cen-war. The fundus in question was, probably, a turion, whose hard usage from his creditors ex-

” possessio,” or a portion of the domain land cited such a tumult in the year of Rome 259.- held by occupation; but such estates were See Livy, II.

23. bought and sold amongst individuals as if they F “Fundum in Veienti,”

says Livy, “caput were property, subject always to the chance ot patrimonii.” It could hardly, then, have been their being reclaimed by the state. a part of the Veientian territory which had been ~ Livy, VI. II,

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220 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXr Hisambitioa practices. Cornelius Cossus, perhaps the same person who, in his consulship, he tri-bnmpes..nhtrit b eight-and-twenty years before, had taken cognizance of’the mur. and death.

der of M. Postumius by his soldiers; and he was now recalled from the field to check the apprehended sedition. He summoned Manlius”1 before him, called upon him to prove his charge of the embezzlement of the sacred money, and on his failing to do so threw him into prison. This seems to have been merely the exercise of that power of arresting dangerous individuals, and so stopping their plans for a season, which is granted to, or assumed by, all governments in perilous times; it is remarkable, however, that the imprisonment of Manlius did not expire with the term of the dictator’s office, but continued till the senate, fearing, it is said, that he would be released by force, passed a vote to restore him to his liberty. This might seem to have been an act of weakness, yet the event allows us to attribute it to a wise policy; for Manlius, when released, indulged in language more violent than ever, and at last, if we can rightly interpret58 the doubtful language of the annalists, the assemblages at his house assumed a more threatening character; and the Capitol was occupied by him and his followers as a stronghold in defiance of the government, as it was many years afterwards by the tribune L.

Saturninus. That his motives were not pure, and that his purposes were treasonable, seems evident from several circumstances. He did not unite with the tribunes, the natural leaders of the commons, nor concert with them any definite measure for the redress of the existing evils. This makes a wide distinction between him and the several honest popular leaders who, on other occasions, had opposed the aristocracy. Volero, Terentilius, Duillius, Icilius, Canuleius, and Trebonius, had each come forward with some distinct measure for the attainment of a particular end; but of Manlius we hear nothing but that he exercised great liberality towards distressed individuals, and so acquired an immense popularity; that he excited the passions of the people by vague charges and invectives against the aristocracy; and that he occupied the Capitol with a multitude of his partisans. It marks also the character of his proceedings, that the tribunes, forgetting the just grievances of their order, joined the patricians against him; and that Q. Publilius,59 whose family was surpassed by none in its hereditary zeal for the true liberties of the commons, came forward to impeach him of high treason. What follows is told with some variations, and the real details cannot be recovered. According to the common account, Manlius submitted to take his trial before the centuries in the Campus Martius. I have already shown how much even the greatest criminals had to hope from the uncertainty of such a tribunal; how much weight was given to matters foreign to the question at issue; how a strong and eloquent appeal to the feelings of the judges might overpower the clearest evidence of the prisoner’s guilt. If even the decemvir Appius had thought his acquittal by the centuries not impossible, how much more might Manlius expect from them a favorable sentence? Nor was his hope deceived. When he appeared in the Field of Mars, he brought forward four hundred debtors60 whom he had relieved from bondage; he exhibited the spoils of thirty enemies whom he had slain in personal combat; he showed forty honorary rewards which he had at various times received from his generals in war; and amongst these, eight of those wreaths of oak, the famous civic crowns, which were given for saving the life of a fellowcitizen in battle. He produced, besides, some of the very men whom he had thus saved, living witnesses of his services, whose tears and entreaties in behalf of their preserver might strike to the hearts of all who saw them. Finally, he bared his own breast, covered with 67 Livy, VI.

16. -9 Livy, VI. 19. This Publilius was of the 5Senatus de secessione in domum priva-same family with Publilius Volero and was the tam plebis,…

agitat.”-Livy, VI. 19. The dictator Publilius Philo who passed the famous word “secessio” is either an exaggeration or popular laws which bear his name some years denotes a positive act of insurrection, or, to afterwards.-Livy, VIII. 12. speak more strictly, of a withdrawal of allegiance 6” Livy, VI. 20. from the existing government.

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CHAP. XXV.] INCREASED DISTRESS. 221 honorable scars; and, looking up to the Capitol, which rose immediately above the Field of Mars, he implored the aid of those gods whose temples he had saved from barbarian pollution, and bade the people to look at the Capitol, and then give their judgment.

The tribunes saw that the centuries, thus excited, would never find him guilty; and the trial was adjourned,6l not to be brought forward again before the same tribunal. Yet how he was prevented from appealing to the centuries from the sentence of any other court that might have condemned him, does not appear. Nothing more is known with certainty than that Manlius was put to death as a traitor; the very manner62 of his execution, as well as the authority by which he was condemned, are variously reported. All agree, however,63 that his house was levelled with the ground; that a law was passed forbidding any one from henceforth to reside within the precincts of the Capitol; and that the members of the Manlian gens shared so deeply in the general sense of his guilt, as to make it a rule of their house, that no Manlius should ever hereafter receive the proenomen of Marcus. After this ill-omened opposition to the aristocracy, their power was, as usual, only the more confirmed. For four years the distress went on ncreased distress: the increasing, till the tribunes of the year 375 (we do not know their troibutefert.i tbehalfof names) ventured to make a stand64 in behalf of their constituents. the com.ons.

Censors had been appointed in this year, to take a new valuation of the property of the citizens; but one of them having died, and it being accounted unlucky to fill up the place of a deceased censor, his colleague went out of office. Two censors were then elected, but the augurs pronounced their election invalid, and they also resigned without doing any business; after which a religious objection was made to any third election, as if the gods had manifested it to be their will that there should be no censors that year. This so provoked the tribunes, that when it was proposed to call the legions into the field against the people of Prmeneste, they had recourse to the old method of opposition practised by the tribunes in the preceding century, and protected every citizen in refusing to enlist; nay, they went still further, and declared that they would once for all redress the existing grievances, by forbidding any debtor to be given over to his creditor’s power by the sentence of the magistrate. And though they did not persevere in their puIpose, for the PrEenestines,65 by a sudden inroad up to the very gates of Rome, furnished an excuse for the appointment of a dictator, and made the war seem a matter of paramount necessity, yet the tribunes withdrew their opposition only on some compromise; and at the ensuing election of military tribunes, three out of six were, for the first time since the Gaulish invasion, chosen from among the plebeians. This apparently brought some relief for the following year; but at the end of it only one66 plebeian was elected amongst the military tribunes; Their interference and the year 377 was only marked by disappointment of all the seems unavailn.g. hopes of the commons, and an actual increase of their burdens. Censors were 6~ Any objection of a religious kind on the lie enemy. Further, what was the “
coneilium part of the augurs, or a notice “that it thun-populi,” and where was the “Lucus Petelidered,” was sufficient to break up the comitia.

nus 2” for the present reading of ” Porta NoC. Rabirius was saved from condemnation by a mentana” in the editions of Livy, is a mere corsudden adjournment produced by the act of L. rection of Nardihli, and not to be admitted; inMetellus, who tore down the standard hoisted asmuch as there was no Porta Nomentana before on the Janiculum, and thus, according to an old the enlargement of the walls by Aurelian. Then custom, obliged the comitia to separate. there is the curious story recorded by Dion Cas62

Livy, and most other writers, say that he sius, and which Niebuhr prefers as the most was thrown from the Tarpeian rock. Cornelius authentic of all the accounts. The question is Nepos related that he was scourged to death.- too long to be discussed here: I have thrown See Gellius, XVII.

21, ~ 24. Again, some said, it therefore into a note at the end of the volume. that he was condemned by a ” concilium popu-63 Livy, VI. 20.

Plutarch, Camillus, 86. Aueli,” held in the Peteline grove without the Porta tor. de Viris illustr. in Manlio. Dion Cassius, Flumentana; others said that he was condemned Fragm. Peiresc. xxxi. by the duumviri, or two judges created, accord- ” Livy, VI. 27. ing to the old law ascribed to the times of the 65 Livy, VI. 28. kings, for the purpose of trying him as a pub-68 Livy, VI. 31.

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222 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVI again elected, but a war with the Volscians was made a pretence for postponing the census; while, on the other hand, although the censors could not find opportunity for relieving the distress of the commons, they thought it necessary to contract for the building of a part of the city wall;67 and to defray the expense of this work, additional taxes were imposed. Accordingly, in this and the following A. U. C. 3‘78 year, the amount of debt in the state continued to increase, and the number of insolvent debtors condemned to bondage was greatly multiplied; while a sudden dissolution of the alliance between the Latins and Volscians, and the conclusion of a separate peace between the latter and Rome,68 relieved the patricians from any immediate pressure of foreign warfare, and thus deprived the opposition of the tribunes of its most effectual weapon. From this apparently hopeless condition there sprung up suddenly a prospect nut deliverance is,not. of deliverance.

Again we have conflicting traditions, idle stories, withstaning,at hand.

and party exaggerations in the place of history. But the result of the great struggle is certain, whatever obscurity hangs over the details. And L. Sextius and C. Licinius, though we cannot gain a distinct knowledge of them as individuals, yet deserve to be recorded amongst the greatest benefactors to the cause of good government and equal law, inasmuch as they brought forward and carried the Licinian laws. CHAPTER XXVI, THE

LICINIAN LAWS.-378-384. ” Les mouvemens qui agitent les peuples peuvent ~tre de deux sortes. Les uns sont produits par une cause directe, d’oi r6sulte un effet imm’diat. Une circonstance qulelconque amene une nation, ou m6me une partie de la nation, a d6sirer un but determin; l’enterprise echoue ou reussit. Ce sont la les heureuses revolutions; on salt ce qu’on veut, on marche vers nn point precis, on se repose quand il est atteint.”-BARANTE, Tableau de la Litterature Franiaise pendant le Dixhuitieme Siecle. Six patrician military tribunes’ had been elected at the comitia for the year 378, and had entered on their office on the first of July. The coalition between the Latins and Volscians, which had been so dangerous to Rome, was dissolved in this asme summer, and the Volscians of Antium made a separate peace.Y During the autumn the commons seemed to have utterly lost heart; the patricians were all powerful at home, and fortune seemed disposed to favor them equally abroad: the cause, in short, appeared so hopeless that the more eminent men3 amongst the commons were discouraged from coming forward as candidates, even for the office of tribune of the comnmons; the tribune’s power, they thought, would merely expose themselves to odium, while it would be unable to effect any good.

Thus the elderly men, who generally held the tribuneship, now abandoned the helm in despair, and younger men, who would have given way to their higher claims under other circumstances, now found themselves called upon to come 67 Livy, VI. 32. on that very spot, Satricum, which they had con6s Livy, VI. 33. quered in the war now before us, and which Lt ivy, VI; 32.

they must have retained, therefore, at the peace 2 Livy, VI. 33. But they could scarcely have of 378. See Livy, VII. 27. But a state which made an absolute surrender, ” deditio,” of their retains even its conquests at the end of a war is city and territory; for we hear of them again in not likely to make at that same tine an ab solute little more than twenty years, as an indepen-surrender of its own city and territory. dent and sovereign people; planting a colony 3 Livy, VI. 34.

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CHuP. XXVI.] THE THREE LICINIAN LAWS. 223 forward, and brought with them strength and spirits better fitted for times so perilous. At the election in December, C. Licinius Stolo, a member of one of the richest4 and most distinguished families amongst the commons, and a man in the full vigor of life, obtained a place amongst the ten tribunes, and L. Sextius, a young man of an active and aspiring spirit, and a personal friend of Licinius, was elected one of his colleagues. Could we look into the private history of these times, we should find, no doubt, amongst the Roman patricians, as amongst the members of all aris-some of the patricians tocracies, a certain number of persons, who, from various motives, are favorable to the are opposed to the majority of their own order. By some of these, 0e ofe Licinius and Sextius were, we may be sure, encouraged and supported; the Licinian family had repeatedly intermarried with patricians:5 the tribune himself was married to a Fabia, and others of his name had been similarly connected with the Manlii and the Cornelii. With all the advantages then of wealth and connection that could be enjoyed by a commoner, Licinius came forward to redress the grievances of his order, and to secure their rights for the time to come. He proposed in the assembly of the tribes, in conjunction with L. Sextius, three separate laws.6 The first provided a strong remedy for the The tribunes propose great actual evil, the overwhelming pressure of debt. It enacted, the three Licinianlaw.. that whatever had been already paid in interest should be deducted from the amount of the principal;’ and that the debt thus reduced should be discharged in three years, in three equal instalments. The second bill was intended to save the commons, when their debts were once relieved, from the necessity of running into debt again. It proposed therefore to provide for the poorer citizens by giving them grants of land 6ut of the domain, or ager publicus; and in order to have land enough available for this purpose, it restrained the right of the occupation, by enacting that no man should occupy more than five hundred jugera of the public land in tillage,8 nor feed more than a hundred oxen and five hundred sheep on those portions of it which were left in pasture. The third bill was dictated by the consciousness that the enjoyment of property is neither secure in itself, nor can satisfy the wants of a noble mind, without being united with a certain portion of political power. The commons, as an order, must be raised to a level with the patricians; the honors of their country must be laid open to them; they must have an opportunity of bequeathing nobility to their children. The institution of the military tribuneship was, in itself, an affront to the commons: it was only because it was so inferior in dignity to the consulship, that it had been made nominally accessible to them. The bill of Licinius, accordingly, did away with the military tribuneship, and restored the consulship.’ That very image of the ancient royalty, with all its sacredness and display of sovereign state, was to be open to the commons no less than to the patricians. But expe4 This appears from what is related of him 8 Livy, VI.

35. afterwards, that the amount of public land in 7 4 Ut deducto eo de capite quod usuris perhis occupation exceeded the measure of 500
numeratumn esset, id quoc superesset triennio jugera, which had been fixed by his own law. mquis portionibus persolveretur.” -Livy, VI. Niebuhr observes also that this wealth of the 35. Licinian family continued to the latest period of Ne quis plus quingenta jugera agri posthe republic, as is shown by the immense riches sideret.” If we remember the legal definition of M. Licinius Crassus. of possessio, quicquid apprehendimus cujus 6 The Licinius who was a military tribune in proprietas ad nos non pertinet, aut nec potest the year 355 was a brother of Cn. Cornelius; pertinere, hoc posessionem apellamus, IDe and the Licinius who was master of the horse-Verbor. Significat.’ 15 (Digest. Lib. L. tit. xvi.), men in 382-3 was related to the dictator of that we shall see that it was needless to add “
pubyear, P. Manlius. Livy, V. 12, VI. 39. If in lici” to “agri,” because the only land which the first of these two cases we suppose with men ordinarily occupied without its being their Borghesi (Nuovi Frammenti, Parte 2, p. 89), own, was the “ager publicus.” that P. Licinius was a Cornelius by birth, and For the clause limiting the number of cattle adopted into the family of the Licinii, it shows which might be fed on the public pasture land, no less the high eminence of the Licinii and see Appian, de Bell. Civil. I. 8. their intimacy with the noblest patrician houses, 9, Ne tribunorum militum comitia fierent, when even a Cornolius would not scruple to be-consulumque utique alter ex plebe crearetur.““come their adopted son. Livy, VI. 85.

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224 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXV1 rience had shown that it was not enough to throw it open merely; one place must be secured to the commons by law, or the influence of the patricians at the comitia would forever exclude them from it. It was proposed, therefore, that one, at least, of the two consuls should of necessity be elected from the commons. This last law requires no explanation; and the second, since Niebuhr has Operationofthe ystem cleared up the whole subject of the agrarian laws, is equally intelotfdebtoranddreditor. ligible. The first, however, involves in it some difficulty; for if the rate of interest had been high, and a debt had been of long standing, the sum paid in interest would not only have equalled, but must, in some instances, have actually exceeded the amount of the principal; so that the creditor, far from having any thing more to receive, would rather have had something to refund. To explain this, Niebuhr observes, that debts were ordinarily settled at the end of one year; and that if a debtor could not then pay, he was in the habit of borrowing money of a new creditor to discharge the principal and interest of his first account; a proceeding which, from its frequency, had a particular name, “Versura.”’~ That a speedy settlement of debts was the ordinary practice, may indeed be collected from the clause in this very Licinian law itself, which required the whole debt remaining after the deduction of the already paid interest to be discharged within three years; and if the practice of versura was often repeated, it will be obvious that a debtor would have paid his original debt many times over in interest, although not under that name: a part of the principal of every new debt being, in fact, the interest of the preceding one. Still, as the distress had now lasted for thirteen years, there must have been many who could not have gone on so long upon this system; the amount of their debt must have so exceeded all their possible means of payment, that no new creditor could have been found to advance them the money to discharge it.

Under these circumstances, what could the debtor do but enter into a nexum, and at the end of a certain term, on failing to redeem himself, submit to be given over as a bondman to his creditor; or else try to procure a further respite by offering an exorbitant rate of interest? In this latter case the interest so paid would, undoubtedly, be deducted from the amount of the principal, and thus it would happen that there would be a very small balance left for the creditor still to receive. But such cases would be very few: in most instances, when a man’s credit was so exhausted that he could no longer practice the system of borrowing from a new creditor to pay his old one, he would be obliged to enter into a nexum, and being still insolvent, would, in the common course of things, become his creditor’s bondman. Then whilst the debtor was giving his creditor all the benefit of his labor, we cannot suppose that the interest of the debt went on accumulating also; and thus, after he had remained some years in bondage, he might be redeemed by the mere payment of his original debt, from which there would be deducted only that interest which he had paid before he had been consigned to his creditor’s power. But what we should most desire would be, to learn the fate of the great mass of debtors, who, in the course of the last thirteen years, had thus been reduced to slavery. Was thereany limit of time beyond which they could not be redeemed? or, if the debt were never paid, did they or their posterity ever recover their freedom?” Are we, in short, to believe that many families of the “0 Festus, or rather Paulus, in “Versura.” gem habet;”

that is, he could not be killed by 1 There is a wellknown passage in Quinc-his master, nor treated by him absolutely at his tilian, VII. 3, ~

27, which enters into the dif-discretion, but might claim the protection of ferences between the condition of a slave and the law like a freeman; again, he could inherit that of one who was “addictus,” or given over property and acquire property, which a slave to his creditor into bondage.

But it does not could not do. ” Tribum habet” is remarkable, specially touch the questions which I have sug-because it implies that the addictus did not gested. Some parts of it, however, are re-undergo either the maxima or media capitis markable. “Ad servum nulla lex pertinet: deminutio; he could not lose his rights of citiaddictus legem habet.

Propria liberi que nemo zenshi? if he retained his tribe. But were these habet nisi liber, prcenomen, nomen, cognomen, rights in abeyance, as the father’s power over tribum; habet hec addictus.” ” Addictus le-his children was suspended so long as he was

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CHnA. XXVI.] ELECTION OF CURULE MAGISTRATES STOPPED. 225 Roman commons, during this period, were finally lost to their country as free citizens; or was there any mitigation of the extreme rigor of their fate, and did the slave-debtor ever recover his personal liberty by consenting to become the client of his master? These are questions to which, I believe, it is impossible to give satisfactory answers. To return, however, to our narrative; the promulgation of the three Licinian bills provoked, as was natural, the most determined opposition on Th rib Tho tribunes stop tho the part of the aristocracy. Again the battle was to be fought in election of curtle mathe assembly of the tribes; the great object of the patricians was to prevent the bills from being passed there. Some of the tribunes were attached to the aristocratical party, and these were persuaded to interpose their negative,’ 12 to forbid the reading of the bills to the people, and thus to stop them from ever being put to the vote. Licinius and Sextius, thus baffled, ana being unable to proceed with their measures directly, determined to retaliate by obstructing, in like manner, the course of their opponents. When the month of July arrived, and the military tribunes for the last year went out of office, Licinius and Sextius forbade the election of any successors to them; they would allow no curule magistrates to be appointed; and they with the aediles of the commons remained for a time the only magistrates of the republic. But that this time continued for five years, according to the common report of the Roman Fasti and historians, is a thing altogether incredible.‘3 But this tim of anarAn anarchy of five years; so long a period of the most extreme po-chy did not lst for five litical excitement, nay, of the greatest extremities of revolutionary yea s. violence; the water boiling, as it were, with such intensity, and yet never boiling a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, but re-It is to be observed, that about forty years afturned to him as soon as he came home? or can terwards we still find the consular year spoken we suppose that they continued to exist, and of as beginning on the 1st of July (Livy, VIII. that a creditor might drive his addicti into the 20), which requires us to suppose either that Forum to give their votes as he should require, one whole year passed without military triband that such votes were legal? or would this unes, and that the elections were not again be one of the many cases in which the officer delayed; or that in the course of the five years’ who presided at the comitia exercised his dis-struggle, the elections were each year delayed cretion in objecting to them whenever he for a time, so that at the end of the period the thought proper or receiving them if it suited time lost in the several years, when added tothe interests of his party? gether, amounted to just a year in all, or, final-‘2 Livy, VI. 85. ly, we must believe that there was no period of 13 It is utterly impossible to ascertain the real anarchy at all; that the tribunes every year chronology of this period. The story of the five threatened to stop the elections, but allowed years’ anarchy arose probably from an exagger-them, from consideration for the public service, ated interpretation of some expressions in the to be held as usual, stipulating, perhaps, for annalists, ” that for five years the tribunes went the election of certain individuals known to be on obstructing the elections,” meaning, that either favorable to their claims, or, at least, not whilst the contest lasted, this was their weap-violently adverse to them. Borghesi thinks on, which they used from time to time, and that one college of military tribunes has been never relinquished it without stipulating for omitted by Livy in the year preceding the besome concession in turn. Afterwards, when ginning of the anarchy, and he has restored it, the date of the Gaulish invasion had been fixed partly from Diodorus, and partly from conjecto the 2d year of the 98th Olympiad, and this ture. Thus he places the election of L. Sexwas assumed as certain, the existence of the five tius as the first plebeian consul, exactly fouryears’ anarchy was no longer questioned. The andtwenty years after the invasion of the Fasti Capitolini acknowledge them as well as Gauls. Striking out the five years of pretended Livy; so also does Dionysius, for he speaks of anarchy, the consulship of L. Sextins falls ninethe ten years’ tribuneship of Licinius.- (XIV. teen years after the invasion of the Gauls, 22. Fragm.

Mai.) And Polybius implies them, which agrees exactly with the chronology of where he gives the dates of the several inva-Diodorus, when his confusions have been corsions of the Gauls, II. 18. The later writers, rected, and the Gaulish invasion brought to its such as Eutropius, Cassidorus, and Rufus Fes-true date, according to his system, that is, to tus, make the anarchy to have lasted for four the third year of the 99th Olympiad. It agrees years. So also does Zonaras; but then these also with the statement of Orosius, III. 1, 4; four years are with him the whole period of the and this is the nearest approximation to the struggle, for he makes them to be followed im-truth at which I think it is possible to arrive; mediately by the dictatorship of Camillus, and namely, to fix the consulship of L. Sextius in the pretended Gaulish invasion. They are then the 2d year of the 104th Olympiad,. which is the the years which, in the common Fasti, follow date of the battle of Mantinea, and of the death the five pretended years of anarchy; and which of Epaminondas, 363-2, B. c.

are marked by four colleges of military tribunes. 15

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226 HISTORY OF ROME. i [Coi. XXVY over; a knot so perplexing, which none untied, and yet none were tempted tc cut; a livelong strife, neither pacified by any compronrise, nor exasperated into open violence, requires far better testimony than that of the Roman annalist removel two hundred years from the period of the struggle, to induce us to admit it as historical. What would have become of, the ordinary course of business, if for five years the supreme courts of law had been closed, and the praetor’s or prmtorian tribune’s judgmentseat so long left empty? Where was the restless enmity of the Latins, who, down to the beginning of this pretended anarchy, are described as so relentless in their hostilities, and who again appear in arms as soon as it is over? Unless the circumstances of the struggle were very different from all the representations of them which have reached our times, we can scarcely doubt that the Fasti, followed by Diodorus and Orosius, have preserved the truer account of these disputes; that one year at the most, perhaps even that not continuously, but at different intervals, was passed without curule magistrates; that the consulshipof the first plebeian consul is to be placed not twenty-four but nineteen years only after the invasion of the Gauls. The length of the struggle, even when reduced in all from ten years to five, is Militarytribunes again sufficiently memorable. The tribunes had prevented the election elected. of any curule magistrates; whether this state of things really lasted for a whole year, or only for a few weeks, it is not possible to determine; but it was ended by a fresh attack of the Latins on the old allies of Rome, the people of Tusculum;14
the call for aid on the part of the Tusculans could not be resisted; the tribunes withdrew their veto, and the comitia for the election of military tribunes were duly held; but care was taken that only moderate men, or men friendly to the popular cause, should be chosen; there were two Valerii, the very name of whose house was an assurance to the commons, and a third tribune was Ser. Sulpicius, connected by marriage with 0. Licinius, and with his patrician supporter, M. Fabius. After all, they were not allowed to enlist the soldiers for the legions without much opposition, nor probably without some stipulation on the part of the senate, that the military tribunes should not, like M. Postumius, abuse their power by visiting on their soldiers in the field the political offences of the commons at Rome. When the army did at last march, Tusculum was relieved, and Velitrae, which had been foremost in the attack upon it, was besieged in its turn; but the siege was not speedily ended, and the year came to a close before the place was reduced. Meanwhile the popular cause was gaining ground: amongst the new-military tribunes was M. Fabius Ambustus,‘5 the father-in-law of Licinius, commissioners of the and the zealous supporter of his bills, an advantage which more than counterbalanced the danger threatened by the appointment of two zealous members of the aristocratical party. These were A,. Cornelius Cossus, who had been named dictator some years before to oppose the designs of M.

Manlius, and Q. Quinctius Cincinnatus, of the house of that Cincinnatus, who, in his consulship, had proposed to repeal the laws passed in favor of the commons at Rome, by the votes of his soldiers, in an assembly to be held in the field beyond the protection of the tribunes, and who in his dictatorship had defended the murder of Sp. Maelius. Besides, the patrician interest in the college of the tribunes of the commons was becoming weaker and weaker; not only were Licinius and Sextius continually reelected, but three others of their colleagues, it is said, now espoused their cause, and the remaining five, who had still pledged their veto to the patricians, so felt the difficulty of their position as to be obliged to: lower their tone: their veto now professed only to suspend the discussion of the bills, and not to forbid it altogether:: ”’ A large proportion of. the people,“16 they said, “were engaged in foreign service at Velitrae: so great a question must be decided in a full assembly; till, therefore, the legions should return home, the bills must’ Livy, VI. 36. 5

Livy, VI. 36. -6 Livy, VI. 88.

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CaAP. XXV.] GROWING STRENGTH OF THE POPULAR CAUSE. 227 not be brought forward.” In such contests as these, delay is an advantage to the resisting party when the assailants are not keen in their attack, so that it may be possible to divert them from it by exhausting their patience; but when they are thoroughly in earnest, the flood gathers into a stronger head the longer it is opposed, and breaks in at last more overwhelmingly.

So Licinius finding his three bills thus pertinaciously resisted, now proceeded to add to them a fourth,11 enacting that the two keepers of the Sibylline books should be superseded for the future by a commission of ten, and that these ten should be chosen alike from the patricians and from the commons. The notion of a plebeian consul was most objected to on religious grounds; a plebeian, it was said, could not take the auspices, because his order could exercise no office connected with the service of the gods. Licinius resolved to destroy this objection most effectually, by attacking the religidus exclusion itself. So far was he from allowing that a plebeian could not be consul because he could not be a priest, that he claimed for his order a share in the priestly offices as such; he required a distinct acknowledgment that the service of the gods might be directed, and their pleasure made known, by plebeian ministers as rightfully as by patricians. Perhaps, too, he had another and more immediate object; in seasons of extreme public danger, it was usual to consult the Sibylline books, and the keepers of them reported the answer which they found applicable to the emergency. Licinius might fear that this oracle, if left solely in the keeping of his adversaries, might be unfairly tampered with; and its answers shaped according to their interests. It was thus especially desirable that some of the commons should be made acquainrted with their contents, to prevent the possibility of any forgery. New military tribunes,18 it is said, came into office before the army came home from Velitrm. This would be equally true whether we suppose M.

Camillus and P. that the soldiers came home to the harvest in July and August, Mai dictators. or remained in the field till the close of the autumn. Amongst the new military tribunes we again find Ser. Sulpicius, and also Ser. Cornelius Maluginensis, a man so distinguished that he had already filled the same office six times before.‘g When the Licinian bills were again brought forward, the popular feeling in their favor was so strong as to make it apparent that the tribunes opposed to them would find it impossible to persist in interposing their negative; the patricians accordingly had recourse to their last expedient; it was pretended that the war with Velitrse required a dictator, and then Camillus, the bitterest enemy of the commons, was appointed to fill that office. It appears that he issued a proclamation20 summoning the citizens within the military age to enlist and follow him to the field; whether his object was any thing more than delay must remain doubtful; but his edict was utterly disregarded, and the senate,. to allay the storm, called upon him to resign his dictatorship. The Fasti recorded, that P. Manlius Capitolinus was named dictator shortly after, for the avowed purpose of putting an end to the domestic disturbances;2” no record, however, remains to us of any thing that he did in his office; but it is evident that he was disposed to take no violent steps against the commons, for one branch of the Licinian family were.his relations, and from them he chose C. Licinius Calvus, though a plebeian, to be his master of the horsemen. As if to show still further that the contest was drawing to a close, the bill22 relating to the keepers of the Sibylline books was passed before the end of this year; but the other three were still delayed a little longer. Every nerve was, doubtless, strained by the patricians lo preserve the exclusive possession of the consulship, and this was naturally the, point to which 17 Livy, vI.

37. KardXoyov.-Camillus, 39. And so the Fasti is Livy, VI. 38.

Capitolinii; for the beginning of the line may “9 This appears from the fragments of the be safely restored as Sigonius has supplied it. Fasti Capitolini. “Ob Edgitum in milites ex S. C. abdicarant.” o2 Livy says, that he only threatened to issue 2’,, Seditionisse dandbe et rei gerendse caun such a proclamation, VI. 38. But Plutarch sA.”.. speaks of it as actually issued, 7rpolypapts ~roartas 22 Livy, VI. 42.

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228 HISTORY OF ROME.’[CHAP. XXVI the mass of the commons attached the least importance, while they eagerly desired to pass the other two bills, relating to the public land, and to the debts. But the tribunes, being well aware of this feeling, and being anxious, on personal as well as public grounds, to secure the great point of an equal share of the highest magistracies, had resolved only to bring forward the three bills together, to be altogether either accepted or rejected. The more violent23 of the aristocratical party remonstrated with hypocritical indignation against the arrogance of the tribunes, in thus dictating to the commons; and against their selfishness, in refusing to bring forward bills for the good of their whole order without stipulating at the same time for the gratification of their own ambition. But Licinius, trusting that the people would have the sense to reject the pretended sympathy of their worst enemies, persevered in his purpose; and told the commons in homely language,24 ” that they must be content to eat if they wished to drink.”

There is nothing viler than the spirit which actuates the vulgar of an aristocOn what grounds the racy; we cannot sympathize with mere pride and.

selfishness, with tettea port of th erL-the mere desire of keeping the good things of life to themselves, cinian bills. with the grasping monopoly of honors and power without nobleness of mind to appreciate the true value of either. All can conceive from what motive, with what temper, and in what language, the coarser spirits of the aristocratical party opposed the Licinian bills. But in all the uncorrupted aristocracies of the ancient world, there was another and a very different element also; there were men who opposed the advance of the popular party on the highest and purest principles; who regarded it as leading, in the end, to a general lawlessness, to a contempt for the institutions and moral feelings of men, and to a disbelief in the providence of the gods. Such men must have existed amongst the Roman patricians; and their views are well deserving of the notice of posterity. When Ser. Cornelius Maluginensis in his seventh military tribuneship opposed Licinius and Sextius in the assembly of the tribes, he might have expressed his feelings in something like the following language, and the soberest and wisest of the commons themselves would have been touched with a foreboding fear, while they could not help acknowledging that it was partly just: 2a “I know, Quiretes, that ye account as an enemy to your order whoever will Speech of Ser. Corne-not agree to the passing of these three ordinances proposed by e Mau.ginene.is. your tribunes, Caius Licinius and Lucius Sextius. And it may be that some who have spoken against them, are, in truth, not greatly your wellwishers; so that it is no marvel if your ill opinion of these should reach also to others who may appear to be treading in their steps.

But I stand here before you as one who has been now, for the seventh time, chosen by you one of the tribunes of the soldiers, -six times have ye tried me before, in peace and in war, and if ye had ever found me to be your enemy, it had been ill done in you to have tried me yet again this seventh time. But if ye have believed me to have sought your good in times past, even believe this same thing of me now, though ss See the language which Livy has put into on the view’of human affairs which I have asthe mouth of Appius Claudius, VI. 40, 41. cribed to Ser. Maluginensis. And this view is 24 EirpWV,‘W OIK av 7rLBgY Esi du’ odyoLgV. Dion exceedingly deserving of notice, because it so Cassius, Fragm. Peiresc. 33, as corrected by strongly illustrates one of the great uses of the Refinar.

Christian revelation; namely, that it provides 25 I am far from wishing to introduce into a fixed moral standard independently of human history the practice ofwritingfictitious speeches, law, and therefore allows human law to be alas a mere variety upon the narrative, or an oc-tered as circumstances may require, without casion for displaying the eloquence of the his-the danger of destroying thereby the greatest torian. But when the peculiar views of any sanction of human conduct. I have not, then, party or time require to be represented, it seems put modern arguments into the mouth of a to me better to do this dramatically, by making Roman of the fourth century of Rome; but I one of the characters of the story express them have made him deliver arguments not only in the first person, than to state as a matter of which might have been, but which were unfact, that such and such views were entertained. doubtedly used then, and which are so charac I believe it to be perfectly true, that the better teristic of ancient times, that they could not be part of the opposition to the advance of popular repeated now without absurdity. principles in the ancient world was grounded

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CHAP. XXVI.] SPEECH OF SER. CORNELIUS MALUGINENSIS. 229 I may speak that which in the present disposition of your minds ye may perchance not willingly hear. “Now, as regarding the ordinances for the relief of poor debtors, and for restraining the occupation of the public land, I could be well content that they should pass. I know that ye have borne much, and not through any fault of yours; and if any peaceable way can be found out whereby ye may have relief, it will be more welcome to no man than to me.

I like not the taking of usury, and I think that ye may well be lightened of some part of the burden of your taxes by our turning the fruits of the public land to the service of the commonwealth. But if ye ask me, Why then dost thou oppose these ordinances? I must truly bid you go to your tribunes, Caius and Lucius, and demand of them your answer.26 They can tell you that they will not suffer me to give my vote for these ordinances, nor will they suffer you to have your will. For they have said that these ordinances shall not have our votes, neither yours nor mine, unless we will vote also for a third ordinance, which they have bound to them so closely, as that none, they say, shall tear them asunder. Now, as touching this third ordinance, Quirites, I will deal honestly with you: there is not the thing in all the world so precious or so terrible as shall move me, either for love or for fear, to give my vote in its behalf.

” What is there, then, ye will say to me, in this third ordinance which thou so mislikest? I will answer you in few words. I mislike the changing of the laws of our fathers, especially when these laws have respect to the worship of the gods. Many things, I know, are ordered wisely for one generation, which, notwithstanding, are by another generation no less wisely ordered otherwise. There is room in human affairs for change; there is room also for unchangeableness. And where shall we seek for that which is unchangeable, but in those great laws which are the very foundation of the commonwealth; most of all in those which, having to do with the immortal gods, should be also themselves immortal. Now it belongs to these laws that the office of consul,27 which is as it were the shadow of the majesty of Jove himself, should be held only by men of the houses of the patricians. Ye know how that none but the patricians may take any office of priesthood for the-worship of the gods of Rome, nor interpret the will of the gods by augury. For the gods being themselves many, have set also upon earth many races of men and many orders; and one race may not take to itself the law of another race, nor one order the law of another order.

Each has its own law, which was given to it from the beginning; and if we change these the whole world will be full of confusion. It is our boast28
that we Romans have greater power over our children than the men of any Dther nation: with us the son is ever, so long as he lives, subject to his father’s will, except his father be pleased to give him his freedom. Now, if a son were to ask why he should not, when he is come to full age, be free from his father’s authority, what answer should we give than this, that the law of the Romans gave to fathers this power over their children, that to this law he had been born, as surely as to those other laws of his nature which appointed him to be neither a god nor a beast, but a man.

These laws are not of to-day, nor of yesterday; we know of no time when 26

This attack on the tribunes for their rements used against the Canuleian bills, IV. 2-6, fusal to separate the three bills from each other and again in the speech of Appius against the is put by Livy into the mouth of Appius Clau-Licinian bills, VI. 41. The principle implied in di’s VII.

40. It would, of course,-be pressed this argument is not to be found in Livy, but by all the opponents of the measures; and it is is important to be stated, because it is as chartoo much to expect that even the best of the acteristic of polytheism, as the opposite ]rinaristocratical party would have scrupled to avail ciple, that all men are equal before God, except themselves of it, although they would have so far as their own conduct creates a differdwelt on this point in a very different manner ence between them, is characteristic of Chrisfrom their more violent associates. tianity. a’ The religious argument, that a plebeian 28 ” Fere enim nulli alii sunt homines, qui could not be created consul without profana-talem in filios suos habent potestatem qualem tion, is to be found twice in Livy, in the argu-nos habemus.” Gaius, Institut. I. ~ 65.

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230 HISTORY OF ROME. [CAPr. XXVI they have not been: may neither we nor our children ever see that time when they shall have ceased to be! ” But if the mere will of the men of this generation can set aside these laws if, breaking through that order which the gods have given to us, we elect foi consuls those whom the gods allow not; see what will be the end.

Within these fifteen years four tribes of strangers have been added to the commons of this city. Ye know, also, that many enfranchised slaves, men with no race, with no law, I had well-nigh said with no gods, are, from time to time, enrolled amongst our citizens. If all these are admitted into our commonwealth, to become Romans, and to live according to the laws of the Romans, it is well. But if we may alter these laws; if strangers come among us not to receive our custom, but to give us theirs, what thing is there so surely fixed in car state, that it shall not be torn up at our fancy? what law will be left for us to follow, save the law of our own fancies? Truly, if the gods had sent down one from heaven to declare to us their will; if, as our own laws were written by the decemvirs upon the twelve tables, so there were any tables to be found on which the gods had written their laws for all mankind, then we might change our own laws as we would, and the law of the gods would still be a guide for us. But as the gods speak to us, and will speak only through the laws29 of our fathers, if we once dare to cast these aside, there is no stay or rest for us any more; we must wander in confusion forever. “Nor is it a little thing that by breaking through the law of our fathers, and choosing men of the commons for consuls, we shall declare that riches30 are to be honored above that rule of order which the gods have given to us. Riches, even now, can do much for their possessor, but they cannot raise him beyond the order in which he was born; they cannot buy for him-shame were’it if they could!-the sovereign state of the consulship, nor the right to offer sacrifice to the gods of Rome. But once let a plebeian be consul, and riches will be the only god which we shall all worship. For then he who has money will need no other help to raise him from the lowest rank to the highest. And then we may suffer such an evil as that which is now pressing upon the cities of the Greeks in the great island of Sicily. There may arise a man from the lowest of the people with much craft and great riches, and make himself what the Greeks call a tyrant.3’ Ye scarcely know what the name means; a vile person seizing upon the state and power of a king, trampling upon all law, confounding all order, persecuting the noble and good, encouraging the evil, robbing the rich, insulting the poor, living for himself alone3 and for his own desires, neither fearing the gods, nor regarding men. This is the curse with which the gods have fitly punished other people for desiring freedom more than the law of their fathers gave them. May we never commit the like folly to bring upon ourselves such a punishment! ” Therefore, Quirites, unless your tribunes can find for us another law of the gods to guide us in the place of that law which they are destroying, I cannot consent to that ordinance which they are so zealously calling upon us to pass. Not because I am proud, not because I love not the commons, but because, above all things else on earth, I love and honor law; and if we pull down law and exalt33 Tots Epqorat trg &i,roteiV;] rEp2ip Ovata i)!pqi the increasing honor paid to riches in comparirpoydvwv Oeparteias ii wr p ag ov rli r4v roTo6Trov,, son with the declining estimation of noble. l IvOia v6ylt, r6XnoaevatpE!

rolotvraS bs’p3&g birth. av 7rotev. Xenophon, Memorab. I. 8, ~ 1. Thucvd.

I. 18. vuvarsrpaes R, ytysO1dV17; Compare the language of Archidamus, and of 7rs’ EAXXao Ka? rTv T xp#wdrtv v KTrV Ltyav ETL paXCleon in Thucydides, I. 84, III. 37, and the ar-Xov ” rqp6repov Rrotovdl.7S, Tra roAM
rupavviES ly, gument against any alteration in the laws given rats,ro’EcL

KaOiaravro, rGWv rpood6a&v EtpgdoVW yLby Aristotle in his review of the theoretical yvotvOv. commonwealth of Hippodamus.‘o yap vbog 3a Thucyd. I.

17. To lp’ lavrrOv ubvov p7rpooptIacrv oaepiav EXEt rp TO ra iretOe0at, >rXIv,rafpa rT pEVOL, SS rte roi ata:Kal lE rv T’V iLov oKov atLuv h& 0oQ.

reo8ro d’ ob yiyverat El pjt Va Xpvov orX0ooS0.- jaaXelaLS arov 6ivvaivro PduLta -rag rS WrSX wKovv.-4 Politic. II. 6. Compare the description of a’tyrant in Herodo30 Compare the sentiments of Theognis and tus, III. 80, and V. 92. Pindar on this point, who constantly lament 33 This is what Archidamus and Cleon, stnk

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CHAP. XXVI.] THE LAST COLLEGE OF MILITARY TRIBUNES. 231 our own will in the place of it, truth, and modesty, and soberness, and all virtu( will perish from amongst us; and falsehood, and insolence, and licentiousness, and all other wickedness will possess us wholly. And instead of that greater freedom which ye long for, the end will be faction and civil bloodshed,34 and, last of all, that which is worse than all the rest, a lawless tyranny.” To such language as this the tribunes might have replied by denying that its principle was applicable to the particular point at issue: they hat was tobe saidin might have urged that the admission of the commons to the connent.roftthe speech ogf sulship was not against the original and unalterable laws of the Ser. Cornelius. Romans, inasmuch as strangers had been admitted even to be kings at Rome; and the good king Servius, whose memory was so fondly cherished by the people, was, according to one tradition, not only a stranger by birth, but a slave. And further they might have answered, that the law of intermarriage between the patricians and commons was a breaking down of the distinction of orders, and implied that there was no such difference between them as to make it profane in either to exercise the functions of the other. But as to the principle itself, there is no doubt that-it did contain much truth.

The ancient heathen world craved, what all men must crave, an authoritative rule of conduct; tad not finding it elsewhere, they imagined it to exist in the fundamental and original laws of each particular race or: people. To destroy this sanction without having any thing to substitute in its place was deeply perilous; and reason has been but too seldom possessed of power sufficient to recommend its truths to the mass of mankind by their own sole authority. On the other hand, good and wise men could not but see that national law was evidently, in many cases, directly opposed to divine law;35 and that obedience and respect for it were absolutely injurious to men’s moral nature; they felt sure, moreover, that the very truth was discoverable by man, and trusted that it must at last force its way if the ground were but cleared for its reception. They hoped, besides, as was the case with Aristotle, that by gaining the ear of statesmen they might see a system of national education established,36
which would give truth all the power of habit; and knowing too that universal law, that if man does not grow better he must grow worse, and that to remain absolutely unchanged is impossible; they ventured to advance towards a higher excellence, even amidst the known dangers of the attempt, in the faith that God would, sooner or later, point out the means of overcoming them. The events of the last year of this long struggle are even more obscure than those of the years preceding it. P. Manlius,3 the late dictator P. Valerius, who had been five times tribune before, two Cornelii, Aulus and Marcus, the one of ing specimens of the noblest and vilest advo-tragedy of the “Seven Chiefs who warred on cates of an unchanged system, as opposed to one Thebes” with the expression of the opposite of continual progress, call ” the wishing to be sentiment, which is evidently uttered from his wiser than the laws.” Archidamus.boasts that heart. Half of the chorus go with Antigone to the Spartans were trained iaaOicTrepoov nr3v v6pwv bury Polynices in defiance of the king’s decree; Trc nrEpoqaa,.-Thucyd. I. 84. Cleon describes urging in their justification:good citizens as men who rrtarorvrge T5 if eav-Kai yap yEvcr rwv’UvEOaEL, aipaer7Epo Twp v61 r ov a6tovsav io va.  Koivov r6’o a`oSg Kai Ir6tS aXXws Thucyd. III. 37. aAsXor’ E7ralvs ra 3iKata. g4 SO

Theognis, But the other half follow the body orEteocles, K6pvc,: KUEL
wdXs6g de’-WoLuca He yI rEtcl a4vpa whose funeral was sanctioned by the law, exE’Ovvriipa galc iS iptog s LEriprls. claiming: ‘Etc Trv yap arrdac laTi, Ktal ElovXot.q6vot auvpwv I’ JtE?15 a ipa Tad-, t’h7rep Tre A6Xs Mosvapxos Hd rdAXt #Osfora rTE ados. 39-51. Kas TO i aIov aovvuEratvE7. Y5

Hence the distinction insisted on by the Ptrai yap PdKapas Kaii AtLi iaXyV
philosophers between universal and municipal gig Karyeltwv 5pvCs rdAtv law, between natural and political justice.-See ye’varparorat, pI7rl6’

aXoSarv Aristotle, Ethics, V. 7, Rhetoric, I. 14. Hence sK vsaro OWTorV
the interest of the story of Antigone, who is saraKXvoeiivat r7 ladXmra.

represented as breaking the law of her country 30 Ethic. Nicomach. X.

9.‘Etc sioa dE ayoy7; because it was at variance with the law of the Jp0in rvXELv rpjs apermv xaerbiv, u# vrn Troto5rToL gods: Sophocles invests her character with all rpaqobvra vdpots… ILS v6pots JeC TrdXOXat 7r5, the sacredness of a martyr; but {Eschylus, who Tpo001bV Kai r i bnrntrip7nVara’ osgK garas yap XAvwrpa more entirely identified the laws of the land with avv4Oq, ysv6peva. the highest standard of human virtue, ends his 37 Livy, VI. 42.

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232 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. XXVL Last college of military tIe family of Cossus, the other of that of the Maluginenses; M. Ge onibtUet. iEnd of tle ganius Macerinus, and L. Veturius, formed the last college of mili. the pratorship. tary tribunes which was to be known in Rome. Manlius and Valerius were likely to favor the bills; of Veturius we know little; but the two Cornelii38 and Geganius, if they were true to the political sentiments of their families, would be strongly opposed to them. But the story of this year is again perplexed by an alleged dictatorship of M.

Camillus, and a pretended inroad of the Gauls into Latium. It is said that an alarm of an approaching invasion from the Gauls led to the appointment of Camillus; and this may be true; for the senate would gladly avail themselves of the slightest rumor as an excuse for investing him with absolute power; but that the Gauls really did invade Latium at this time, and were defeated by Camillus in a bloody battle89 near Alba, seems to be merely a fabrication of the memorials of the house of the Furii, the last which occurs in the story of Camillus, and not the least scrupulous.

Setting. aside this pretended Gaulish war, the annalists merely related, that after most violent contests, the Licinian bills were carried;40 this must have taken place before the tribunes went out of office in December; and apparently they were not again reelected, as if in the full confidence that the battle was won. But when the comitia for the election of consuls were held, according to the new law, and the centuries had chosen L. Sextius to be the first plebeian consul, the storm broke out again with more violence than ever, owing to the refusal of the curie to confirm the election and invest him with the imperium. No particulars are recorded of the following crisis; matters, it is said, came almost to a secession of the commons, and ” to other terrible threats of civil contentions;““41 words which seem to mean that the secession would not have been confined to mere passive resistance, but would have led to an actual civil war. But Camillus, who was still, it is said, dictator, acted on this occasion, if we may believe any story of which he is the subject, the part of mediator; both sides made some concessions: the patricians were to confirm the election of the plebeian consul; but the ordinary judicial power was to be separated from the consul’s office, and conferred from hence8s The two Cornelii Maluginenses were ment which clearly refers to it, IV. 7, and it is amongst the most zealous supporters of the see-implied, I think, in the short summary of Floond decemvirate, one of them being actually a rus, I. 13. On the other hand, there is the nocolleague of Appius Claudius, at a time when torious falsehood of the other stories of Gaulish even the patricians themselves were generally victories gained by Camillus; there is the posidisgusted with it; and a Cornelius Cossus had tive statement of Polybius, that the Gauls did been appointed dictator to oppose the supposed not invade Latium again till thirty years after designs of Manlius. The consulship of M. Ge-their first irruption; and that when they did ganius Macerinus, two years after the end of come, and advanced to Alba, the scene of Cathe decemvirate, is marked as the period at millus’ pretended victory over them, the Rowhich the reaction in favor of the patricians be-mans did not dare to meet them in the fiehl.gan; and the consuls of that year are contrasted Polyb..II. 18. There is also the statement of with those of the year preceding, who are de-Aristotle, quoted by Plutarch, Camillus, 22, and scribed as moderate men, not much inclined to agreeing so completely with Polybius, “that either party.’ And M. Geganius was one of those Rome was delivered from the Gauls by Lnucius; censors who treated the dictator Main. ~Emilius that is, by Lucius Camillus, the son of Marcus, with such unjust severity, because he had who repelled the Gauls in the year 406 (or more abridged the duration of the censor’s office. properly 401), the first time, according to Poly39 The Fasti Capitolini state that Camillus was bius, that the Romans ever did meet them with appointed dictator this year, ” rei gerunds cau-advantage.

Finally, the common stories of this s3,” that is, ” to command an army in the field,” pretended war are at variance with one another, as distinguished from the other objects for some placing the famous combat of T. Manlius which a dictator was sometimes appointed, with the Gaulish giant in this year, and making such as, ” seditionis sedandee cause,”

“comiti-the Gauls advance as far as the Anio; while orum habendorum causa,‘l or “clavi figendi others laid the scene ofCamillus’ victory on the causa.” But as the fragments of the Fasti are Alban Hills, and placed the combat of Manlius in this place very much mutilated, we cannot ten years later. I believe, therefore, that the tell whether they contained any mention of his accounts of this last dictatorship of Camillus are victory and triumph over the Gauls or no. as little to be relied on as those of his pretended Probably, however, they did, for the story seems defeat of Brennus, and freeing Rome from the to have established itself in the Roman history shame of paying a ransom. very generally; it is mentioned by Livy, by 40 Livy, VI. 42. Plutarch, by Dionysius in the fragments of his 41’ Terribilesque alias minas civilium certa14th book, by Zonaras, by Appian, in a frag-minum.” Livy, VI. 42.

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CHAP. XXVI.] THE LICINIAN BILLS BECOME LAWS. 233 forth on a new magistrate, who was always to be a patrician, and who being appointed without a colleague was not to be called consul but praetor; a title of high dignity, which had been anciently borne by the consuls, and expressed particularly their supreme power, as the captains or leaders of the commonwealth. The first person who filled this new office42 was Sp.

Camillus, the son of the dictator; a compliment which his old father well deserved, if the last public act of his life of more than fourscore years was the reconciling of the quarrels of his countrymen, and the bringing a struggle of five years to a peaceful and happy termination. This union of the two orders was acknowledged also in the religious ceremonies of the republic. A temple43 was built on the Capitoline Hill Intitutn of the Cu looking towards the Forum, and dedicated to ” Concord;” and a rule Adileship. fourth day was added to the three hitherto devoted to the celebration of the great or Roman games; as if to signify that the commons were from henceforth to take their place as a part of the Roman people, by the side of the three old patrician tribes, the Ramnenses, Titienses, and Luceres. To preside at these games, two new magistrates were appointed under the name of Curule -iEdiles; and these were to be elected in alternate years from the patricians and from the commons. Their other duties and powers it is very difficult to define; but it appears that they exercised for a time44 the jurisdiction which had formerly belonged to the Quwestores Parricidii, that they tried criminals for various offences, and if their sentence were appealed against, they appeared as prosecutors of the appellant before the comitia of the centuries. Thus, with no recorded instance of bloodshed committed by either party, thle five years’ conflict upon the Licinian bills was happily ended. The completion of tho From this time forward the consulship continued without inter-form ofthe constituton. ruption to the end of the republic; and, with the exception of a short period to be hereafter noticed, it was duly shared by the commons. The form of the constitution, such as we find it described in those times which began to have a contemporary literature, was now in its leading points completed; but many years must yet elapse before we can do more than trace the outline of institutions and of actions; the spirit and character of the times, and still more of particular individuals, must yet, for another century, be discerned but dimly. 42 Livy, VII. 1. riod of the empire possessed even the ” impe43 Plutarch, Camillus, 42. Livy, VI.

42. rium.“r Savigny, Geschichte des Rom. Rechts 44 See Niebuhr, Vol. III.

p. 42, and seqq. im Mittelalt. Vol. I. p. 36. The two Scipios To what is there said, it may be added that the of the fifth century, whose tombs and epitaphs title AEdilis was common amongst the magis-have been preserved to us, have their Wd iletrates of the municipia and colonies at a later ships as well as their censorships and consulperiod; that we meet frequently, in inscriptions, ships recorded. This seems to imply that the with the title “.L Edilis juri dicundo,”’ that the office then was held in higher estimation than sediles in the municipia had a “tribunal,” or when Cicero could call the curule AEdile ” p llo judgmentseat, as a mark of their high dignity; amplius quam privatus.” Verr. Act. I. 138. and as Savigny thinks, they in the earlier pe

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CHAPTER XXVII, GENERAL HISTORY, DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN, FROM THE ADMISSION

OF THl COMMONS TO THE CONSULSHIP TO THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST SAMNITIT

WAR-EVASION OF THE LICINIAN ILAWS-WARS WITH THE GAULS, TAR QUINIENSIANS, AND VOLSCIANS.-A. U. C. 889-412, LIVY; 384-407, NIEBUHR. — vpiab p lvptos XP&vou; rEClcoZra’t vvicras /.iopas r’ tov, iv ais ra iv:auoewvsa 3Sefrlsara -6pst-ea 6acsdiZtv {K aTiXpoD XMyou. SoPIHOCLES, aEdip. Colon.

v. 617. THE first plebeian consulship coincides, as nearly as the chronology can be Chronology of the Li-ascertained, with the great battle of Mantinea and the death ot cijian laws. Epaminondas. At this point Xenophon ended his Grecian history; and as the writings of Theopompus and of the: authors who followed him have not been preserved to us, we here lose the line of contemporary historians in Greece, after having enjoyed their guidance during a period of nearly one hundred and forty years. More than that length of time must still elapse before we can gain the assistance of a contemporary writer, even though a foreigner, for any part of the history of Rome. But as I have before observed that the Greek poets, long before the time of Contrast between our Herodotus, have done more than any mere: annalists could have knoewledge of tho done t o acquaint us with the most-valuable part of history, that Greeks and of the - done to a masat this period which relates to a people’s mental powers and habits of thinking, so, when we close the Hellenics of Xenophon, we find in the great orators and philosophers of the next half century more than enough to compensate for the want of regular historians. What contemporary record of mere battles and sieges, of wars and factions, could afford such fulness of knowledge as to the real state of Greecej in all points that are most instructive, as we derive from the pamphlets, as they may be called, of Isocrates, from the dialogues of Plato, the moral and political treatises of Aristotle, and the -various public and private orations of Isaeus, ~Eschines, and Demosthenes? It is when we think of the overflowing wealth of Greece, that we feel most keenly the absolute poverty of Rome. The fifth century from the foundation of the city produced -neither historian, poet, orator, nor philosopher; its whole surviving literature consists of three or four lines of a monumental inscription, and a short decree of the senate, the date of which is not, however, ascertained. I cannot too often remind the reader of the total want of all materials for a lively picture of the Roman character and manners under which we unavoidably labor. Still we are, as it were, working our way to light; the greatness of Rome is beginning to unfold itself; we are ap-, proaching the Samnite and the Latin wars, of which the first trained the Romans to perfection in all military virtues, by opposing to them the bravest and most unwearied of enemies; while the latter consolidated forever the mass of their power near home, by securing to them the aid of the most faithful of allies. And the great domestic struggles are almost ended; what required direct interference has been, for the most part, remedied; it must be left for time to complete the union of the two orders of the commonwealth, now that they have been freed from those positive causes of irritation which kept them so long not only distinct from each other, but at enmity.

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CHAP. XXVII.] EFFECTS OF THE LICINIAN LAWS. 235 We have seen the Licinian bills become laws of the land; we have next to endeavor to trace their results; to see how far they were faily Effects of the Licinia carried into effect, and what was their success in remedying. the l’s. evils which had made them appear to be necessary. I. The Licinian law, which opened the consulship to the commons, was regularly observed during a period of eleven years.’ After that time i. Of the law respec the patricians ventured to disregard it, so that in the fifteen fol-ing the consulship.

lowing years, down to the great Latin war, it was violated six or seven several times.2 But after the Latin war it was observed regularly, and we can only find one or two doubtful instances of a violation of it. In the twenty years of plebeian consulship which occur before the Latin war, there appear, however, the names of only-eight plebeian families; the Sextii, the Genucii, the Licinii, the Pcetelii, the Popillii, the Plautii, the Marcii, and the Decii: two of these, the Marcii3 and the Popillii, enjoyed the consulship four times each; the Genucii4 and Plautii obtained it three times each; the Licinii and Poetelii twice each; and the Sextii and Decii once each. Of the individual consuls none were eminent, except M., Popillius Lmnas,: C. Marcius Rutilus, and P. Decius Mus; the two former were each four times elected consul, and C. Marcius obtained besides the offices of dictator’ and censor, being the first commoner who attained to either of them. The fame of P. Decius has been still greater, and more enduring; his selfdevotion in the Latin war placed him in the fond remembrance of his countrymen on a level with the greatest names of Roman history, and from that time forward it could not be denied that commoners were to be found as worthy of the consulship as the proudest and noblest of the Fabii or the Cornelii. Thus it appears that the Licinian law was not passed till the state of the coimmonwealth was ripe for it.

There were families amongst the com-It was a sea.sonble nd mons fit to receive the highest nobility; whilst, on the other hand, holeome.m.easure.

so sound was the public feeling, that we read of no mere demagogue raised to the consulship as the reward of his turbulence and faction; even the two tribunes who had conducted the long contest with the patricians were each only once elected consul, and none of the other plebeian consuls are known to have been tribunes at all. No constitutional reform could be more happy than this; nothing could be more just or more salutary than to open the honors of the state to an order sufficiently advanced to be capable of wielding political power, but retaining so much simplicity and soberness of mind as to be in no danger-of abusing it. II. It has ever been found that social evils are far more difficult to cure than such as are merely political. It was easier to adjust the political. Of the Agrarian relations of the patricians and commons, than the social relations law. of the great and the humble, the creditor and the debtor. *We are told that the agrarian law of Licinius was carried; but what amount of public land was allotted under it to the poorer commons we have: no means of discovering. Niebuhr concludes from a passage in Laurentius Lydus,’ that now as-in the time of Ti. Gracchus l livy, VII. 18. l He was dictator in 399 (Livy, VII. 17), and 2 That is to say, in the year 400, when a Sul-censor in 404 (Livy, VII. 22). picius and Valerius were consuls, and in the De Magistratibus, I. 35. Era erl revratrlav two following years; again in 404, when a Sul-avapXiav rvart6rXe 7r o)‘irevua’ Kai rTO aotrrv 7rptIS
picius and a Quinctius were elected; then in voaoOEra; KIai dKaarizg 7rpofleOevat irpbs fpaXb av/406, in 410, and lastly, in 412. This would 1f3iKE Lta6 ra;s 1uivXtovu arxatsd. Niebuhr thinks amount to seven instances, but in the year 401 that this is taken from Junius Gracchanus, and some annals made a plebeian, M. Popillius, the that it relates to the period immediately followcolleague of M. Fabius; although most author-ing the anarchy. But Lydus, whose confusions ities give this as a year of two patrician con-and blunders make his authority very suspisuls. See Livy, VII. 18. cious, intended, I believe, only to notice all the C9. Marcius Rutilus was consul in 898, in extraordinary magistrates who had at any time 403, in 411, and 413. And M. Popillius been appointed at Rome; and thus after menLtenas was consul in 396, in 399, in 405,‘and in tioning the famous decemvirs, he goes on to 407. speak of the pontifices, and sdiles, as being in 4 One of the Genucian family was consul in some sort magistrates; and then he names the 890, 392, and 393, and a Plautius was consul in military tribunes, and the five years’ anarchy, 897, in 408, and in 414. as another anomalous period; and lastly, the

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236 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHrAP. XXVII a commission of three persons was appointed, with those large powers ordinarily granted to a Roman commission, for the purpose of carrying into effect the new agrarian law, and that Licinius himself was one of these commissioners, which would account for his not having been chosen rather than Sextius to be the first plebeian consul. It would be the business of this commission to take away all public land occupied by any individual above the prescribed amount of five hundred jugera, and from the land thus become disposable, to assign portions to the poorer citizens. But their task would not be easy; for attempts of every sort would be made to defeat or to evade the law: land which had passed by purchase from one occupier to another, and which had been possessed without dispute for many years, would acquire, even in the eyes of unconcerned persons, something of the character of property; while in the feeling of. those who held it, to take it from them without offering them any compensation was no better than robbery. Besides, the occupation of the public land had been for some time past, probably since the period of the last war with Veii, permitted to the commons as well as to the patricians; so that the occupiers were a larger and more influential body of men than they had ever been before, and the commissioners must have found it proportionably hard to compel them to observe the letter of the law. Thus, although we are told’ that the patricians and commons, when the law Difficulties In carrTing was passed, had solemnly sworn to observe it, and though a itintoeffect. penalty had been denounced against any violation of it, yet the commission, it seems, found it impossible to carry it into effect. The difficulties in the way of a speedy settlement were indeed manifold. In the first place, many of the occupiers emancipated their sons,8 and then made over to them the land in their occupation beyond the legal amount of five hundred jugera; and in the same way probably their sheep and oxen, which were fed on the public pasture land, were also entered in the names of their emancipated sons, when’they exceeded the number fixed by the law. In this manner large portions of land must have been retained in private hands, which the law had expected to make available for allotments to the commons. But further, the occupiers urged that they had laid out money of their own on the land which they occupied; they had erected buildings on it and planted trees; were they to lose these without receiving any equivalent? They’were willing to resign what belonged to the state, but the improvements of the property had been made at their own expense, and on these the state could have no claim. Besides, it was not always easy to ascertain what was public land and what was private; for portions of both being held by the same persons, the boundary stones which, according to Roman practice, were to serve as so sure a mark of private property had been taken up, or suffered to be destroyed; and in the want of any regular surveys’of the ground, the uncertainty and occasions of litigation were endless. In short, we may suppose that, generally speaking, the occupiers retained their land, either in their sons’ names or in their own, and that the agrarian law of Licinius did but little towards relieving the distress of the commons. We are told that nine years after the first plebeian consulship, in the year C. Licinius himself is 398,9 C. Licinius was himself impeached by M. Popillius Leenas, prosecuted for evadmg it. one of the’curule mediles, for having violated his own law by occupying a thousand jugera of the public land, half of which he held in his son’s government of the triumvirs, by whom he effect. And the powers of such a commission, means, I believe, no other persons than the fa-as may be seen from Cicero’s speeches against mous triumviri reipublicte constituendse, Au-the agrarian law of Rullus, were very great and gustus, Antonius, and Lepidus. But although very important; and it is extremely probable I do not think that Lydus spoke of any extra-that Licinius would be apr ointed one of its ordinary commissioners appointed after the members, almost as a matter of course. passing of the Licinian laws, yet an agrarian 7 Appian, Bell. Civil. I. 8. law on an extensive scale necessarily implied a 8

Appian, Bell. Civil. I. 8. Livy, VII. 16. commission, whether of three, five, ten, or even Livy, VII. 16. Mfteen members, to carry its provisions into

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CuAP. XXVII.] THE LAW FOR THE RELIEF OF DEBTORS. 237 name, having emancipated him in order to evade the law. Licinius was condemned to pay a fine of ten thousand ases; but in the meagerness of our knowl. edge of these times, we cannot tell in what spirit the prosecution was conducted; whether it originated in personal feelings of enmity to Licinius, or whether it was merely one out of a number of other prosecutions carried on with the intention of trying once more to carry the agrarian law into full effect. We know nothing of the character of M. Popillius; but from his having been chosen four times consul, and once curule aedile, it is scarcely possible to conceive that he could have been particularly obnoxious to the patricians; whereas we know that they never forgave any man who was an active supporter of an agrarian law. I am inclined to think therefore that the prosecution of Licinius’~ was rather instigated by a desire to lower his credit, and to punish him for his obnoxious laws, than by any wish to see those laws enforced more strictly. III. The failure of the agrarian law was of itself sufficient to prevent the suc. cess of the third of the Licinian bills, that for the relief of distressed debtors. It was something, no doubt, to free them from reliefofdiotr. saeddelt,the double burden of both interest and principal, by deducting.. from the principal of every debt what had been already paid in interest, and to allow a lengthened term of payment, during which they might be free fromthe extremest severity of the law. But to men who had nothing, and had no means of earning any thing, this lengthened term was but a respite, and their debts, even when reduced by the deduction of the interest already paid, were more than they were able to discharge. Grants of public land made at such a moment might have delivered them from their difficulties; but as these were withheld, the evil after a short pause returned with all its former virulence. The Licinian law was not prospective, nor did it lay any restriction on the amount of interest which might be legally demanded. Accordingly, to pay their reduced debt within the term fixed by the law, the debtors were obliged to incur fresh obligations, and to give such interest as their creditors might choose to demand. Things grew worse and worse, till in the year 398, nine years after the passing of the Licinian laws, a bill was brought forward by two”

of the tribunes, M. Duilius and L. Mmanius, to restore the limitation of interest formerly fixed by the twelve tables, namely, the rate of the twelfth part of the sum borrowed, foenus unciarium. But still this did not reach the root of the evil; the very principal itself could not be paid, and the number of nexi, or persons who were pledged to their creditors, and were to become their slaves if the debt was not discharged within a certain time, went on continually increasing. At length, in the year 403, fourteen years after the passing of the Licinian laws, the consuls, P.

Valerius and 0. Marcius Rutilus, the latter commission of five sphimself a plebeian, the former a member of that family which had oed ffectsdUPIt pto a certa, always been eminent amongst the patricians for its constant zeal point. 10 We should be glad, however, to be able to but it is too common; and Licinius may well excuse the conduct of Licinius, which cannot have deceived himself by it. His enemies would be justified by any want of sincerity in the mo-naturally triumph in his violation of his own tives of his prosecutor. Ti. Gracchus made it law, and would care little though they thema provision of his agrarian law that the commis-selves had set him the example of breaking it. sioners for enforcing it should be a permanent n’ Livy, VII. 16. It is pleasant to observe magistracy, to be filled up by new elections the traces of an hereditary political character in from year to year. And it was this very clause so many of the Roman families. The Maenii which deprived the opponents of his law of all and Duilii appear to have been remarkable for hope of evading it. (Appian, Bell. Civil. I. 10.) their moderation and integrity; the conduct of The commission in the present case was proba-the tribune M. Duilius, after the overthrow of bly not renewed after the first year, and then the decemvirs’ tyranny, has already been nothe law became powerless. It is possible that ticed; and another Duilius was appointed one the evasion of it practised by Licinius was very of the five commissioners in 403, for the relief generally adopted; and he may have excused of the distressed commons, and distinguished himself by that common sophism, that as the himself in that office by his impartiality and evil could not be prevented, he might as well diligence. We have seen also a Msenius taking share in the benefits to be derived from it. part with the patricians against the dangerous This is not conscientious reasoning certainly, designs of M. Manlius; and C. M1enius, the

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238 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVII. for the welfare of the commons, determined that the government should itself interfere to relieve a distress so great and so inveterate. Five commissioners were appointed,‘2
three plebeians and two patricians, with the title of mensarii, or bankers. These established their banks or tables in the Forum, like ordinars bankers, and offered in the name of the government to accommodate the debtors with ready money on the most liberal terms. It appears that one cause of the pfevailing distress was the scarcity of the circulating medium.‘3 A debtor, therefore, even though he possessed property in land, might yet be practically insolvent, inasmuch as he could not, except at an enormous loss, convert his land into money. Here, therefore, the five commissioners interposed: they furnished the debtor with ready money, when he had any property to offer as a security, or any friend who would be security for him; and they ordered that land and cattle should be received in payment at a certain valuation. In this manner much property, which had hitherto been unavailable, was brought into circulation; land and cattle became legal tender at a certain fixed-rate of value; and thus a great amount of debt was liquidated, and, as Livy adds, tc the satisfaction of the creditor as well as of the debtor. If he had any authority for saying this, the fact is remarkable, for when the dictator Cmsar remedied the evils arising from a scarcity of money, during the civil wars, by nearly a similar arrangement, he was accused of making the creditors-sustain a loss of 25 per cent.;14 and men are so apt to regard money as the only standard of value, that this feeling is still very general; and he who should pay his’ creditor a less sum in actual money than he had borrowed, would be thought to have defrauded him of his due, although, from an increase in the value of money, what he paid might really be fully equal in its command over other commodities, to the sum which he had originally received. After all, however, although these proceedings of the five commissioners were well calculated to relieve the embarrassments of those debtors, Other measures attempted, but with:in-who, being really solvent, were yet unable, owing to peculiar complete success. P causes, to convert their property into money, yet the case of the insolvent debtors was not affected by them. Five years afterwards, in 408, the interest of money was still further reduced to the twenty-fourth part of the sum borrowed, or 41
per cent.;” and in 411, several persons were brought to trial for a breach of the law,‘6 and condemned to pay fourfold, as in an action for furtum manifestum. Thus palliatives of the existing evil had been sufficiently tried; but all were found to be inadequate. The mischief came to a head in the year 413, and could be stopped only by the most decisive remedies; but the disturbances of that year so affected the whole state of the commonwealth, and were again so much mixed up with political grievances, that an account of them will be more fitly reserved for another place, when we shall have reached that period in the course of our general narrative. upright dictator in the second Samnite war, this period the Gauls had been-plundering the was a worthy representative of the family char-country round Rome during four consecutive aeter. years; and the terror of such an enemy could 12 Livy, VII. 21. Their names were C. Dui-not but depreciate.the value of land exposed to lius, alluded to in the preceding’ note; P. De-their ravages, while. money could be kept safely cius Mus, who devoted himself in the Latin’within the walls of cities which the Gauls did war; Q. Publilius Philo, eminent both as a not attempt to besiege; and at such seasons of general and as the author of the famous laws alarm the practice of hoarding money is’always which bear his name, Ti. iEmilius, one of.the’more or. less. prevalent, so that the circulating most moderate of the. -patricians, the colleague medium becomes perceptibly scarcer and acof Q. Publilius in his consulship, and the man:cordingly, rises in value.. If, added to these who named him dictator; and M. Papirius, of causes, the demands of commerce had already whom nothing, I believe, is known..’ begun’ to draw away the copper of Italy into is Whether that great rise in the price of cop-Greece’and Asia, the difficulty of selling land to per had yet begun, which led to the successive pay a debt’ contracted when’money was more d6preciations of the as, it is not possible to as-plentiful must have been proportionablygreater. certain; but without taking this into the. ac- “

Setonius, Julius C-sar,‘c, 42. count, other and more’ temporary causes tended’ 3 Livy, VII.‘2.’ to raise the value of money at this. timne at Rome, 1 Livy, VII.:28. Cato de re rustici, ab is comparecwith that of land. A little before initio.

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CHIP. XXVII.] THE PETELIAN LAW. 239 I propose, then, first, to take a general view of the internal state of the commonwealth, during the period which intervened between the pass-General internal hia. ing of the Licinian laws and the first Samnite war, and then to toryfrom389 to 412.

trace its foreign relations within the same space of time. The first part of our task has been nearly completed already, in the view which has been given of the effects of the three Licinian laws. One or two points, however, may still require to be noticed. Between 389 and 412 we find the remarkable number of fourteen dictatorships. Four of these dictators are expressly said to have been Frequent dictntoralipa named with a political object,‘7 that they might preside at the and theirobject. election of consuls, and prevent the observance of the Licinian law. Two more,M8 those of 402 and 403, although nominally appointed to command against a for-, eign enemy, were yet really named for political purposes; and two,‘9 those of 392 and 411, were appointed to perform a religious ceremony. Of the remaining six, three were named during the alarm of the Gaulish invasion in 394, 395, and 397;20 and the other three were chosen in 393, 399, and 410, to act against the Hernicans, the Tarquiniensians, and the Auruncans.2’ But even in these last appointments there was something of a political feeling: they prevented a plebeian consul from obtaining the glory of defeating the enemy, and notwithstanding the Licinian law, kept the executive government in the hands of a patrician; and it is expressly mentioned, that App. Claudius was named dictator in 393, to conduct the Hernican war, because he had been so active in opposing the bills of Licinius. It is thus evident-that a soreness of feeling continued to exist between the patricians and commons; and that the former could not yet recon-P etelian law against cile themselves to the inevitable change which was in progress. cE.Va….rang.Bach of The attack of the Tiburtians in 396, is said to have stopped a apectingthe onehip. rising quarrel between the two orders;22 the inactivity of the dictator, C. Sul picius, in the early part of the campaign of 397, was ascribed to the policy of tim patricians,23 who wished to keep the commons as long as possible in the field, to prevent them from passing any measures adverse to the patrician interest in the Forum. The Pcetelian law passed in that same year, and brought forward by C. Pcetelius,24 one of the tribunes, with the sanction of the patricians, appears also to have been intended indirectly to undermine the Licinian law with respect to the consulship. Its professed object was to put down canvassing, “ambitus,” and ambitus here seems to be taken in its literal sense, not as implying any bribery, but simply the practice of going round to the several markets and meetings, held, for whatever purpose, in the country, and thus acquiring an interest among the country tribes. It is expressly said, that this law was directed against plebeian candidates; and this is natural; for men whose names did not yet command respect from their old nobility, were obliged to rely on their personal recommendations, and a simple plebeian, if unknown to the country voters, could ill compete with the influence of an old patrician family, strong not only in its ancient fame, but in the actual votes of its own clients, and of those of the other patricians, a body of men who would be mostly resident in Rome. Be17 M. Fabius in 404 (Livy, VII. 22), L. Furius 20 T. Quinctius in 394 (Livy, VII. 9, Fasti Camillus in 405

(Livy, VII. 24), T. Manlius Capitol.), Q. Servilius Ahala ill 395 (Livy, VII. Torquatus in 406 (Livy, VII. 26), and another, 11 Fasti Capitol.), and C. Sulpicius Peticus in whose name is unknown, in 407; the fragments 397 (Livy, VII. 12, Fasti Capitol. Appian do of the Fasti Capitolini only containing under rebus Gall. 1). this year the words, App. Claudis in 393

(Livy, VII. 6, Fasti “Diet.- Capitol.t, C. Marcius Rutius in 399 (Livy, VII. Comit. Habend. Caus…” 17, Fasti Captol.), and L. Furius (CamiLus in 18 T. Manlius in 402 (Livy, VII. 19), and C. 410 (Livy, VII. 28). Julius in 403 (Livy, VII. 21). s Livy, VII. 12. ” L. Manlius in 392, “:clavi figendi causa” 23 Livy, VII. 13. (Livy, VII. 3, and Fasti Capitol.), and P. Va-24 Livy VII. 15. lerius, “feriarum constituendarum causa,” in 411

(Livy VII. 28).

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240 HISTORY OF ROME. LCAP. XXVIL sides, if he had not an opportunity of canvassing the country tribes generally, his interest might not extend beyond his own immediate neighborhood, and thus the total number of his votes in any given tribe might not be sufficient to give him the legal vote of that tribe, and two patrician candidates might obtain a majority of suffrages, merely because no one plebeian candidate had any general interest in his favor. This seems to have been the way in which the Licinian law was set aside three years afterwards, in 400. The majority of votes was in favor of two patrician candidates; one of these was a Valerius, and his name was sure to be popular amongst the commons; whilst the plebeian candidates, debarred from general canvassing by the Pcetelian law, had each of them probably so small number of votes in his favor, that they would not have been duly elected according to the Roman law, even had there been no candidate standing against them, Thus the interrex,25 M.

Fabius, was enabled to say that the people had themselves set aside the Licinian law; inasmuch as there was a legal majority in favor of two patrician candidates, and only a small minority for any plebeian. An event occurred in the year 398, which very properly alarmed the tribunes, Law “
de vicesima eo-although it does not seem to have originated in any evil intention. trum qui.nenmitteren-f One of the consuls, Cn. Manlius,26 was in the field with a consular the nar.ies in the field. army, to carry on the war against the Tarquiniensians and Faliscans; his colleague, C.

Marcius Rutilus, was engaged with the Privernatians, and enriching his army, it is said, with the plunder of the enemy’s country which had been for many years untouched by the ravages of war. It is probable that the soldiers on this occasion made prisoners of many Privernatian families, and released them again on the payment of a large ransom. But prisoners taken in war, becoming, according to ancient law, the slaves of the captor, his release of a prisoner upon ransom was, in fact, the manumission of a slave. Accordingly, Cn. Manlius ca-led his soldiers together in the camp near Sutrium, according to their tribes, and, as if they were assembled in regular comitia, he proposed to them a law, that five per cent. on the value of any emancipated slave should be paid by his master into the public treasury.27 It might be argued that the state ought not to lose all benefit from the plunder acquired by its soldiers; and that, especially, if a soldier set an enemy at liberty for the sake of his ransom, some compensation should be made to his country, whom his act might be supposed to injure. There was some plausibility in this, and the army of Manlius might have felt also some jealousy at the better fortune of their comrades, and might have known that their own general would not, like C. Marcius, give up to them the full benefit of such plunder as they might acquire from the Etruscans. Accordingly the law was passed in the camp, and received the ready sanction of the curia and the senate at Rome.

But the tribunes, dreading the precedent of a law passed at a distance from Rome, beyond the range of the tribunes’ protection, and where every citizen was subject to the absolute power of his general, declared it to be a capital offence, if any one should for the future summon the tribes in their comitia in any other than their accustomed place of meeting.28

Their bill to this effect was sure of the support of Marcius and his army; and its principle was so clearly just, that it was passed, so far as we hear, without meeting any opposition. The years 390, 391, and 392, were marked by a pestilence,29 which is said to L25 ivy, VII. 17. “Fabius aiebat, in duo-forward in such an irregular manner. Similar decim tabulis legem esse, ut quodcunque pos-laws were in force in some of our West Indian tremum populus jussisset, id jus ratumque islands, at once to restrain emancipation, and to esset; jussum populi et suffragia esse.”

prevent the slave from becoming a burden upon 26 Livy, VII. 16. the public, if the state received nothing as a 27 “Legem de vicesim.a eorum qui manumit-compensation for the contingency of being terentur.” The time and place at which the obliged to maintain him as a freeman. law was passed justify the explanation which I 28 “, Ne quis postea populum sevocaret..” Conmhave given of its meaning; for had the object pare the wellknown sense of secessio. been merely to check the increase of the class 29 Livy, VII. 1, 2. of freedmen it would scarcely have been brought

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CHAP. XXVII.] DEATH OF CAMILLUS. 241 have been very generally fatal; and in 391, the Tiber rose to an unusual height, overflowed the Circus Maximus,o and put a stop Stoaryof Curltiu leaping to the games which were going on there at that very time, as a propitiation of the wrath of heaven. It is difficult to say whether it was a similar flood two years afterwards, or the shock of an earthquake, which gave occasion to the famous legend of the filling up of the Curtian lake in the Forum. All know how the gulf, which had suddenly yawned wide and deep in the midst of the Forum,31 could be filled up by no human power, till the gods at last declared, that the best and true strength of the Roman commonwealth must be devoted as an offering to the gulf; so should the state exist and flourish forever. While men were asking, what is the true strength of Rome? a noble youth, named M. Curtius, whose valiant deeds had made him famous, said that it were a shame to think that the true strength of Rome could lie in aught else but in the arms and in the valor of her children; and he put on his armor and mounted his horse, and plunged into the gulf.

All the assembled multitude threw their offerings into it after him, and the gulf was closed, but the place -bore his name forever. It were vain to inquire at what period and upon what foundation this remarkable story was first originated.32 The first year of the pestilence was marked by the death of M. Camillus.-3 In him we seem to lose the last relic of early Rome, the last hero DeathofCamillus. whose glory belongs rather to romance than to history. But the fame of the stories connected with him proves the high estimation in which he was held when living; and it was a beautiful conclusion to his long life, that his last public action was that of a peacemaker, his last interference in political contests was that of a patriot and not of a partisan. The glory of his name was supported for one generation by his son, L. Furius, and then sank forever. The same period of pestilence was also noted as the era at which the first and simplest form of dramatic entertainments34 was introduced at Rome. Fit introuction Amongst the games ordered to be celebrated in the hope of pro-sntag acting and danepitiating the gods, one, it is said, consisting of a dance in dumb show, as an accompaniment to the music of the flute, was, for the first time, introduced from Etruria. The dumb show was afterwards succeeded by a song in which the dance was suited to the words; then came a dialogue, and, last of all, a regular acted story; but here the Romans did but translate or imitate the dramatists of Greece, and nothing in literature is less original, and therefore less valuable than the tragic and comic drama of Rome. What power of imagination can complete these few isolated facts into the full picture of the life of a people during three and twenty years? who can represent to himself the Senate or the Forum, such as they were at this period, either as to outward forms and scenes, or as to the men who frequented them? Much less can we conceive what was passing in the interior of every family, and realize to ourselves the names of our scanty history-the Fabii, the Valerii,. the Sulpicii, or the Marcii, as they were talking and acting in the ordinary relations of life, abroad or at home. A period, of which there remains no contemporary literature, has virtually perished from the memory of after ages; some scattered bones of the skeleton may be left, but the face, figure, and mind of the living man are lost to us beyond recall. In times so imperfectly known as those with which we are now engaged, the 9 Livy, VII.

3.. the Forum, marked out by an altar, was known, 31 Livy, VII. 6.

Valerius Maximus, V. 6. ~ 2. even in the times of the emperors, by the name 32 Another story derived the name of the of the Curtian lake: Galba was thrown out of Curtian lake in the Forum from one Curtius his litter and murdered close to it. (Tacitus, Mettins, a soldier of Tatius, the king of the Sa-Hist. I. 41.) But the real origin of the name bines; who, in the battle between Tatius and being unknown, various stories, as is usual, Romulus, had been nearly lost in a piece of bog-were invented to explain it. gy ground between the Capitoline and Palatine 33 Livy, VII. 1. hills.

Livy, I. 12, 13. A spot in the centre of 94 Livy, VII. 2. 16

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242 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVI1 Foreign history of geographical order of events is far more instructive than the chroRome from 389to 312.

nological. I propose, therefore, to trace successively the relations of Rome with the several neighboring states, from 389 to 412, beginning with the wars with the Etruscans, who were divided by the Tiber from the ILatins, Volscians, and Hernicans. I. The people of Tarquinii, sometimes aided by the Faliscans, were engaged Wars with Tarquiii in wars with Rome during a period of eight years, from 396 to 404. and the Falican.. What may have been the cause of quarrel is unknown, if it were any thing more than the ordinary enmity between two neighboring nations, and the disputes which are forever occurring on their common border. But the war is rendered remarkable by the specimens displayed in it of the character and influence of the Etruscan religion. The Roman consul, C. Fabius,35 having been defeated in a battle in theyear 397, the Tarquinians sacrificed to their gods three hundred and seven Roman soldiers, who had been taken prisoners in the action; and two years afterwards, when the Faliscans had joined them, the priests of both cities, with long snake-like ribbons of various colors twisted in their hair, and brandishing burning torches in their hands,36 fought in the front of their army, and struck such terror into the Roman soldiers, that they drove them back in confusion to their camp. The Etruscar priests, it should be remembered, were also the chiefs or lucumones of the nation, and they acted on this occasion, and with equal success, the same part which the two Decii performed for Rome in the Latin and Etruscan wars of a later period. Full of confidence in the support of the gods, the Etruscans followed up their victory; they entered the Roman territory and spread their devastations over the whole country on the right bank of the Tiber as far as the sea. It was to meet this danger that 0. Marcius37 was appointed dictator; he was named, we-must suppose, by the plebeian consul of that year, M. Popillius Lsenas, and was the first plebeian who ever obtained the dictatorship. His appointment gave great offence to the patricians, and was proportionably acceptable to his own order; all his commands were zealously obeyed; he repelled the invaders, and, like the popular consuls of the year 305, he obtained a triumph by a vote of the people when the senate refused to grant it. In the year 401, the Roman annalists say that the butchery of the Roman Peace concluded for prisoners by the Tarquinians four years before was signally forty yearm. avenged; the Tarquinians were defeated in a great battle, and three hundred and fifty-eight of the noblest of the prisoners were sent to Rome, and there scourged and beheaded in the Forum.38 The war lingered on, however, for three years more; and was then ended by a peace concluded for forty years.39 No conquests of towns or territory are recorded, and thus the Roman frontier still remained on the side of Etruria in the same position as it had been for the last forty years, since the conquest of Veii, Nepete, and Sutrium. II. Far more complicated was the scene on the left bank of the Tiber. There WaRs in Latium. great changes took place; the relations of the several people to one another were materially altered; some nations almost vanish out of history, whilst Rome saw her territory enlarged, her population of citizens increased, her power and influence strengthened and extended beyond all former example. But the causes and circumstances of these changes are partly disguised by the dishonesty, and partly omitted through the mere meagerness of the Roman historians. Out of the confusion of Livy’s narrative we must endeavor, if possible, to obtain a clear and consistent outline of the events of a period which contributed, in no small degree, to determine the future destinies of Rome and the world. In the year 394, according to the common chronology, the Gauls again aps Livy, VII. 15. - Livy, VII. 19. Livy, VIL
it. 1 Livy, VII. 22.: Livy, VII. It.

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CHAP. XXVII.] GAULISH INVASIONS. 243 peared in Latium. This inroad lasted, according to the Roman annals, for four years, and was ended, as they pretend, by the total destruction of the invaders in the year 397. Eight years afterwards, in 405, we hear of another invasion; but this new attack was completely defeated in the following year, and from that time forward we never again find the Gauls in Latium. The dates of these two invasions are, no doubt, correctly given. They are confirmed by Polybius,40 although in all other points his account dif-Account of them give fers widely from that of the Roman writers. The Gauls penetrated by Polybius. into the heart of Latium thirty years after their first attack on Rome; they appeared at Alba, but the Romans, surprised by the suddenness of their inroad, and unable to collect their allies together, did not venture to meet them in the field. Twelve years afterwards, continues Polybius, they came again; but the Romans had now timely notice of their coming; their allies had joined them, and they marched out boldly to give the enemy battle. The Gauls were dismayed by this display of confidence; their chiefs quarrelled, and their whole multitude broke up under cover of night, and retreated like a beaten army to their own country. On this their last appearance in Latium, the Roman army opposed to them was commanded by Lucius Camillus; and this is the Lucius4’ whom Aristotle spoke of as the deliverer of his country from the Gauls. According to the Roman accounts, he defeated the Gauls in a general action; yet it is not pretended that he obtained a triumph. These last invasions of the Gauls were marked, according to the Roman annalists, not only by many signal victories won by the Roman armies Stories of the Gulish in general battles, but in particular by two brilliant single combats T. M.an… ”’

b”””~’ “ ZD t “”’ ”’ r””^’””” “J’” V ”””’ ~ ”’”’ Torquatus, and M.

Vain which two of the noble youth of Rome gained for themselves leriu Corvus an immortal memory. T. Manlius, the future conqueror of the Latins, fought with a gigantic Gaul42 on the bridge over the Anio upon the Salarian road: he slew his enemy, and took from his neck his chain of gold (torques), which he wore on his neck in triumph, so that the soldiers called him Torquatus, and his descendants ever after bore that name. And again, before the last great victory won by Lucius Camillus, there was another single combat in the Pomptinian territory between a second giant Gaul and the young M. Valerius,43 who afterwards 40 II. 18. It is well known, that the Roman that the triumphs, if not altogether false, were writers claim three,iictories in the course of the granted by the policy of the senate, wishing to invasion of 394 39? in which, according to Po-make the most of any advantage gained over an lybius, the Romans did not venture to meet the enemy so formidable as the Gauls. Gauls in the field.

The victory of the dictator 4’ Taev n awiaavra AEU’LOV Eivant OIiv.

Plutarch, C. Sulpicius, in 397, is described very circum-Camill. 22. It should be remembered, that the stantially by Appian, who, probably, copied Romans, in old times, were known and called Dionysius, as well as by Livy, and the Fasti by their praenomina, or first namles, as lPolyCapitolini give the day of his triumph, the nones bins calls Scipio, ” Publius,” and Regulus, of May. On the other hand, the statement of “Marcus.” The preenomenwas thenmuch less Polybius is given simply and positively, and likely to be mistaken than in after ages, when we know how completely the Romans corrupted the nomen and cognomen were generally use’d the memory of many events in the Samnite war, instead of it, and when it was possible for a and in other parts of their early history. We foreigner to be very familiar with the actions of should be glad to know from what sources Po-Caesar, without remembering whether his prmlybius derived his knowledge of these events. nomen was Caius or Lucius. But Aristotle The chronological exactness of his account seems would have been no more likely to have misto show, that it could not have been taken from taken one prsenomen for another, than to have any Greek writer who may have mentioned the confounded two Greek brothers together, beGaulish invasions of central Italy, but fi’om sonime cause together with their own peculiar names Roman annalist, and it is probable that Fabius, they had both the same patronymic. who, in spite of his national prejudices, had, in 42 There is a striking description of this coilother instances, given a true report of transac-bat given by Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, an antions which later annalists utterly misrepre-nalist of the seventh century of Rome, and presented was the authority whom Polybius fol-served to us by A. Gellius, IX. 13. lowed. It is not likely, on the other hand, that 43 This combat is also given by Gellius from the pretended victories of the Roman generals some of the old annalists, IX. 11. It is deare mere inventions, but that some trifling ad-scribed too by Dionysius, XV. 1, 2, and by vantages gained over detached parties of the Livy, VII. 26. Gauls were magnified into general battles, and

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244 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVI1 defeated the Samnites at the great battle of Mount Gaurus. A wonderful thing happened in this combat, said the story; for as Marcus was going to begin the fight, all on a sudden a crow flew down and perched upon his helmet. When the two combatants closed with each other, the crow still sat on the Roman’s helm, but ever and anon it soared up in the air, and then darted down upon the Gaul, and struck at his face and eyes with its beak and claws. So the Gaul, confounded and dismayed, soon fell by the sword of Marcus; and then the crow flew up again into the air, and vanished towards the east. For this wonderful aid thus afforded him M. Valerius was known ever afterwards by the name of Corvus, Crow, and the name remained to his posterity. ~ These stories are the very counterpart of the combat between Sir Guy of Warwick and the Danish giant Colbrand before the walls of Winchester; or, as Manlius and Valerius Corvus are certainly more real personages than Sir Guy, we may compare them with the ballad of Chevy Chase, and consider how far we could recognize the historical battle of Otterburne, and the real Hotspur, in the battle on the Cheviot hills, and in the Earl Percy of the poem. As in this instance, the time,44 place, circumstances, and issue of the poetical battle bear no resemblance to those of the real one, so also the poetical or romance accounts of these last Gaulish invasions retain scarcely a feature of that simple and real history of them which has been preserved to us by Polybius. That the triumphal Fasti have followed the fictitious rather than the true account, belongs to that peculiar blot on the Roman character which I have already noticed; that what with other people has been mere fanciful romance, has been by the Romans made to wear such an appearance of serious earnest as to be no longer romance but falsehood.

What the Gauls did in Latium and against the Romans has been sufficiently Effectof the Gaulish in-disguised and perverted; but what they did in other parts of Italy of the lvetirat ettee of is altogether ulnknown to us. Wte hea of them in Latium, and Italy. that they moved southwards from thence into Campania and Apulia;45 but they do not seem to have touched Etruria, and their attacks on Rome were all made on the left bank of the Tiber. Perhaps the Etruscans had early concluded a peace with them, so that in their invasions of Latium and Campania they passed through Umbria and the’ country of the Sabines, descending upon Rome either bv the Salarian road along the Tiber, or by the valley of the Anio. The Romans complained that two Latin cities, Tibur and Preeneste,46 had not scrupled, in their hatred of Rome, to ally themselves with these barbarians; and this was remembered afterwards against them when the issue of the great Latin war had placed them at the mercy of their old enemies. But it is not to be wondered at if they were glad to divert the torrent of the Gaulish invasion from themselves to the territory of strangers or rivals; perhaps they hired some of the Gaulish bands to enter into their service, and some advantages gained over these by the Roman generals may have been the origin of the pretended victories and triumphs recorded in the annals and in the Fasti. The main Gaulish army appears to have stationed itself principally on the Alban hills,47 from whence, as from some island stronghold, they could attack and lay waste all the neighboring country.

Twice they are said to have approached Rome, and once they advanced as far as the very Colline gate,48 by which they had entered the city in their first 44 The battle of Otterburne was fought in the in the poetical battle, Percy is killed, but the reign of Richard the Second, of England, and English are victorious. And further, to show Robert the Second, of Scotland; the poetical how slight actions may be magnified into great account of it places it in the reign of a King battles, the Scottish army at Otterburne which Henry in Esngland, and a King James in Scot-consisted really of 2300 men, is made in another land. Otterburne is in Redes dale near Elsdon, ballad of the battle to amount to 44,000, of whom the scene of battle in the poem is in the Cheviot there “went but eighteen away.”

hills; the historical battle did not arise out of 45 Livy, VII. 11. 26.

any hupting excursion of Percy on the Scottish 46 Livy VII. 11. VIII. 14.

border, but from an inroad of the Scotch into 4 Polytius, II. 18. Livy, VII. 25. DionyNorthumberland. In the real battle, Percy was sius, XIV. 12.

taken prisoner, and the English were defeated; 48 Livy, VII. 11.

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CHAP. XXVII.] LATINS, ETC., AGAIN ALLIED WITH ROME. 245 invasion. On one occasion we find them encamped at Pedum4’ in front of Praeneste, an old Latin city which the iEquians had formerly conquered, but which afterwards, perhaps at this very time, got rid of its foreign masters and became again united to the Latin nation. None can tell what cities were destroyed, what people weakened, and what confederacies or dominions were broken up in the course of these Gaulish invasions. The Volscians seemed to have suffered more especially; for it was through their territory that the Gauls moved onwards from Latium to Campania, or returned from Campania to their quarters on the Alban hills; and it appears that their nation was from this time forward broken into fragments, each of which had from henceforth a destiny of its own. In order to understand this change fully, we must recollect that in the year of Rome 378 the Roman frontier had fallen back from Anxur to Satricum, that Satricum itself had been won by the Volscians, and afterwards burnt by the Latins”5 that it might not revert to Rome, and t]at the Roman territory in the maritime part of the Campagna scarcely reached to the distance of twentyfive miles from Rome.

But in 397 we find that the Latins51 renewed their alliance with the Romans; that two new tribes of Roman citizens were created,52 the Pomptine and the Publilian; and that Velitrre and Privernum,53 both of them Volscian towns, but the latter unmentioned hitherto in Roman history, were engaged alone in a war with Rome. This same year witnessed also the retreat of the Gauls from Latium, after they had been overrunning it at intervals during a period of three years; and finally, it was marked by what the Romans call a conquest of the Hernicans,54 who for the last four years had been at open war with Rome. That there was a connection between all these events is manifest, although they appear in Livy as’mere accidental coincidences. It should be remembered also that in this same year war was formally declared55 between Rome and Tarquinii. The complicated negotiations. and the ever-changing alliances of the Greek states, between the peace of Nicias and theAthenian expedition of the aiance to Sicily, cannot be comprehended readily, even though related by beteen Rome.nead the such an historian as Thucydides. In the last ten years of the fourth century of Rome, Latium and its neighborhood’ must have presented a tissue of events equally perplexed in themselves, without any contemporary historian like Thucydides to explain them to posterity.

But by considering the mere fragments of information which have been preserved to us, we may attempt to combine them into something like the following form. A war with Tarquinii, in addition to one with the Hernicans, and that at a time when Tibur and Prmeneste were hostile, and when the Gauls might be expected to appear again in Latium as they had done regularly for the last three years, was clearly more than the strength of Rome could bear. The old alliance with the Hernicans, and with some at any rate of the Latin cities, must, at whatever price, be renewed.

We can easily conceive that there must have been a party amongst the Latins and Hernicans equally well disposed to such a reunion. It was accordingly effected: the plebeian consul C. Plautius appears to have had the honor of restoring at this critical moment the great work of Sp.

Cassius. The whole people of the Hernicans renewed their old alliance with Rome; but of the thirty Latin cities which had concluded the league with Sp. Cassius many had perished, and some had become separated from the Latin confederacy, and were now the heads of small confederacies of their own: we may safely conclude, however, that Aricia, Boville, Gabii, Lanuvium, Laurentum, Lavinium,.Nomentum, and Tusculum were among the cities which returned to their old connection, and became as heretofore the equal allies of the Romans. Thus a force was organized 40, Gallos:..

circa Pedum consedisse audi-54 11 Hernici devicti subactique sunt.”-Livy, Sum est.” Livy, VII. 12. VII. 15. 60 Livy, VI. 33. 55 Livy, VII.-12.

“Rebus nequicquam re51 Livy, VII. 12. petitis, novi consules jussu populi bellum inen2 Livy, VII. 15. dixere.” Livy, VII. 15.

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246 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVI_ which might be able at last to meet the Gauls in the field, should they again vent Lure to establish themselves on the Alban hills, or to overrun the plains of Latium. But while Rome was thus strengthened by this reconciliation with her old allies, wonewRoman tribe, she also made an addition to the number of her own citizens. Two created. new tribes were created, making the whole number twenty-seven; and the new citizens thus received into the state appear to have been in part the inhabitants of the Ager Pomptinus, or Volscian lowlands, the country between Antium and Tarracina on the coast, and running inland as far as the roots of the Apennines which form the eastern wall of the Campagna. In the times of the later kings, the Romans, according to their own stories, had made several conquests over the Volscians in this region, which at any rate were all lost again during the subsequent advance of the.AEquians and Volscians into Latium: but in the twenty years immediately preceding the Gaulish invasion, the Volscian frontier had again receded, and the Romans, as we have seen, extended their dominion for a time as far as Tarracina or Anxur. After the Gaulish invasion there followed another change of fortune; when the Latins no longer aided the Romans, but were for some time in alliance with the Volscians, the Romans again lost ground; Satricum became once more Volscian, and the intermediate country between it and Tarracina, the much contested Ager Pomptinus, must also have returned to its old masters. But whether it was that the Volscians had suffered even more than their neighbors from the Gaulish invasions, or whether the Samnites had already begun their attacks upon them in the valley of the Liris and on the side of Campania, or whether it is to be ascribed to internal divisions, and to the destruction of their old allies the AEquians, it seems at any rate that the Volscian nation was now declining, and utterly unable to withstand, as it had once done, the united forces of Rome and Latium. It is probable that much of its territory became at this period either Roman or Latin; exactly in the same manner as the Sabines of Regillus and Nomentum had lost their independence soon after the expulsion of the Tarquins. And as the Claudian and Crustuminian tribes were then formed out of those Sabines who became Romans, while Nomentum and Regillus fell to the share of the Latins, so a similar division in all probability took place now, and the Pomptine and the Publilian tribes must have been formed out of the Volscians who were assigned to Rome, whilst other portions of the Volscian territory and population fell to the share of the Latins. Thus the Volscian nation having been so dismembered, those states which still survived became henceforth more individually distinguished, and also, as was natural, more resolute to defend their independence. Amongst this number were the people of Privernum; and the ravages which they and the people of Velitrue are said to have carried into the Roman territory56 in this same year, were doubtless more especially directed against those whom they would consider as traitors, their own Volscian countrymen, the new Roman citizens of the Pomptine and Publilian tribes. This favorable aspect of the Roman affairs was still further improved four Peace with Tibur and years afterwards, when in the year 401 both Tibur and Praeneste57 Pr.eneste. gave up their long-continued hostility, and obtained, perhaps at the price of some sacrifices of territory, a peace for a certain number of years with Rome.

The peace with Tarquinii followed, as we have already seen, in the year 404. But in the year 402 we again hear of an attack made by the Voiscians upon The growthof the Sam-the Latins in the direction of Tusculum.58 No particulars are &itme power draws the mentioned, perhaps because the allied Romans and Latin forces omanand L atiosperhapste morecloselytogether. were in this year commanded by a Latin general; but we may en Livy, VII. 15. ” Accessit… vastatio Ro-19; and for the peace or rather truce with Priomani agri, quam Privernates, Veliterni deinde, neste, see Diodorus, XVI. 45. incursione repentina fecerunt.” 68 Livy, VII. 19. 61 For the peace with Tibur, see Livy, VII.

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CHAP. XXVIII.] ORIGIN OF THE SAMNITES. 247 suppose that Privernum and Velitrme, with some of the cities of the Volscian highlands, were the part of the Volscian nation engaged in these hostilities. From this time for the next five years all was quiet: but in the year 407, Satricum, which had been burnt some years ago by the Latins, and the territory of which the Latins had appropriated to themselves in their late partition of the Ager Pomptinus with Rome, was again occupied and rebuilt by the Volscians of Antium.~9 Jealousies were arising about this time between Rome and Latium; and it appears probable that there was a party amongst the Latins disposed to form a separate alliance with the remaining independent states of the Volscians, in order to be strengthened by them against Rome. Thus when the Auruncans, or Ausonians, one of the most southern people of the Volscian stock, began to plunder the Ager Pomptinus in 410, the Romans, we are told, suspected that this inroad was actually made with the concurrence of the Latins, and expected60 a war with the whole Latin confederacy. Their fears, however, were groundless for the present, and indeed the progress of the Samnnite arms in Campania and on the Liris was a strong inducement both to the E[omans and Latins to defer their jealousies of each other to a more convenient season. Two years afterwards, in 412, the first Samnite war broke out, in which both the Latins and Volscians to all appearance took part with Rome. Thus in the course of three-and-twenty years Rome was finally delivered from the scourge of the Gaulish invasion; she had secured her north-Increased power of ern frontier by a peace with the neighboring states of Etruria; her Rono.. old alliance with the Latins and Hernicans, however doubtful might be its duration, had been restored in time to enable her to, repel the Gauls and to crush the Volscians: and it was now ready to aid her in her coming struggle with the Samnites. She had not merely extended her dominion, but by granting the full rights of citizens to the Volscians of the Ager Pomptinus, she had enlarged and strengthened her own commonwealth. She was thus prepared for the events of the next ten years, which assured to her beyond dispute the first place among the nations of Italy. We have seen that the date of the first plebeian consulship coincided with that of the death of Epaminondas at Mantinea. The first Sam-Chronology. nite war broke out about two vears before the establishment of the Macedonian supremacy in Greece by Philip’s great victory at Cheronea. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE FIRST SAMNITE WAR-SEDITION OF THE

YEAR 408-GENUCIAN LAWS.A. U. 0. 407-409 NIEBUHR: 410-412 FASTI CAPIT.: 412-414 LIVY. “Majora jam hino bella et viribus hostium et longinquitate vel regionum vel temporum spatio quibus bellatum est dicentur; namque eo anno adversus Samnites, gentem opibus armisque validamr, mota arma.”

LIvr, VII. 29. THE Sabines, who dwelt amidst the highest mountains of the Apennines, where the snow lies all the year long, and which send forth the Legend concerning the streams to run into the two seas northward and southward, werel origi ofthe Saites.‘9 Livy, VII. 27. eo Livy, VII. 28. 1

Strabo, V. p. 250. Dionysius, II. 49.

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248 AISTORY OF ROME, [CHAP. XXVII1 at war for many years together with their neighbors the Umbrians. At last they made a vow, that if they should conquer their enemies, all the living creatures’ born in their land in that year should be devoted to the gods as sacred. They did conquer, and they offered in sacrifice accordingly all the lambs and calves and kids and pigs of that year, and such aninials as might not be sacrificed, they3
redeemed. But still their land would not yield its fruits, and when they thought what was the cause of it, they considered that their vow had not been duly performed; for all tleir own children4 born within that year had been kept back from the gods, and had neither been sacrifibed nor redeemed. So they devoted all their children to the god Mamers, and when they were grown up they sent them away to become a new people in a new land. When the young men set out on their way, it happened that a bull went before them; and they thought that Mamers had sent him to be their guide, and they followed him. He laid himself downs to rest for the first time when he had come to the land of the Opicans; and the Sabines thought that this was a sign to them, and they fell upon the Opicans, who dwelt in scattered villages6 without walls to defend them, and they drove them”

out, and took possession of their land. Then they offered the’bull in sacrifice to Mamers, who had sent him to be their guide; and a bull was the device’ which they bore in after ages; and they themselves were no more called Sabines, but they took a new name and were called Samnites.

Such is the legendary account of the origin of that great people whose historl What truth is contained is now beginning to connect itself with that of Rome. In two in it. points it has preserved the truth; the Samnites were a people of Sabine extraction, and had established themselves as conquerors in the country of the Opicans. But the two races were, probably, not very remote from each other, and thus it is less surprising that the conquerors should have adopted the language of their subjects; for the Samnites spoke Opican, or Oscan, and the legends of their coins, and their remaining inscriptions are in the Oscan character.

Still the two people were distinct; and the Samnites regarded neither their Opican subjects in Campania, nor their Opican neighbors, the A/Equians and Volscians, as their own proper countrymen. One single contemporary notice of the Samnitess in the days of their greatness Notice ofthe Sait has descended to our times; and this is contained in two short lines in the Periplus of Scy-of the Periplus of Scylax, who describes the Samnites as living on lax, the coast of the Lower Sea between the Campanians and Lucanians, and the length of their coast-line was no more, he tells us, than half a day’s sail. The space which they occupied reached nearly from the Sarnus to 2 The form of one oY these vows is given by whim represents a bull, the emblem of the Livy, XXII. 10, “quo l ver adtulerit ex suillo, Samnites, goring a wolf, the wellknown type ovillo, caprino, bovillo grege, quveque profana of the Romans. Two or three specimens of this erunt, Jovi fieri.” coin are tobe seen in the British Museum. 3 Ta,ev KaTErfOvav, 7r SE KaOdfpwcav. Strabo, s Ka.trravv RE sxovra E.avaurat Kain 7rapcd,-rov; Y. p. 250. What was not sacrificed, but yet’arYi favvtrrov Ilyipas Lp/av, p. 3. Niebuhr reads was consecrated to the gods, must have been zavv’rat instead ofAauvvrat in the following page redeemed before it could be employed for or-of Scylax, urging that the description is inapplidinary purposes. cable to the Daunians, as they neither extended 4

Strabo as before. Festus in “Mamertini.” across all Italy from sea to sea, nor lived to the 6 This reminds us of the story of the white N. W. of Mount-Drium or Garganus. I think sow which guided Aneas to the place where he that this conjecture is highly probable, because was to build his city. A wolf was said to have Scylax had not mentioned the Daunians in his done the same service to the Hirpinians, who description of the coasts of the Lower Sea, but were also of Samnite extraction. had mentioned the Samnites; and the only‘6 ErTyXavov 6 KxPtl3Uv;avrt;. Like the EAto-other people who had stretched from sea to sea, lians in the time of the Peloponnesian war, the Etruscans or Tyrrhenians, are mentioned Thucyd.

III. 94; or like the Casali, which to separately in the description of both coasts. If this day contain the greatest part of the popula-so, Scylax includes within the limits of the Samtion in the valleys of the central Apennines. nites, not only the country of the Frentanians, Mi7 ali gives an engraving of a coin, struck who were notoriously of Samnite origin, but by the Italian allies during their-great war with also that of their neighbors, the Marrucinians the Romans in the seventh century of Rome, and Vestinians.

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CHAP. XXVIII.] GEOGRAPHY OF SAMNIUM. 249 the Silarus; Neapolis, according to Scylax, is in Campania; Posidonia, or Paesturn, is in Lucania. But the Samnite possessions on or near the coast, even though they once included the famous cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii,9 of Nola, Nuceria, and Abella, were a mere recent offshoot from the great body of the nation: the true Samnium lies wholly in the interior, and having been thus removed from the notice of the Greeks, from whom alone we’derive our knowledge of the ancient world before the dominion of the’Romans, it has been fated to remain in perpetual obscurity. Nearly due north of Naples, there stands out from the central line of the Apennines, like one of the towers of an old castle frofn the lower Geography of Samniand more retiring line of the ordinary wall, a huge mass of mount-m. T eMatese. ains, known at present by the name of the Matese.’ On more than threefourths of its circumference it is bounded by the Volturno and its tributary streams, the Cal ore‘0 and the Tamaro, which send their waters into the Lower or Tyrrhenian Sea; but on its’northern side, its springs and torrents run down into the Biferno, and so make their way to the Adriatic. A very narrow isthmus or shoulder, high enough to form the watershed between the two seas, connects tlie Matese at its N. W. and N. E. extremities with the main Apennine line, and thus prevents it from being altogether insulated.

The circumference of the Matese, as above described, is between seventy”

and eighty miles. Its character bears some resemblance to that of the Its extent and r district of Craven, in Yorkshire, or more closely to that of the ter. Jura. It is a vast mass of limestone,‘2 rising from its base abruptly in the huge wall-like cliffs or scars, so characteristic of limestone mountains, to the height of about 3000 feet; and within this gigantic inclosure presenting a great variety of surface, sloping inwards from the edge of the cliffs into deep valleys, and then rising again in the highest points of the centre of the range, and especially in the Monte Miletto, which is its loftiest summit, to an elevation computed at 6000
feet. Its upland valleys offer, like those of the Jura, a wide extent of pasture, and endless forests of magnificent beech-wood; it is rich in springs, gushing out of the ground with a full burst of water, and suddenly disappearing again into some of the numerous caverns in which such limestone rocks abound. In this manner the waters-of a small lake in the heart of the mountain have no visible outlet;13 but the people of the country say that they break out at the foot of a deep cliff or cove, aboiu two or three miles distant, and form the full stream of the Torano. On the highest points of the Matese the snow lies till late‘4 in the summer; and suce is their elevation, that the view from them extends across the whole breadth of I.,lAy from sea to sea. No heat of the summer scorches the perpetual fresh9 Herculaneum and Pompeii both stood, it is zionario del Regno di Napoli, Parte 2, in “Matrue, to the northward of the Sarnus; and Stra-tese.” bo expressly says that they were wrested by the 12 This limestone is, in some parts, bituminSamnites from the Etruscans, V.

p.‘247. This, OTIs, and contains some fossil remains of fish. however, was the case also with Cuma and Ca-There are some volcanic or tufaceous rocks in pua; but as Scylax places these towns in Cam-the Matese, resembling probably the beds of pania, and distinguishes it from the countryof tuff which are found on the slopes of the Apenthe Samnites, a little to the south ofit, it is prob-nines in other places, as for instance, on the able that at the time ot the first Samnite war, road from Naples to Avellnin the pass of which is nearly the date of Scylax’s Periplus, Monteforte. most of this district had recovered its indepen- -” See Keppel Craven, Excurs. in the Abruzzi, dence, andtheSamnitepossessionswerereduced Vol. I. p. s18. The English reader will rememto the limits mentioned in the text. ber Malham Tarn, and the full burst of water 10 The Calore runs along the southern side of with which the Aire rushes out from under the the Matese: the Tamaro, which bounds its east-rocks of Malham Cove.

Similar phenomena ern side, runs into the Calore from the north are frequent in the limestone mountains of Polonearly at right angles.

ponnesus. 11 Mr. Keppel Craven says, that it is reckoned 14 See Giustiniani, Dizionario. Mr. ieppel to measure seventy miles.-Excursions in the Craven found the upper half of the Matese covAbruzzi, &c. Vol. II.

p. 166. Giustiniani gives ered with snow in May: it would rYmain much it at sixty-two Neapolitan miles, which are later on the highest summits.

more than seventy English ones.-See his Di

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250 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVII1, rless of these mountain pastures; and during the hottest monthsT5 the cattle from the surrounding country are driven up thither to feed. This singular mountain, with its subject valleys, was the heart of the country Principal divisions and of the Samnites. Of the two principal divisions of the Sarmnites, towns of Sa.n.ium. one, the Caudinians, occupied the southern side of the Matese, and the other, the Pentrians, dwelt on its northern side. To the former belonged the towns of Allifwe‘6 on the Vulturnus, of Telesia, the country of that Pontius Telesinus,” who struggled so valiantly against the fortune of Sylla in the great battle at the Colline gate, and of Beneventum.‘s To the Pentrians belonged ~Esernia’g on one of the first feeders of the Vulturnus, Bovianum20 on the Biferno or Tifernus, and Sepinum2’ on the E.

of the Matese, not far from the sources of the Tamaro. Besides the Caudinians and Pentrians, there were, doubtless, other tribes more or Tribes connected with less closely connected with the Samnite name, who took part in the the Samnites. great contest of their nation with Rome.

The very names of some of these may have perished; for it is by mere accident that we hear of the Caracenians,22 a tribe to the north of the Pentrians, who dwelt in the upper valley of the Sangro or Sagrus, and to whom belonged the town of Aufidena. The Frentanians, who reached down to the very shores of the Adriatic, are called a Samnite people;h3 yet in the accounts of the wars with Rome, they are spoken of as distinct; and they seem to have taken no part in the first war. -And the Hirpinians, whose country is also included within the limits of Samrnium, and who dwelt to the S. E. of the rest of their countrymen, occupying the upper valleys of the Calore and Sabbato on the south of the Apennines, and of the Ofanto or Aufidus on the northern side, are on some occasions24 distinguished from the Sam”1 They are turned out about the end of June. and the Biferno so floods the valley, that it is a See Keppel Craven, Vol. I. p. 20. constant swamp, and the air is damp and foggy; “o Alife, which still retains its ancient name, but there is no malaria, because it has no severe ranks even now as a city, but the bishop resides heats in summer. Its population, according to at Piedimonte, a flourishing town about three Giustiniani, writing in 1797, was then 3500 souls. miles distant, and Alife is at present almost de-Mr. Keppel Craven rates it at present as low as populated from malaria. See Keppel Craven, 1500. Abruzzi, Vol. II. p. 164.

Vol. I. p. 21. 2l The actual town of Sepino stands on a hill 17 Ald according to the writer of the little at some distance from the remains of the ancient work, ” de viris illustribus,” it was the councity, which are to be seen in the valley below. try also of that still greater C.

Pontius, who de-These remains are very large and remarkably feated the Romans at the Caudine Forks. The perfect, but they are of Roman, as I imagine, remains of Telesia are to be seen at the distance rather than of Samnite origin. One of the faof about a mile to the N. WV. of the modern mous cattle-tracks (calles, tratturi, delle pecotown of Telese, which, like Alife, has almost re), which have existed unaltered from time gone to ruin from the influence of the malaria. immemorial for the yearly migrations of the See Keppel Craven, Vol. II. p. 173, 174. cattle from and to the coast, runs straight “8 This is still a well-built and flourishing through the ruins of the ancient town from E. town, containing a population of 18,000 souls. to W. See Keppel Craven, Abruzzi, Vol. II. p.

See Keppel Craven’s Tour in the southern prov-131, 135. inces of Naples, p. 22, 28. 22 The name is only noticed, I believe, by Zo1I The present town, still called Isernia, stands naras and Ptolemy; unless it be the same with on a narrow ridge between two torrents, run-the Carentini of Pliny. The Italian writers, ning down in very deep ravines, which meet Romanelli, for instance, and Micali, propose to a little below, and then fall into the Vandra, read Sariceni, as if the name were derived from about two miles above its junction with the Vol-the neighboring river Sarus or Sangro. But tonmo. It is a flourishing place, with various this is exceedingly uncertain. Alfidena, or Aumanufactures, and a population of about 7000 fidena, contains at present about 1500 souls: it souls. Large remains of polygonal walls are stands on the Rio Torto, a torrent which just still visible, which belong, probably, to the days below the town plunges down into a very deep of its independence as a Samnnite city. The re-and narrow glen, about a mile above its juncmarkable tunnel, hewn through the rock for tion with the Sangro. There exists considerable about a mile, and still used, according to its remains of polygonal walls, and an Oscan inoriginal purpose, for supplying the town with scription on the bridge which crosses the Rio water, is probably a work of the Roman times.

Torto. Keppel Craven, Abruzzi, Vol. II. p. 58, See Keppel Craven, Abruzzi, Vol. II. p. 81-84. 59. 20 JBovianum, or Boiano, also contains re-23

Strabo calls them yavvrlKlIV’Ovo, V. p. 241; mains of polygonal walls, built of very large yet Livy represents them as suing for and obstones, put as closely together as possible and taining peace as a distinct people, after a treaty the smaller interstices filled up with remarkable had been concluded with the Samnites, IX. 45. nicety. It is a cold place, being shaded by the 24 As, for instance, ” Hannibal ex Hirpinis in Matese, which rises directly to the south of it; Samnium transit.” Liv, XXII. 13.

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CEAP. XXVIII.] STATE AND HABITS OF THE SAMNITES. 251 nites; and it is by no means certain that they took part in the beginning of the contest with Rome; nor, on the other hand, that when they became involved in it, the other tribes which had been first engaged continued to maintain it without interruption. The country of the Samnites still retains its ancient features, and our own eyes can inform us sufficiently of its nature. But of the Samnite peoLittle is known of tho pie we can gain no distinct notions whatever. Unknown and stateo of the Samnite unnoticed by the early Greek writers, they had been well-nigh people. exterminated before the time of those Roman writers whose works have come down to us; and in the Augustan age, nothing survived of them but a miserable remnant, retaining no traceable image of the former state of the nation. Our knowledge of the Samnites is literally limited to the single fact that they were a brave people, who clung resolutely to their national independence. We neither know what was the connection of the several tribes of the nation with each other, nor what was the constitution of each tribe2 within itself. We know nothing distinct of their military system and tactic, except that they did not use the order of the phalanx; the sword and large shield26 were their favorite arms, and not the small shield and pike. We do not know how they governed the countries which they conquered, nor how far they adopted the Roman system of colonies.” Their wealth, manner of living, and general civilization we can but guess at; and to add to all this, the very story of their wars with Rome having been recorded by no contemporary historian, has been corrupted, as usual, by the Roman vanity; and neither the origin of the contest, nor its circumstances, nor the terms of the several treaties which were made before its final issue, have been related truly.

Thus destitute of direct information, we may be pardoned for endeavoring to extract some further conclusions from the few facts known to us. Their prinipal articles The nature of their country makes it certain that the principal of produce. wealth of the Samnites consisted in their cattle.

Wool and hides must have been the chief articles which they had to sell to their neighbors. Wintr psturage for But the high elevation of much of their country, as it preserved their ecatt on the sea the pasture unscorched by the summer heats, was, on the other hand, especially exposed to the rigor of the winter; the snow lay so long on the ground that their cattle could not have found subsistence. And as, in like manner, the parched plains of Apulia yield no grass in the summer, the inhabitants of the centre of Italy, and of the coast of the Adriatic, must always have been dependent on each other; and the Samnites, either by treaty or by conquest, must have obtained the right of pasturing their cattle in winter in the low grounds near the sea, either on one side of the peninsula or on the other. On the shores of the Adriatic this was probably secured by their close connection with the Frentanians, a people of their own race; and by their constant friendly inter-‘ Micali states that the Samnites were gov-Samnites. Sallust, Bell. Catilin, 52. Atheerned by a priestly aristocracy, like the Etrus-nueus, VI. 106, p. 273. Diodorus, XXIII. 1l cans. He gives no authority for this, and cer-Fragm. Vatic. tainly it is not proved by their mere practice of 21 Micali says that ” their society was founded enlisting their soldiers on great emergencies on a system of agrarian laws,” and he quotes as with certain solemn religious ceremonies.

his authority for this a fragment of Varlro pre20 Livy expressly speaks of them as scutati, served to us by Philargyrius, one of the schoand describes the form of their shield, IX. 40. liasts on Virgil, in his note on Georgic. II. 167. The use of the scutum in itself implies that the The fragment runs thus: ” Terra culturna causa sword, and not the spear, was the offensive attributa olim particulatim hominibus, ut Etruweapon generally used; we are told also that ria Tuscis, Samrniurn Sabellis.” But I do not the Campanians called their gladiators Samnites, understand this as saying any thing of agrarian because they equipped them with arms taken laws, but merely that the earth became the profrom the Samnites (Livy, IX.

40); and in such perty of particular portions and races of mancombats, as the very name shows, the sword k instead of being all common to all; and was the common weapen. Add to this the story, that thus Etruria was given (by the gods, I whether well or ill founded, as to the particular think, and not by an agrarian law) to the peofact, that the Romans borrowed their arms, of-ple of the Etruscans, and Samnium to the Safensive and defensive, arma et tela,” fron the bellines.

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252 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVIIr course28 with the Marrucinians and Vestinians; while their arms, by winning possession of Campania, procured for them an access to the coast on that side, and gave them the full enjoyment of that soft and sunny plain which extends along the shore of the Gulf of Salerno. It is not certain, as I have said, that the Samnites governed their Campanian TheirconquestsiuCam-conquests by means of colonies, but there is every probability that pania. they did so. The Samnite colonists would thus constitute the ruling body in every city: and, like the early Roman patricians, might be called indifferently either the burghers or the aristocracy. Niebuhr supposes that the sixteen hundred Campanian knights, who in the great Latin war are said to have stood aloof from the mass of the people, and to have remained faithful to Rome, were the colony of the Samnite conquerors. And the frequent revolts which we read of, from one alliance to another, may mark a corresponding domestic revolution, in which the colony either lost or re-established its ascendency. Yet it may have happened that the colony, in some cases, had really identified itself with the old inhabitants, and felt with them more than with the people from whom they were themselves descended. In this manner the Samnite colonies may have become in feeling thoroughly Campanian, and have wished to make themselves independent of their own Samnite countrymen in Campanium; and thus, although the highest of the Campanian nobility were of Samnite extraction, yet Campania may have become, as it is represented, wholly independent of the Samnite nation within no long period after its first conquest. Not the slightest notice remains of the effect produced on the Samnite dominHo they were affected ion by the irruptions of the Gauls. Yet in the year 394-395 the by the invasions of tho Gauls had winteredt9 in Campania; and after their last appearance in Latium in 406, they are said to have retreated into Apulia30
through the land of the Volscians and Falernians; so that they must have passed as it seems through a part of Samnium. The heart of the Samnite territory indeed they were not likely to assail; they were not expert in besieging walled cities, nor would they be tempted to invade the mountain fastnesses of the cen. tral Apennines. Thus if the Samnites did not choose to engage with them in the plains, their substantial power would be little impaired by their invasions; and they received from them perhaps no greater mischief than the ravaging of their territory in Campania, and the loss of their cattle, which might have been sent down to the coast for their winter pasture. It is possible, however, that a dread of the’Gauls may have been one of the causes which led to a treaty of alliance between Rome and file Samnites3’ in the year 401. The first Sarmnite war, which broke out eleven years afterwards, was no doubt 28 The Vestinians join the Samnites in 424, towards their neighbor? But what if the injuand the Marsians, Pelignians, and Marrucinians, rious treatment of the Samnites consisted in are represented as so closely connected with the compelling the Apulianes’o find pasture for their Vestinfians, that an attack on these would neces-cattle in the winter; exa t!y as the Arragonese sarily involve the Romans in a war with all the kings of Naples obliged all tenants holding of others. - Livy, VIII. 29. I think it may be con-the crown in Apulia to let their lands during the eluded that the Marsians and Palignians were winter to the cattle-owners of the Abruzzi; and on friendly terms with the Samnites, from the although the French took off these restrictions, fact that the Latins, then in alliance with Rome, yet the present government has, in a great meanattacked the Pelignians in the first year of the sure, reimposed them: and the Apulian proSamnite war (Livy, VII. 38); and that as soon prietors are still obliged to reserve two-thlrds as peace is made between Rome and Samnium, of their land in pasture, and have only the culthe Roman armies march through the country tivation of one-thlird left to their own disposal. of the Marsians and Pelignians, in order to See Keppel Craven, Abruzzi, Vol. I. p. 267reach Campania. Livy, VIII. 6. 269. According to Livy, IX. 13, the Apulians were 29 Livy, VII. 11. hostile to the Samnites, because they were op-30 Livy, VII. 26. pressed by them, and their country frequently 31 Livy, VII. 19.

Diodorus, XVI. 45. It said waste. Had Livy any authority for this may be observed that Diodorus agrees with last expression, ” canmpestria et maritima loca Livy in placing this treaty in the consulship of.. ipsi montani atque agrestes depopulaban-M. Fabius Ambustus, and T. Quintius; but the tur,” or did he put it in merely as a natural way consulship is according to him the 2d year of of accounting for the ill-will of the Apulians the 107th Olympiad.

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CHAP. XXVIII.] CHARACTER OF THE WAR. 253 occasioned in part by the advance of the Samnite arms in the val-Causes of the first war ley of the Liris, and by the war between Rome and the Auruncans between the Romnans in the year. 410, which brought the Roman legions into the imme-andSamnites diate neighborhood of Campania.32 At this time Rome and Latium were in league together, and jointly pressing upon the Volscians; their power held out hopes to the Campanians that, by their aid, they might be defended against the Samnites. This aid was in the year 412 become highly needful; the Campanians, having ventured to defend the Sidicinians33 against an attack of the Samnites, had drawn the hostilities of the Samnites upon themselves, and we find that a Samnite army occupied the ridge of Tifata immediately above Capua, and from thence descended like the ~quians and Volscians from Algidus, to the plain before the walls of the city. In this state of distress, Capua implored the protection of Rome and Latium, and obtained it.34 A war between Samnium on the one hand, and the connected Romans, Latins, and Campanians on the other, was the immediate consequence. The Roman consuls in this year were M. Valerius Corvus, and A. Cornelius Cossus. Valerius is the hero of that famous legend already re-Character of the ao lated, which told how he had vanquished in his early youth a’ounts of the war. gigantic Gaul by the aid of a heavensent crow. The acts of his consulship have been disguised by a far worse spirit; they were preserved, not by any regular historian, but in the mere funeral orations and traditional stories of his own family; and were at last still further corrupted by the flattery of a client of his house, the falsest of all the Roman writers, Valerius of Antium. Hence we have no real military history of the Samnite war in this first campaign, but accounts of the worthy deeds of two famous Romans, M. Valerius Corvus, and P. Decius Mus. They are the heroes of the two stories, and there is evidently no other object in either of them but to set off their glory. It seems to me to be a great mistake3 to regard such mere panegyric as history. All that history can relate is that the Romans, we know not with what allied 32 Livy, VII. 28. Niebuhr supposes that by tion of their falsifications. The case of Capua the name of Auruncans are meant the Volscians applying for aid to Rome against the Samnites on the Liris, and that Sora was an Auruncan was exactly that of Corcyra asking help from town. Vol. III. p. 101. Livy himself does not Athens against Corinth. The motives which seem to have had this notion; for the Aurun-induced the Athenians to receive the Corcyrecan and Volscian wars are in his accounts care-ans into their alliance were the very same which fully distinguished, and Sora is said to have influenced the Romans: the justice of the meabeen taken from the Volscians. The Aurun-sure was in both cases equally questionable; cans, on the other hand, are mentioned again but it may be doubted whether the Roman lein the 8th Book, c. 15, and Suessa Aurunca is gions sent into Camlpania were ordered only to named as their chief town. Now Suessa is fight in the event of an actual attack made upon Sessa, a town standing on the crater of an old their allies, which was the charge given by Pervolcano, just above the modern road from Na-icles’

government to the ten ships sent to proples to Rome, a few miles to the east of the tect Corcyra. So truly is real history a lesson Garigliano or Liris. Is there any reason for of universal application, that we should.underthinking that these Auruncans were more stand the war between Rome and Samnium far closely connected with the Volscians of Sora better from reading Thucydides’ account of the and’Arpinum than with those of Antium, or war between Corinth and Corcyra, than from that the name Auruncan was at this period ex-Livy’s corrupted story of the very events themtended to any other Opican people than to those selves. of the neighborhood of Sessa?- 35 Some of my readers may have seen a work 33

Livy, VII. 29. The Sidicinians were close which formed a sort of Appendix to the “Vicneighbors to the Auruncans, living on the same toires, Conqultes, &c. des Franlqais,”’ and was cluster of volcanic hills which form the bound-called “Tables du Temple de la Gloire.” It ary of the plain of Naples on the road towards consisted of an alphabetical catalogue raisoun6 Rome. Teanum, now Teano, was their princi-of all Frenchmen, of whatever military rank, pal town. who had distinguished themselves, or thought 34 Livy, VII. 31. But it is impossible to be-that they had done so, in the course of the last lieve the statement in Livy that they applied to war; and many of the articles were apparently the Romans only, or that they purchased the contributed by the very individuals themselves Roman protection by a literal surrender,: dedi-who were the heroes of them. Now these notio, of themselves and their city to the sovereign tices had nothing of the license of a poetical acdisposal of Rome. Every step in the Samnite count of events; they professed to be a real and Latin wars has been so disguised by the matter of fact narrative; they were published ]~oman annalists, that a probable narrative of when the memory of the actions to which they these events can only be given by a free correc-relate was fresh, and in the face of the jealous

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254 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVIII force to aid them, took the field with two armies; that one of First campaign, and battl by Mount Gau-these was to protect Campania, while the other was destined to invade Samnium. The army in Campania was commanded by M. Valerius, and his panegyric, careless of historical details, brings him, without a word as to his previous march, to Mount Gaurus,36 now Monte Barbaro, in a remote corner of Campania, close upon the sea above Pozzuoli. Here, says the story, he met the Samnites, and here, after a most bloody battle, he defeated them. The army which was to invade Samnium,37 had scarcely entered the hills Unsuccessful invasion of which bound the plain of Naples, apparently by the pass of MadSuuniaumr. daloni, when it became involved in a deep defile, and was nearly cut off by the enemy. It was saved by the conduct and courage of the famous P. Decius, then one of the military or legionary tribunes; and thus his panegyrist gives the whole story in great detail, and ends with saying that the Roman army was not only saved from destruction, but gained a great victory over the enemy. As it is not pretended, however, that the Romans made any progress in Samnium beyond the scene of their victory, it is likely that their success was limited to their escaping from a very imminent danger, and being enabled to retreat with safety. The story of VYalerius pretends that he won yet a second victory over the Resultof the campaign. whole collected force of Samnium, which had been gathered to revenge their late defeat-; and yet we are told that as soon as the Roman armies had returned to Rome, the Campanians38
were obliged to send embassies to the senate, requesting that a force might winter in Campania for their protection, to keep off the attacks of the Samnites. This is the beginning of a totally different story, that of the sedition of the year 413, and the author of it having no concern with the Samnite war, did not think of reconciling his criticism of all the nations ot Iurope, where especially a crown of gold, and one hundred there were thousands of witnesses both able oxen, and one beautiful white ox over and and eager to expose any exaggeration. And yet, above the number, with his horns bedecked after all, what sort of history of any of the cam-with gold. To the soldiers who had been with paigns of the last war could be compiled from him in his post of danger, the consul’ gave an the “Tables du Temple de la Gloire?” I cannot ox to each man, and two coats; and told them therefore, persuade myself that the details of that their daily allowance of corn should for the the battle by Mount Gaurus, or of the wise and time to come be doubled. Then, when the convaliant conduct of Decius in Samnium, deserve sul had ended, all the soldiers of the legions to be transcribed in a modern history of Rome. gave to Decius a wreath of twisted grass, which They have not obtained such celebrity as to be was accustomed to be given by a beseiged or worth preserving as legends; they have not in blockaded army to him who had delivered their style and substance those marks of origi-them; and it was put upon his head amidst the nality which would make them valuable as a cheers of all the army.

Another wreath also, picture of the times; and least of all, have they of the like sort, was given to Decius by the that trustworthiness which would entitle them soldiers of his own band. So Decius stood, to be regarded as historically true. wearing his crown of gold and his wreath of 96 Livy, VII. 32. “Consules… ab urbe grass, and he forthwith offered in sacrifice to profecti, Valerius in Campaniam, Cornelius in Mars the beautiful white ox with the gilded Samnium, ille ad montem Gaurum, hic ad Sa-horns, and the other hundred oxen he gave to ticulam, castra ponunt.” “What actions,”

says the soldiers who had followed him in his enterNiebuhr, “had forced the consul to fall back prise. And the other soldiers too gave each thither, and gave to the Samnites that assurance man to the soldiers of Decius a pound of corn of victory with which they hastened to attack from their own allowances, and a measure exhim,-this knowledge, as almost all else where-ceeding a pound in weight (sextarios) of wine. by the Samnnite wars might have become more All the while that they were giving these honintelligible, is buried in everlasting night.” ors to Decius and his soldiers, the whole army Vol. III. p. 137. were shouting and cheering, for they knew not 37 Livy, VII. 34-36. The account of the what to do for joy.”

Livy, VII. 837. honors paid to Decius on this occasion by his us Livy VII.

38. He adds that the people of fellow-soldiers, is characteristic of the time and Suessa sent an embassy to the same effect. people, and is worth transcribing. “After the This shows, that immediately after the retreat battle, the consul called all the soldiers togeth-of the Roman armies, the Samnites were beginer, and made a speech, in which he comning, not only to overrun Campania again, but mended all the worthy deeds which Decius had even to carry their ravages beyond the Vulturdone.” [Polybius especially mentions and nus into the country of the Sidicinians and Au praises this practice, VI. 39.] “He then, as runcans. was the custom, gave him divers gifts of honor,

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CHAP. XXVIII.] DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES. 255 account with the exaggerated representations given of the preceding campaign. That the Romans drove the Samnites from Campania is probable; but, on the other hand, they failed in their attack upon Samnium, and the Samnites were clearly no way dispirited as to the general result of the war. It would seem from a short and obscure notice in Livy,39 that the Samnites were assisted in this war by some of their neighbors; whether as The Latins engaged equal or as dependent allies we know not. For it appears that gainst the PeligniSan.

the Latins, instead of being engaged in Campania or in Samnium, moved into the heart of Italy and attacked the Pelignians; so that we must suppose that the operations of this year were carried on on a most extensive scale, and we thus see how much greater was this contest with Samnium, than any other in which Rome had been engaged before. The active campaign was short; for the consuls, so far as appears, still entered on their office on the 1st of July, and their triumphs took A R..man rmywintere place on the 22d and 24th of September.40 They themselves inCamPania did not return to Campania, but parties of Roman soldiers, according to the request of the Campanians, were sent back to garrison the several cities, and a large force was thus kept on service during the winter. This state of things lasted through the following spring; the Romans would not commence offensive operations till the new consuls should come into office: of the movements of the Samnites we hear nothing; but it may be that their usual season of military service was the same as that of the Romans, and mere plundering parties would be deterred by the force left to keep them in check. But when the new consul, C. Marcius Rutilus, arrived after midsummer to take the command of the army, he found himself engaged in a very different duty from that of marching against the Samnites. Had we any history of these times, events so important and so notorious as the great disturbance of the year 413 must have been related in Domestic disturbances their main points clearly and faithfully. But because we have merely a collection of stories recording the great acts of particular families and individuals, and in each of these the glory of its own hero, and not truth, was the object: even matters the most public and easy to be ascertained are so disguised, that nothing beyond the bare fact that there was a disturbance, and that it was at length appeased, is common to the various narratives.41 The panegyrists of the Valerian family claimed the glory of putting an end to the contest for M. Valerius Corvus, who was, they said, specially appointed dictator; while tihe stories of the Marcian and Servilian families said that every thing had been done by the two consuls, C. Marcius Rutilus, and Q. Servilius. One account represented the affair as a secession of the Roman commons, another described it as a mutiny of the army in Camipania. The story which most of the annalists afterwards adopted, taking only the latter view of the case, and thinking that mutinous soldiers ought not to benefit by their mutiny, told only how they were pardoned for their crime, and how they obtained42 no more than one or two insignificant concessions, which in no respect compromised the dignity of the government. But other accounts43 preserved the memory of a secession headed by a tribune of the commons, and winning some of the most important constitu3 Livy, VII. 88. ” Hujus certaminis fortu-must not suppose that the “ancient authors” na… Latinos jam exercitibus comparatis, ab here spoken of were contemporary with these Romano in Pelignum vertit bellum.”- This can times; they were but the annalists of the sixth only mean that the Latins directed their main and seventh centuries of Rome. who followed force against the northern side of the Samnite each the traditions and memorials of a different confederacy, moving by the lake Fucinus upon family. Livy himself, in another place, VIII. Sulmo, and the country of the Pelignians, and 40, deplores the want of all contemporary writhus threatening Samrnum on the rear. ters for the times of the Samnite wars, as one 40 See the Fasti Capitolini. great cause of the hopeless confusion in which 41 “Adeo nihil,” says Livy, “preterquam the story of those wars was involved. seditionem fuisse, eamque compositam, inter 42 Livy, VII. 41. antiquos rerum auctores constat.” VII.

42. We 43 Livy, VII. 42.

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256 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVIII tional points which had ever yet been agitated; nay, they told how it forced from the patricians that which above all things they would be most loth to yield, both on public grounds and on private,-a general abolition of debts.44 The truth, however, in this instance, seems not difficult to disentangle. In spite of the successive lowerings of the rate of interest, there was The army in Campania muthiies and…arhe a large amount of debt undischarged, because there had been no towards Rome. change for the better in the circumstances of the commons at large to enable them to pay off even the principal of what they owed. A multitude of men thus involved, many of them perhaps actually nexi, were kept on foreign service during the winter, a thing in itself extremely galling to them, and were quartered in the towns of Campania, where they witnessed a state of luxury such as they could never have conceived before. Nothing is more probable45 than that they should have longed to appropriate those wealthy cities to themselves, to establish themselves at Capua, as their fathers, forty years before, would have fain done at Veii, and to make the Campanians their subjects, the commons of a state in which they themselves would be the burghers. Stories of their design were carried to Rome, and the commons there feeling that they too had their share of distress, proposed also to seek their remedy.

Before the plans of the soldiers were yet ripe, attempts were made by their officers to break up their combinations, and detachments of those who were most suspected were ordered home, as if they were no longer wanted in Campania. But these, when they came to Lautulae, a narrow pass between the sea and the mountains close to Tarracina, concerted their measures with the cohort which was there in gar-. rison, and openly refused to obey their commanders. The example once set became contagious; the mass of the soldiers quartered in Campania joined the revolters, and all marched together46 towards Rome, releasing on their way all the bondmen debtors whom they found working as slaves on their creditors’

lands, till their number was swelled to 20,000 men. They halted on the slope of the Alban hills, near Bovillce, fortified a regular camp, plundered the country as if it belonged to an enemy,47 and The commons rise at Rome. M. Valerius seized upon a patrician, T. Quinctius, at his farm or country-house Corvus ditator. near Tusculum, and forced him to become their leader. The commons at Rome waited no longer; they too rose; they too laid hold on a patrician, C. Manlius, loving the name of their old champion and martyr M. Manlius: they marched out of the city, and established themselves in a spot four miles distant from the walls. Even now the patricians were not left helpless; besides themselves and their clients, a numerous body, they would on this occasion be 44 Auctor de Viris Illustribus, inValer. Corvo. the Samians (Herodotus, VI. 23), as showing Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. I. ~ 2. that such acts were practised even by Greeks Perhaps I ought hardly to have expressed towards Greeks, at a period when manners had myself so strongly as to the probability of this been as little corrupted by luxury and skeptipart of the story, since Niebuhr considers it cism as they were at this time at Rome; whereundeserving of credit. But Wachsmuth has as the Campanians were no countrymen of the well observed, that the eager desire of the com-Romans, and therefore, according to the too imons to settle at Veili, proves sufficiently that prevailing notions of the ancient world, were they had no invincible attachment to Rome as entitled to far less consideration.

their native country: he adds, with no less truth, 46 Appian, Samnitic.

Fragm. I. ~ 1. The per” that a people whose innocence is the fruit of sons whom he speaks of as Irri r7v pywo iv roVs ignorance rather than of principle, is little able &ypoos &3c1Etiovs, must have been debtors workto resist the first strong temptation.” How ing as slaves on the “possessiones” of their pagreat were the excesses of the Spartans after trician creditors, on such portions of land lately the Peloponnesian war, when opportunities of conquered from the VoIscians as had been ocindulgence were first offered to them And cupied in the usual manner by individuals. why should we conceive that the Roman com-Foreign-purchased slaves must have been too mons were men of greater simplicity of man-rare at Rome at this period, to have been emners than the Samnites, who had formerly ployed in great numbers as agricultural laborseized Capua in a similar manner, when they ers: and, in fact, the slaves who were conwere inhabiting it jointly with the Etruscans. fined to work in the workhouses of the patriCompare also the stories of the forcible occupa-cians in these early times, are always described tion of Smyrna by some Colophonian exiles as insolvent debtors. who had been hospitably received there (Hero-47 L ER prcedatoribus vagis quidam comperdotus I. 150); anc of the seizure of Zancle by tum adtulerunt,” &c.-Livy, VII. 39.

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eHAP. XXVIII.] M. VALERIUS DICTATOR. 257 joined by all the noblest and richest of the commons, and by many, perhaps, of the best men even among the less wealthy, who would view with horror the disobedience of the soldiers, and the breach of their military oath. They prepared to put down the revolt; yet, not trusting to force alone, they named as dictator M.

Valerius Corvus, the most popular man in Rome, born of a house whose members had ever befriended the commons, himself in the vigor of youth,4g scarcely thirty, yet already old in glory, and now in the full renown of his recent victories over the Samnites. The dictator proceeded to meet the soldiers from Campania; the consuls were left to deal with the commons who had seceded from the city. But when the opposing parties49 approached each other, and citizens were seen arrayed in order of battle against citizens, all shrunk alike from Reconciliation of the bringing their contests to such an issue, and with a sudden revul-contending parties. sion of feeling the soldiers, instead of joining battle, first welcomed each other with friendly greetings, then, as they drew nearer, they grasped each other’s hands, till at last, amidst mutual tears and expressions of remorse, they rushed into each other’s arms. It may well be believed that not Valerius only, but the majority of the patricians, were noble enough to rejoice sincerely at this termination of the mutiny, although they foresaw that whatever were the demands of the soldiers and the commons, it would now be necessary to grant them. But the insurgents were also brought to a softer temper, and asked little but what might have been given them unasked, as being in itself Terms demanded by just and reasonable. First, an act of amnesty50 was passed for the hsoldiers, nnd grautmutiny and the secession, and the dictator entreated the patricians and those of the commons who had sided with them, that they would never, even in private life, in jest or in earnest, reproach any man with having been concerned in these unhappy dissensions. Then there was passed and sworn to, with all religious solemnities,51 a law which the soldiers regarded as their great charter, that no man’s name who had been once enlisted should be struck off the list of the legions without his own consent, and that no one who had once been chosen military tribune should be afterwards52 obliged to serve as a centurion. They deprecated the power of striking their names off the list of soldiers, partly because it degraded them to an inferior rank, that of the capite censi, who were “48 He was three and twenty in his first con-he says, insisted that no one who had been once sulship (Livy, VII. 40), and he was consul for tribune should afterwards be made centurion, the first time in the year 407. - See Livy, out of dislike to one P. Salonius, who had been VII. 26. made almost every other year one or the other, 49 Livy, VII. 42. Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. and who was obnoxious to them, because he I. ~ 2. This sudden burst of feeling is credible had especially opposed their meeting. Both enough; for civil war seems shocking to men Niebuhr and Wachsmuth suppose, on the conwho are little scrupulous in shedding the blood trary, that P. Salonius was a popular man with of foreigners, however unjustly. In this re-the soldiers, and that the petition was made in spect, it needs the hardness and coldness of a his behalf, to save him from being obliged to later stage of society to overcome the natural go on serving in a lower rank, after having once shrinking from domestic warfare. The feudal served in a higher. Wachsmuth well compares times are, of course, an exception to this; for the case of Volero Publilius, who complained to the isolation and lawlessness of the feudal of being required to serve as a common soldier, system the relations of countryman and fellow-after having been once centurion. (Livy, II. citizen were almost unknown. 55.) Many motives may have joined, however, S Livy, VII. 41. in suggesting this demand of the soldiers. It 61 “, Lex sacrata militaris.” A lex sacrata was a great thing for a deserving soldier, that partook of the character of a treaty, and was if once appointed military tribune (six of whom sworn to by the two parties between whom it were at this time chosen by the votes of the had been agreed to. Thus the term is applied people themselves, Livy, VII.

5), he should be only to such laws as settled points most deeply freed from the necessity of serving again, exaffecting the interests of the two orders in the cept in the same or a higher rank. And it was state, and were therefore a sort of treaty of a great thing for the mass of the commons, that peace between them. Of this sort, besides the promotion should be kept as open as possible,, famous laws respecting the tribunes of the com-and that it should be necessary every year to mons, was the law of Icilius, de Aventino pub-ff1 up the vacancies among the centurions with licando. new men, instead of confining them to a certain 52 It should be observed, that Livy gives to number of individuals who might pass at plea. this petition a different object. The soldiers, sure from one command to another. 17

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255 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXVII considered unfit to bear arms; partly because, whilst they were on military serve ice, they were protected from being personally attached for debts; and partly, also, because service in Campania bore an agreeable aspect, and might furnish a poor man with the means of relieving himself from his embarrassments. The law about the military tribunes had, probably, various objects; amongst the rest it may have been intended to advance the dignity of that office, which offered to the commons the readiest means of acquiring distinction, and thus was a natural step to the highest political magistracies. Another demand was made in a different spirit; that the pay of the horsemen Terms demanded and or knights should be lowered, they receiving at that period three refused. times as much as the foot-soldiers. In requiring this the soldiers not only wished to reduce the public expenditure, and sc to lighten their own taxation, but there was also a feeling of enmity towards the knights, who had taken a decided part against them. But on this point the senate would not yield; and the soldiers, ashamed perhaps of the motives which had led them to ask for it, did not press their demand.53

While the mutiny of the legions was thus ended, the commons, who had withdrawn from the city, returned to their homes again; and L. GeDemands of the corn-4 mones in Rome. The nucius,54 one of their tribunes, proposed to them in the Forum, certain political measures to which, it was understood; the patricians would offer no opposition. These were, ” that no man should be reelected to the same magistracy within ten years, nor hold two magistracies in the same year; and that both consuls might be plebeians, as the Licinian law had declared that one must be.” The multiplication of various offices in the same hands is an evil of which we have no instance on record, because we have no lists of any of the magistrates of this period, except the consuls only. The frequent re-election of the same person to the consulship created an aristocracy within the aristocracy, and confined the highest offices to a number of great families; and now that the Licinian law was again observed, it would raise a few plebeian houses to an undue distinction, whilst the mass of the commons would be altogether excluded. It may be observed that C.

Marcius, the plebeian consul of this very year, was now consul for the fourth time within a period of fifteen-years. But there was another law passed, which Livy could not endure to record, and General abolition of of which we know not who was the proposer:55 a law whose veryname debts. all settled societies regarded with horror; a law which is, indeed, like war, an enormous evil, but which in this is most unlike war, that it has never been adopted, except when it was really necessary to prevent an evil still greater. In order to give the commons an opportunity of rising to a more healthful condition, they were to be freed once for all from the shackles thrown around them by a former period of unavoidable distress: the consequences of the burning of the city by the Gauls had never yet been shaken off, nor did it appear likely that in the ordinary state of things they ever would be. It was demanded, therefore, by the commons, and M.

Valerius, it is said, advised compliance with their demand, that an act of grace should be extended to all debtors, and that their credb3 As the commons were persuaded by Vale-luvXir-rais tdv r; v XpEoV IrOKOuagS

A+‘lsaro warius and Horatius to abandon their demand for a’Pwxauos’ rois g * i rerrE’X.po7s (namely, the rethe summary execution of the decemvirs.-See volted soldiers), Kai aedhlav-SaLnnitic. Fragm. I. chap.

xvi. ~ 2. There is no mistaking the wellknown ex54 Niebuhr supposes, not unnaturally, that pression xpoev a7oKo7r6.-”’ Num honestum igithis Genucius belonged to the family of the trib-tur,” asks Cicero with respect to Cusar when he une Genucius, who was murdered by the aris-had just heard of his crossing the Rubicon, tocracy in the year 281.-See p.

65. He: was ” XpEy 47rOKOvraS, viyd6eov icaO6sov, sexcenta alia also, in all probability, of the same family with scelera moliri, tih? plebeian consuls of the years 385, 387, and’riV OEeV!peyifrnv acr E’XEsv rvpavvfia?” 388. Ad Atticum, VII. 11. 65 It is attested by Appian, who, as Niebuhr The expression in the Roman writer is no less thinks, copied this part of his work from -Dio-decisive. M. Valerius, he says, “sublato sre nysius; and by the little work De Viris Illus-alieno, seditionem compressit.” tribus. Appian’s words are plain enough:’

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CHAP. XXVIII.] PEACE BETWEEN ROME AND SAMNIUM. 259 itors should not be permitted to enforce payment. In other words, all those who had pledged their personal freedom for the payment of their debts (nexi) were released from their bond; nor could the preetor give over to his creditor’s power, addicere, any debtor who had refused, or might refuse, to enter into such an engagement. Thus the burden of actual debts was taken away; and to prevent the pressure of an equal burden hereafter, even the lowest rate of interest was declared illegal, and any man who received more than the actual sum which he had lent was liable to restore it fourfold. This was a sort of national bankruptcy, yet surely it wore the mildest features of that evil, and in some respects did not deserve the name. The Its noeessity and jut-o nation itself broke no faith; but it required one portion of its citi-ice. zens to sacrifice their strict legal rights in favor of another portion for the common benefit of all. It was doing on a large scale and under the pressure of urgent necessity, what we see done every day on a smaller scale for an object, not of necessity, but of expediency; when individuals are forced to sell their property at a price fixed by others, in order to facilitate the execution of a canal or a railway. The patricians were, in like manner, obliged to part with the money which had been advanced as a loan either by themselves or by their fathers; and the compensation which they received was the continued existence of a state of society fraught to them above all their fellowcitizens with the highest means of happiness: they lost their money to preserve their country. Had such a sacrifice been made to the indolence, or carelessness, or dishonesty of their debtors, it would have been mischievous as a precedent, however urgent the necessity which led to it; but in the present case the debts of the commons had arisen out of a common calamity, not occasioned by their fault, nor to be remedied by their exertions: their distress, therefore, was fairly entitled to sympathy, and if there be any meaning in the term civil society, justice would require that its stronger members should bear the burdens of the weaker, and should submit to more than their share of the inconveniences of a common misfortune, rather than allow it to entail upon their fellowcitizens not inconvenience merely, but absolute ruin. The domestic disturbances of this year produced important consequences abroad. The whole brunt of the Samnite war devolved on the Latins, and they sustained it so ably that their consideration GLtins. Peace.bet thee amongst their allies was greatly increased, and Latium, rather than Rome, began to be regarded as the most powerful member of the league. The remains of the Volscians, such as the brave people of Privernum, and the Antiatians, together with those more distant tribes of the same stock who bordered on Campania, and were known to the Romans under the name of the Auruncans, began to gather themselhes under the supremacy of Latium, and the Campanians, who had good reason to dislike the presence of Roman soldiers in their towns, may have hoped to find in a new confederacy, of which the Latins should be the head, protection at once against Rome and against the Samnites. Accordingly, the Romans felt that it was no time for them to continue their quarrel with Samnium; and in the very next year they concluded with the Sam-A. U. c. 414. A. c. nites”G a separate peace. Thus the relations of all these nations”40 were entirely changed: Rome had connected herself with Samnium, and perhaps 66 The Rolnan story is (Livy, VIII. 1, 2), that ritory on different sides, the Romans suddenly when L.

Amilius, the consul, entered the Sam-and treachlierously made a separate peace with nite territory he found no enemy to oppose him; the common enemy, and withdrew their army: that the Samnites humbly sued for peace, and and that, not content with this, they actually purchased an armistice to allow them to send entered into an alliance with the Samnites, and ambassadors to Rome, by giving the consul a were ready to join them against Latium.“year’s pay for his army, and three months’ al-Compare the extreme dissatisfaction of the forlowance of corn. What would have been the mer allies. of Lacedamon, when she suddenly account of a Latin writer?

Would it not have formed her separate treaty with Athens soon been something of this sort? “That when the after the conclusion of the peace of Nicias.confederate armies of Rome and Latium were Thucydides, V. 27.

actually in the field, to invade the Samnite ter

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260 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIX through the Samnites with their neighbors the Marsians and Pelignians; while, on the other side, stood a new confederacy, consisting of the Latins and all the people of Opican extraction who lay between them and the Samnite frontier, whether known by the name of Volscians, Auruncans, Sidicinians, or Campanians. In the same manner, after the Peloponnesian war, we find Thebes and Corinth, so long the close allies of Lacedaemon, organizing a new confederacy against her; and thus, at a later period, Athens was at one time supporting Thebes, and shortly after, having become jealous of her growing power and ambition, joined Lacedemon against her former ally; so that in the last campaigns of Epaminondas, the free citizens of Athens and the barbarian mercenaries of Dionysius the tyrant were fighting in the same ranks in defence of the Spartan aristocracy. CHAPTER XXIX, THE GREAT LATIN WAR-BATTLE UNDER MOUNT

VESUVIUS-THE PUBLILIAN LAWS-FINAL SETTLEMENT OF LATIUM.-A. U. C. 415-417

(410-412 NIEBUHE). ” Je me refuse a croire que des peuples conf6der&s puissent lutter longtemps, a egalite de force, contre une nation ou la puissance gouvernmentale serait centralisee.” DzE TOCQUEVILLE, De la D6mocratie en Am6rique; Tome I. p. 290. ALTHIOUGH Rome had concluded a separate peace with Samnium, yet the Uncertain relatiols be-old alliance with the Latins still subsisted in name unbroken. tween Rome and Latium.

But it could not long remain so; for the Latins continued the war against the Samnites, and might undoubtedly have called upon the Romans to aid them, according to the terms of the alliance; while the Samnites’ called upon the Romans to procure for them peace with Latium also. In fact, the existing state of things showed clearly that the relations between Rome and Latium must undergo some change; either the two nations must become wholly separate, or more closely united; if they were to act together at all, some scheme must be devised to insure that they should act unanimously. The general congress of the Latin cities took upon itself to propose such a scheme; Tae Lntins make pro. and the two preetors for the year, L. Annius of Setia, and L. Nup8oa Rfome ad La-onb- misius of Circeii, magistrates corresponding to the Roman consuls, tium. and retaining the name which the consuls had borne down to the time of the decemvirate, were dispatched with ten of the principal deputies of the congress, to communicate their proposal to Rome.2 The substance of it was that the two nations should be completely united; that they should both be governed by two consuls or prsetors, one to be chosen from each nation; that there should be one senate, to consist of Romans and Latins in equal proportions; I Livy’s whole narrative proceeds on the as- -pleased: that is, in Greek language, they were sumption that the Latins were the dependent atrd6tKoL, or able to give and receive satisfaction allies of Rome, and that the war was on their in their own name, without being obliged to part a revolt. Now, this is certainly false, as refer their quarrels to any superior; one of the we know from the terms of the original alliance characteristics of an equal as opposed to a depreserved by Dionysius, V. 61 (see p. 58 of pendent alliance.-See Thucyd. V. 18, 27.

I this history), and from the indisputable author-have,therefore, tacitly corrected all Livy’s false ity of Cincius (p. 58, note 4). Livy himself coloring in this matter, and given his facts in supplies a refutation of his own story; for he their true light. allows expressly, VIII. 2, that the Latins had 2 Livy, VIII. 5. the right of making war with whom they

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CHAP. XXIX.] PROPOSALS OF THE LATINS. 261 and a third similar provision must have been made for the popular branch of the government, so that a number of Latin tribes should be created, equal to that of the Roman, and the fifty-four tribes of the two nations should constitute one common sovereign assembly. In one point the Latins were willing to yield precedence to Rome; none of their cities was equal to Rome in size or greatness: Rome, therefore, was to be the capital of the nation and the seat of government; there the senate should sit, and the assembly of the tribes be held; the Roman Jupiter of the Capitol should be equal to the Latin Jupiter of the mountain of Alba; to both should the consuls of the united people offer their vows when they first came into office, and to the temples of both should they go up in triumph, when they returned home from war with victory.3 There were probably some in Rome who would have accepted this union gladly; but the general feeling, both of the patricians and of the commons, was strongly against it. It was viewed as a sacrifice jeeted with indigeuof national independence and national pride.

To the Latins, used already to a federal government, it was but taking another city into their union; but to the Romans, whose whole political life was centred in Rome, it was admitting strangers into the Forum and into the Senate? and allowing the majesty of the Roman Jupiter to be profaned by the entrance of a foreigner into his temple. Accordingly when the Latin prietors announced their proposal to, the senate, which had assembled in the Capitol, it was rejected with indignation; and T. Manlius Torquatus,4 who was one of the newly elected consuls, declared that if the senate should be so lost to itself as to receive the law from a man of Setia, he would come armed into the senate-house, and would plunge his sword into the body of the first Latin whom he saw within its walls. Then he turned to the image of the Capitoline Jupiter, and exclaimed: “Hear, O

Jove, this wickedness! Wilt thou endure to behold a stranger consul and a stranger senate within the sacred precinct of thy temple, as though thou wert thyself vanquished and made captive?” To this the Latin praetor, L.

Annius of Setia, made a reply which the Romans called insulting to their god. “But Jove,” said the Roman story,5 “taught the stranger to repent him of his scorn: for as soon as he had spoken his proud words, the lightning flashed and the thunder pealed, and as the Latin left the temple in haste, to go down by the hundred steps towards the Forum, his foot slipped, and he fell from the top of the steps to the bottom, and his head was dashed against a stone, and he died.” Some of the annalists, struck perhaps by its being a notorious fact that L. Annius commanded the Latin army in the war, scrupled to say that he had been killed before its commencement; they said, therefore, that he had only been stunned by his fall: and they said nothing of the sudden burst of the lightning and thunder. No doubt, if the traditions of the family of L. Annius had been preserved, they would have given a different picture of his mission. But whatever were the particulars of it, its result is certain; the proposal for an equal union was rejected, and the sword was to decide whether Latium should from henceforth be subject to Rome, or Rome to Latium. s If the Latins really consented, as is not im-festival on the mountain of Alba, as well as to probable, to acknowledge Rome as the capital sacrifice to the Roman Jupiter in the Capitol. of the united nation, it accounts for their sub-Livy, XXI. 63, XXII. 1. And, although the sequent acquiescence in the settlement made instances are of more rare occurrence, yet we by the Romans after the war, so far as this, that read of Roman generals triumphing at the it shows their willingness to waive the mere Mons Albanus, and going up in solemn procesfeeling as to the name of their country, and sion by the Via Triumphalis to the temple of their consciousness that Rome was so superior the Latin Jupiter, as they went up usually by to every other Latin city, as to be fairly entitled the Via Sacra to the Capitol. We cannot imto be the head of the united nation.

What I agine, therefore, that the Latins, when prohave added in the text respecting the Jupiter posing a perfectly equal union, should have conof the mountain of Alba, seems warranted by sented to assign less honors to their national the actual practice of later times, even after the god, than he enjoyed even when they were beLatins were in a state of acknowledged inferi-come dependent. ority to Rome. It is well known, that one of 4 Livy, VIII. 5. the consul’s first duties after entering upon 5

Livy, VIII. 6. his office, was to offer sacrifice at the great Latin

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262 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIt The Romans, however, had made up their minds to this issue before they heard Tho Romans repare the proposals of the Latin ambassadors. They were anxious to ord P..ee T.re Mnliu engage in the war at a moment when they might be assisted by pointed consuls. the whole force of the Samnites: the Latins, on the other hand, would gladly have reduced Samnium to submission before they came to an open breach with Rome. Resolved, therefore, on the struggle, and well aware of its importance, the Romans wished to anticipate the election of the new consuls,6 that they might have more time for their preparations before the usual season for military operations arrived, which, as we have seen, was not till after the harvest. Accordingly, the consuls of the year 409 were required by a decree of the senate to resign their office before the end of their year, the middle of the summer, and two men of the highest military reputation were appointed to succeed them. One of these was T.

Manlius Torquatus, renowned in his youth, like Valerius Corvus, for having slain a gigantic Gaul in single combat, and no less remarkable for a force of character, such as is best fitted for the control of great emergencies, when what in ordinary life is savageness becomes often raised and sobered into heroism. He had been consul only four years before; but a special act, we must suppose, dispensed in his case with the recent provisions of the Genucian law. His colleague was the deliverer of the Roman army from its imminent peril in Samnium in the first campaign of the late war, and a man no less distinguished nine years earlier for his moderation and equity as one of the five commissioners appointed to relieve the commons from the burden of their debts,7 the famous P. Decius Mus. The Romans had good reason to prepare earnestly for the coming contest; for importance of the con-never had they been engaged in one so perilous. With two or test.

three exceptions all the Latin cities were united against them; not all indeed with equal determination, but still all were their enemies.

Tusculum,a whose true friendship they had so long experienced; Lavinium, the sacred city, which contained the holy things reported to have been brought by.Eneas front Troy; Setia, Cerceii, and Signia, Roman colonies, were now joined with the mass of the Latin nation, with Tibur and Prueneste, with Pedum, Nomentum, and Aricia. The Latin nobles were personally known to those of Rome, and in many instances connected with them by mutual marriages; the two nations speaking the same language, with the same manners, institutions, and religious rites, trained with the same discipline to the use of the same arms, were bound moreover to each other by the closeness of their long alliance; their soldiers had constantly served in the same camp, and almost in the same tents; the several parts of their armies9 had constantly been blended together; legions, cohorts, and maniples had been made up of Romans and Latins in equal proportions; the soldiers, centurions, and tribunes of both nations were thus familiar with each other’s faces: and each man would encounter and recognize in his enemy an old and tried comrade. “The Romans and Latins,” says Livy,1~

“were alike in every thing, except in their courage.” This is an unworthy slander. Even nations of difcharacter not imferior ferent race, and climate, and institutions, when long trained together under a common system of military discipline, and accustomed to fight side by side in the same army, lose all traces of their original disparity. But what the Latins were, we know from the rank which they held o Livy, VIII. 2. the Lavinians; and their disposition is evident “Quinqueviri mensarii.” See Livy, VII. from Livy’s own story, VIII. 11. The praetors 21. of the whole nation for the first year of the war; Gemrinus Metius, who was slain by the came fiom Setia and Circeii, and they are esyoung T. Manlius, commanded the horsemen pecially said to have induced Signia to join the of Tusculum.-Livy, VIII. 7. Lavinium, ac-confederacy. cording to Livy, took no part in the first cam-9 Liy, III. 7, 8. paign, but the Fasti Capitolini says that the’~ “Adeo nihil apud Latinos dissonum all consul Mvenius, inthe year 417, triumphed over RomanA re prvater animos erat.”-VIII. 8.

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COAP. XXIX.] ALLIES OF ROME. 263 amongst the nations of Italy, and from the families which they afterwards furnished to Rome, when it became their common country. The Latins were able to contend on equal terms with the Samnites and Volscians, with the countrymen of C. Pontius and C. Marius.

From Latium Rome received the Fulvii,“1 a family marked at once with all the great and all the bad qualities of the Roman aristocracy; and what Roman house could ever boast of brighter specimens of every Roman virtue than the Latin house of the Catos of Tusculum? The issue of the contest was not owing to the superior courage of the Romans, but to the inherent advantages possessed by a single powerful state when contending against a confederacy whose united strength she can all but balance alone, while to each of its separate members she is far superior. With the Latins were joined, as we have seen, the Camp,nians, the Sidicinians, the Auruncans, and the Volscians, including under this name the The Latin confederacy, various remnants of that people, the Antiatians on the coast, and and i weaktneses. the several tribes or cities in the valley of the Liris.

Laurentum, Ardea, and perhaps Lanuvium,‘2 alone of all the Latin cities took part with Rome: Fundi and Formiae stood aloof from the rest of their Volscian countrymen and remained neutral, allowing a free passage to the Roman armies through their territory.‘3 It was a more remarkable circumstance, and one of ill omen for the unanimity and perseverance of the Latin confederacy, that the knights‘4 or aristocracy of Capua, whether of Samnite extraction, or of mixed blood, Samnite, Etruscan, and Opican, protested as a body against the war with Rome, although for the present the influence of the Latin party overbore their opposition. But it was evident that on the first reverses they would regain their ascendency, and hasten to withdraw their countrymen from the league. We have also indications” of a Roman party in some of the cities of the Latins; and it is impossible to suppose that Tusculum in particular should not have contained many zealous supporters of the old alliance with Rome. Probably the Roman and anti-Roman parties were in most places more or less identical with the aristocracy and the party of the commons; and already, as in the second Punic war, Rome was regarded by the Italian aristocracies as the greatest bulwark of their ascendency. With Rome were united some few Latin towns,l6 some of her own colonies,‘7 her old allies the Hernicans, and above all the Samnites and their Alliesof Rome. ” L.

Fulvius, who was consul in the year when their cause was almost desperate.

But I 427,. had been chief magistrate of Tusculum only am not sure that the mistake is not to be asthe very year before he was consul at Rome.-
cribed to Livy himself rather than to his copyPliny, Hist. Natur. VII. 43.

Ed. Venet. 1559. ists: for it seems a just remark of IDraken12 I agree with Niebuhr and with Sigonius, borch’s that Livy calls the people of Lavinium that in Ilivy’s narrative, VIII. 12, 13, Lavinio not Lavinii, but Laurentes, as if he had conand Laviniis should be restored instead of La-fused the two towns together. Yet “Launuvio and Lanuvinis. It is not only that the rentes,” in VIII. 11, must mean the people of Fasti Capitolini name the people of Lavinium Laurentum, not of Lavinium, from a comparand not of Lanuvium as those over whom the ison with Livy’s own statement about Laivinicousul Mcenius triumphed, or that several MSS. um in the beginning of the same chapter; and of Livy support the correction; but in the set-that the two names really belong to two distinct tlement of Latium the Lanuvians are named places is proved by their being both found in apart, as if they had been treated with singular the list of the thirty Latin towns given by favor which is, scarcely to be conceived, if they Dionysius, V. 61. had been among the last of the Latins to re-13 Livy, VIII. 14. main in arms. And that they were favorably 14 Livy, VIII. 11.

treated appears also from the famous article 15 The Romans received information of the “Municipium” in Festus, where they are class-hostile designs of the Latins, says Livy, “per ed along with the people of Fundi, Formie, and quosdam privatis hospitiis necessitudinibusque others, who we know were thought worthy of conjunctos.” These, like the,rp6,svoL in Greece, reward rather than punishment. Besides, Livy would undoubtedly form a party disposed to himself tells us that the Antiatians in the year Rome, whose influence would be felt as soon as 415 ravaged the district called Solonius (VIII. the fortune of the war turned against the Latins.

12), and we know from Cicero, de Divinatione 16 The lands of the Ardeatians were ravaged 1. 3a), that this district was a part of the terri bythe Antiatians in 415 (Livy, VIII. 12). Ardea, tory of Lanuvium. It is certain, therefore, that therefore, must have been at that time in alli,Lanuvium must have been friendly to Rome at ance with Rome. that time, and if so, it is not conceivable that 17 Such as Ostia, whose lands were also ravshe could afterwards have joined the Latins, aged by the Antiatians in 415. (Livy, ibid.)

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264 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIX. confederacy, including, it is probable, the warlike nations of the Marsians and the Pelignians. When the Latins sent the two praetors as ambassadors to Rome, it is evident that no active warfare could be going on in Campania. Latin gar The Romsns commeneo the war unexpectedly, risons had probably wintered there to repel plundering parties of and both consubs march through Samnium into the Samnites; and the Latin army would march thither as soon 1an.pnia. ~ as the season for military operations arrived, to renew their invasion of Samnium. -‘No expectation seems to have been entertained that their proposal of an equal union would be answered by an immediate declaration of war. Certain it is that the breach of the old alliance was far more to be charged on the Romans than on them; for the Romans had deserted them in the midst of a war jointly undertaken by the two nations, and had made peace with the common enemy; and the Campanians, who had originally joined the alliance to obtain protection against the Samnites, had no choice but to follow the Latins, as from them alone was that protection now to be hoped for. But the opportunity was tempting, and the Romans, taking advantage”t of the earliness of the season, when the Latins might scarcely be prepared for active operations, hastily declared war, and dispatched both consuls with two consular armies, not by the direct road into Campania by Tarracina or by the Liris, but by a circuitous route at the back of their enemies’

country, through the territory of the Marsians and Pelignians”’ into Samnium. There the consuls were joined by the Satniilte army; and their combined forces then descended from the mountains of Samnium, and encamped in presence of the enemy in the plain of Capua, with a retreat open into the country of the Samnites on their rear, but with the whole army and territory of the hostile confederacy interposed between them and Rome.

While the Romans and Latins lay here over against each other, the consuls The son of T. Manltu issued an ordert0 strictly forbidding all irregular skirmishing, or trengary to hiathes o-single encounters with the enemy.

They wished to prevent the ders, and is executed. confusion which might arise in chance combats between two parties alike in arms and in language; perhaps also they wished to stop all intercourse with the Latins, lest the enemy should discover their real strength, or lest old feelings of kindness should revive in the soldiers’ minds, and they should begin to ask whether they had any sufficient grounds of quarrel. It was on this occasion that T. Manlius, the consul’s son, was challenged by Geminus Metius, of Tusculum;2 and, heedless of the order of the generals, he accepted the challenge and slew his antagonist. The young man returned in triumph to the camp, and laid his spoils at his father’s feet; but the consul, turning away from him, immediately summoned the soldiers to the pretorium, and ordered his son to be beheaded before them. All were struck with horror at the sight, and the younger soldiers, from a natural sympathy with youth and courage, regarded the consul When we consider that the usual season fobr again with effect, even after it has been often hostilities at this period was the autumn, it may told before, if we have received it from an oribe doubted whether the Latin army which fought ginal and independent source; because if under Vesuvius was more than that force which twenty eye-witnesses give an account of the had wintered in Campania to garrison the sev-same eve:it, the impression which it has made eral towns, and as such very inferior in num-on each of them will have been different, and, bers to the two consular armies of the Romans.

therefore, each will tell the story in his own way, The rapid march of the consuls through the cen-and it will contain something new and original.

tral countries of Italy may have been unknown But when we derive all our knowledge from one to the Latins, and their sudden appearance in single account, and that account has been once Campania in conjunction with the Samnites may perfectly given, there is nothing to be done by have been as startling a surprise to the enemy, later writers but to copy it, or simply to state as that of Claudius Nero to Hasdrubal after his its substance.

Thus it is with Livy’s famous admirable march from Bruttium to join his col-description of the condemnation of T. Manlins eague on the Motaurus; or as that of Napoleon by his father; the story cannot be better told to the Austrians when the army of reserve than he has told it, and we have no means of broke out from the Val d’Aosta on the plains adding to it or varying it from other original of Lombardy in the campaign of 1800.

sources. I have therefore followed Niebuhr in 1s Livy, VIII. 6. simply stating its outline; for the finished pic20 Livy, VIII. 6. ture the reader must consult Livy himself. n Livy, VIII.’. The same story may be told

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CHAP. XXIX.] BATTLE UNDER MOUNT VESUVIUS. 265 with abhorrence to the latest hour of his life; but fear and respect were mingled with their abhorrence, and strict obedience, enforced by so dreadful an example, was felt by all to be indispensable. The stories which we are obliged to follow, shifting their scene as rapidly and unconnectedly as our old drama, transport the two armies without Th two aries mee a word of explanation from the neighborhood of Capua to the foot near Mount Vesu.vis. Resolution of the Ron of Mount Vesuvius, where, on the road which led to Veseris, ac-man.generals to devote themselves to death for cording to their own way of expressing it, the decisive battle was the victory of their fought. What Veseris was,22 or where it was situated, on which side of Vesuvius the action took place, or what had brought the two armies thither, are questions to which we can give no answers. But he who had been present at the last council held by the Roman generals before they parted to take their respective stations in the line, might have seen that, having planned for the coming battle all that skill and ability could devise, they were ready to dare all that the most heroic courage could do or suffer: the aruspices had been consulted23 as to the import of the signs given by the entrails of the sacrifice: their answers had been made known to the principal cfficers of the army; and with it the determination of the consuls, that, on whichever side of the battle the Romans should first begin to give ground, the consul who commanded in that quarter should forthwith devote himself, and the hosts of the enemy with himself, to the gods of death and to the grave: “for fate,” said they, “requires the sacrifice of a general from one party, and of an army from the other: one of us, therefore, will be the general that shall perish, that the army which is to perish also may be not ours, but the army of the Latins.” We have seen that the arms and tactic of both armies were precisely similar. In each there were two grand divisions, the first forming the ordi-Similar dispositions ol nary line of battle, and the second the reserve; the latter being, both a.ie. in point of numbers, considerably the strongest.24 The first division, however, was subdivided into two equal parts, the first of which, known by the name of the Hastati, consisted of light and heavy armed soldiers, in the proportion of onethird of the former to two-thirds of the latter; the second part, called the Principes, contained the flower of the whole army, all heavyarmed men, in the vigor of their age, and most perfectly and splendidly accoutred. The reserve, forming in itself a complete army, contained a threefold subdivision; onethird of it was composed of veteran heavyarmed soldiers, the Triarii; another third of lightarmed, Rorarii; and the remainder were mere supernumeraries, Accensi, who were destined to supply the places of those who should have fallen in the first line, or to act with the reserve in cases of the last extremity. These divisions being the same in both armies, the generals on either side knew precisely the force and nature of the enemy’s reserve, and could calculate the movements of their own accordingly. The tactic of the Romans was, at this period, in an intermediate state, between the use of the order of the phalanx, with the round shield and pike, Tacticofthe Romanleand the loose array of the later legion, with the large oblong shield, gion at this period. sword, and pilum, such as it is described by Polybius. But the want of all co22 “

Apud Veserim fluvium,” is the expres-the dead, and earth, the mother of all, claimed sion of the author “de Viris Illustriblis” twice as their victims the general of one party, and over, in his notices of P. Decis and of T. Man-the army of the other: the consuls then sacrilius. Cicero twice mentions the name, but sim-ficed, to see whether the sign observed in the ply says ” ad Veserim.” There is no stream at entrails of the victim would speak the same present on either side of Vesuvius which will language as their vision. answer the description; but it is scarcely pos-2’ See the famous description of the legion at sible to calculate the changes effected in the ge-this period in Livy, VIII. 8, and Niebllhrs comography of a country by volcanic action during ments upon it, Vol. I. p. 497, &c.

Ed. 2, 1827, a period of so many centuries. and Vol. III. p. 110, &c. The first line, comLivy, VIII. 6. Both consuls, said the story, prising the hastati and principes, contained in had seen in the night the same vision; a figure each legion only 1890 men; the reserve, cone of more than human stature and majesty ap-sisting of the triaril, rorarii, and accensi, amountpeared to them, and told them that the gods of ed to 2790.

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266 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIXI temporary accounts of this middle period makes it exceedingly difficult to comprehend it clearly. Reserving, therefore, for another place all minute inquiries into the subject, I shall here only take for granted some of the principal points, so far as they are essential to a description of the battle. The Roman and Latin legions were, as we have seen, opposed to each other. Order of battle of both The Samnites and Hernicans, who formed one wing of the Roman armies.

army, must, in like manner, have been opposed to the nations of their own or of a kindred stock, the Campanians, Sidicinians, and Volscians. Of the Roman line itself, the legions on the right were commanded by Titus Manlius,25 those on the left by Publius Decius. The battle began with the encounter of the hastati, who formed on each side, Battleunder Mountv. as we have seen, the first division of the first line. Consisting both suvius.. of light and heavy armed soldiers, they closed with each other with levelled pikes, amidst showers of darts from their lightarmed men, who either skirmished in the intervals between the maniples of the pikemen, or, sheltered behind them, threw their missiles over the heads of their comrades into the line of the enemy. In this conflict the right wing of the Latins prevailed, and the Roman hastati Roman first line in di-of the left wing fell back in disorder upon the principes, who formed order.

what may be called the main battle. Decius then called aloud for M.

Valerius,26 the pontifex maximus. ” The gods,” P. Decius devotes him-he said, ” must help us now;” and he made the pontifex dictate self, to him the form of words in which he was to devote himself and the legions of the enemy to the gods of death. It should be remembered that to Decius, as one of the commons, all the ceremonies of the Roman religion were an unknown mystery. The pontifex bade him take his consular toga,27 and wrap 25 Livy, VII. 9. refer to the apostolical writings in the New Tesa2 Who this M.

Valerius was, we know not; tament. Livy himself may have copied the whether it was the M. Valerius Poplicola, who prayer immediately from one of the older anwas consul in 400 and 402, or M. Valerius Cor-nalists, either from Fabius Pictor, from whom vus, who had been already three times consul Gellius quotes one or two similar notices of anand once dictator, and of whom Pliny relates, cient religious observances, or from L.

Cincius, that in the course of his long life, he was aup-whose treatise “de Re Militari” contained the pointed to curule offices no fewer than one and form used by the Fetiales in declaring war, and twenty times. Hist.

Natur. VII. 48. that of the military oath. See Gellius, XVI. 4. “Togam pretextam sumere jussit;” “sn-Varro also was fond of recording ancient forms, mere,” because itwasnotcommonlyworn in bat-carmina, in their own words; of which we have tie. The form of words in which Decius devo-several instances in that almost solitary remted himself ran as follows: 1” Thou, Janus, thou, nant of his voluminous works which has reached Jupiter, thou, Mars, our father, thou, Quirinus, our times, his work on the Latin language. thou, Bellona; ye, Lares, ye, the nine gods, ye, Forms of all sorts, and laws, may be relied on the gods of our fathers’ land, ye, the gods whose as perfectly genuine, even when ascribed to a power disposes both of us and of our enemies, period the history of which is good for nothing. and ye also gods of the dead, I pray you, I hum-To notice more particularly the prayer of Debly beseech you, I crave, and doubt not to re-cius, it may be seen that it addresses Janus beceive this grace from you, that ye would pros-fore all other gods, even before Jupiter himself per the people of Rome and the Quirites with in evident agreement with that ancient rite of all might and victory; and that ye would visit opening the gates of Janus at the beginning of the enemies of the people of Rome and of the a war, which implied that he was in an especial Quirites with terror, with dismay, and with manner the god whom the Romaus wished death. And, according to these words which to go out with them to battle. See p. 4. Mars I have spoken, so do I now, on the behalf of Pater, like the ZEUs and’AroXeov xrarpyos, has a the commonwealth of the Roman people and the manifest reference to the legend of the birth of Quirites, on the behalf of the army, both the le-Romulus.

As a god of war, Mars, I should imagions and the foreign aids, of the Roman peo-gine, was of a later date in Italy than Janus; ple and the Quirites, devote the legions and the or, at any rate, that the two gods canle to the foreign aids of our enemies, along with myself, Romans from different quarters. Virgil sak to the gods of the dead, and to the grave.”

No of the opening of the gates of Janus as a atin one can doubt the genuineness of this prayer, rite, older than the origin of Rome. The “lawhich, together with the rules to be observed res” here spoken of, would be, I suppose, lain these solemn devotions, Livy has copied, he res militares” (see Orelli’s Inscriptions, No. tells us, ” verbis ipsis, ut tradita nuncupataque 1665), ” lares,” as is well known, being a genersunt:” VIII. 11; where “tradita,” I may ob-al title, and denoting powers, or mighty ones; serve, does not refer to any oral tradition, but their particular character and office being exto the pontifical books: just as Cyprian, where pressed by a particular title, or implied by the he appeals to “traditio apostolica,” means to nature of the case. Thus L.

Emilius, in the

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CHAP. XXIX.] P. DECIUS DEVOTES HIMSELF TO DEATH. 267 it round his head, putting out his hand from under it, to hold it to his face, and to set.

his feet upon a javelin, and so to utter the set words which he should dictate. When they had been duly spoken, the consul sent his lictors to his colleague, to say that he had devoted himself to death for the deliverance of the Roman army. Then, with his toga wrapped around his body, after the fashion adopted in sacrifices to the gods, he sprung upon his horse, armed at all points,2” plunged amidst the ranks of the enemy, and was slain. Such an example of selfdevotion in a general is in all cases inspiriting; but the Romans beheld in this not only the heroic valor of Decius, but the certain devotion of their enemies to the vengeance of the gods; what was due from themselves to the powers of death Decius had paid for them; so, like men freed from a burden, they rushed on with light and cheerful hearts, as if appointed to certain victory. The Latins, too, understood the meaning of Decius’ death, when they saw his dress and heard his words of devotion; and no doubt it produced Tho main battles on on their minds something of dismay. But, soon recovering, the both sides engage. main battles on both sides closed in fierce onset; and though the light troops of the Roman reserve were also brought into action, and skirmished amongst the maniples of the hastati and principes, yet victory seemed disposed to favor the Latins. In this extremity Manlius, well knowing that in a contest so equal the last reserve brought into the field on either side would inevitably decide The Reman reserve dethe day, still kept back the veterans of his second line, and called cides the fate of tle~ forward only his accensi or supernumeraries, whom, for this very d purpose, he had, contrary to the usual custom, furnished with complete arms. Trhe Latins mistook these for the veterans, or triarii, and thinking that the last reserve of the Romans was now engaged, they instantly brought up their own. The Romans struggled valiantly, but at last were beginning to give way, when, at a signal given, the real reserve of the Roman veterans started forwards, advanced through the intervals of the wavering line in front of them, and with loud cheers charged upon the enemy. Such a shock at such a moment was irresistible; they broke through the whole army of the Latins almost without loss; the war with Antiochus, when engaged in a sea-prayer, to show that the Romans did not treat fight with the enemy, vowed to build a temple them with that irreverence which the Latin amto the lares permarini, or ” the powers or genii bassador had manifested towards the Jupiter of the deep.” Livy, XL. 52. Macrobius, Sat-of the Capitol. urnalia, I. 10. Muller, Etrusker, Vol. II. p. Lastly, to end this long note, it has been 129, conf. p. 91. The war lares, to whom Decius doubted what is the meaning of the expression, prayed, are, apparently, the same powers that “veniam petoferoque,”’ which occurs in the are represented on two Etruscan tombs, engra-prayer of Decius. I think the btrue interpretavings of which are given by Micali in the plates tion of ” fero” is ” nanciscor;” and that as some accompanying his history, P1. 105, 106. They have understoodlit (see the note on the words in are winged figures’ male and female, who are Bekker’s Livy), the words are added as of good present in a battle, taking part with the several omen, ” the grace which I crave I feel sure that combatants. I shall also obtain ” in the wellknown future The ” ninle gods,”’ dii novensiles,” are prob-sense of the present tense, in which ” fero” sigably the nine gods of the Etruscan religion, nifies, “I am going to obtain.” It may, perwho alone had the power of launching light-haps, signify no more than an earnest wish, “I ning and thunderbolts. See Miiller, Etrusker, am ready to obtain,’ “I would fain obtain;” Vol. II. p. 84, note 10. According to another but, at any rate, “ferre veniam” must signify definition, Servius, AEn. VIII. 187, the dii no- ” to receive favor,” as ” petere” signifies to sue vensiles were gods who had been deified for for it.” their good deeds; “quibus merita virtutis delde-28, Armatus in equum insilivit,” says Livy.

rint numinis dignitatem.” Zonaras says, ri arrXa 1Ksuis (VII. 26). But this By “the gods whose 7power disposes both of must refer only to the moments while he was us and of our enemies,” ” divi quorum est po-uttering the prayer: when that was ended, he testas nostrorum hostiumque,”

may be meant resumed the full arms of a Roman general; only either the especial tutelar powers of eachnation, his sacred character, as one devoted to the gods, the ” lares urbium et civitatum” (see Orelli, was marked by the peculiar manner in which Inscription. Collect. 1668, 1670, and Miiller, his toga was wrapped around him, the ” cinctus Etrusker, Vol.

II. p. 91, 93), or the peculiar na-Gabinus.” tional gods of each, such as the Jupiter, Juno, With respect to the nature and origin of the and Minerva of the Capitol for Rome, and the cinctus Gabinus, see Miiller, Etrusker, Vol. HI, Jupiter of the mountains of Alba for Latium. p. 266, The gods of Latium might be addressed in the

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268 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIX battle became a butchery, and, according to the usual result of engagements fought hand to band, where a broken army can neither fight nor fly, nearly threefourths of the Latins were killed or taken. How far the Samnites contributed to this victory, whether they, after having Share of the Samniter beaten the Volscians and Campanians, threatened the flank of the in the battle. Latins at the moment of the last charge of the Roman veterans, there was no Samnite historian to tell, and no Roman annalist would tell truly. Nor need we wonder at this; for if we had only certain English accounts of the battle of Waterloo, who would know that the Prussians had any effectual share in that day’s victory? If the importance of a battle be a just reason for dwelling upon it in detail, then I may be excused for having described minutely this great action between the Romans and Latins under Mount Vesuvius; for to their victory on that day, securing to them forever the alliance of Latium, the Romans owed their conquest of the world. The wreck of the Latin army retreated by different routes out of Campania; The Latis are agin and the conquerors had suffered so severely that they were in no defeated, and manayoit-condition to pursue them. The fugitives first halted at Minturnae;29’es submit. then finding themselves not molested, they advanced again to Vescia, a town described as in the country of the Ausonians, one of the Greek forms of the name of the Opicans or Oscans, and situated apparently on the eastern or Campanian side of the Massican hills, where the streams run towards the Savone. Here they rallied, and L.

Numisius, the Latin preetor, used every effort to revive their courage, and’to procure reinforcements both from Latium, and from the Volscians; Campania having been wholly lost by the late battle. A large force was thus again assembled, and the Romans and Samnites, who had been themselves also reinforced, we may suppose, in the interval, from Samniumt at any rate, if not from Rome, hastened a second time to encounter them. But the victory was easy and decisive; and as no third army could immediately be raised, the consul entered Latium without opposition, plundered the open country, and received the submission of several cities. The Latin confederacy was, in fact, broken up forever. According to the Fasti, the consuls of the preceding year must have resigned T. Manlius returns to so long before the regular expiration of their office, that Manlius Rome and triumphs. and Decius must have been appointed to succeed them almost before the end of the winter, and their great campaign was carried on in the early spring. Manlius made all haste, no doubt, to return home to his triumph; but as he triumphed on the 18th of May,30 it is clear that he had greatly anticipated the usual season for military operations, and by so doing had perhaps taken the enemy by surprise. Great as had been his services, his triumph was regarded with no joy; such rejoicings seemed unbecoming31 in one who had lost both his colleague and his own son in the course of the contest; and the younger Romans looked on him less as the conqueror of the Latins, than as the murderer of his son. The Latin towns which had already submitted were deprived of all their public or domain land, and a like penalty was imposed on the Campanians.32 But as 29 Livy, VIII. 10, 11. It is plain from this that by a route circuitous indeed, but secure from Samnium was altogether the base of the Roman interruption, through the country of the Mararmy’s operations, and that whatever was the sians and Pelignians. exact scene of the great battle, the Romans S0 The notice in the fragments of the Fasti fought with the enemy’s army interposed be-runs as follows:tween them and Rome. This sufficiently marks [T. M]anlius L. F. A. N. Imperiossus Torthe grand scale of these operations, and also the quatus [C]os III. De Latineis. Campaneis.

Sienlarged military views of the Roman consuls. dicineis. Aurunceis.

A.CDXIII. xv. K. JuThey ventured to abandon altogether the line of nias.

their own territory, and to carry the war di-31 Dion Cassius, Fragm.

XXIX. MI{a rectly into Campania, resting on the territory 32 Livy, VIII.

11. Niebuhr thinks that the of their allies, and communicating with Rome settlement of Latium was attended by many ex

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CHAP. XXIX.] THE LATINS AGAIN DEFEATED. 269 the Campanian aristocracy had been wholly opposed to the war The Campailan aristac. with Rome, they were rather entitled to reward than punishment. racy rewtf ded for theft They therefore’ received the firanchise of Roman citizens, which attch to Rome.

enabled them to intermarry with Romans, and to inherit property, while their ascendency in their own country was abundantly secured; and as a compensation for the loss of their domain land, they were each to receive from the Campanian people 45033 denarii a year. W’hilst the consuls were absent in Campania, L. Papirius Crassus, the prretor had been left at home with the command of the forces usually appointed to protect the city. He had watched the Antiatians,. Crsus, dictator. and checked their plundering inroads, but had been able to do nothing of importance. After the return of Manlius he was appointed dictator, as Manlius himself fell sick. It seems probable that he was appointed dictator for the purpose of holding the comitia, and that Manlius, having been left sole consul, and afterwvards being himself disabled by illness, was required, like the consuls who had preceded him, to resign his office before the end of his year.4 He was succeeded by Ti. LEmilius and Q. Publilius Philo. The history of their consulship is obscure. The Latins are said to have renewed the war again,35 to recover their forfeited domain; it is more The new consuls defeat likely that only some of their cities had submitted to Manlius, and the Lats again. that the treatment which these met with drove the rest to try the fortune of arms once again. They were defeated by the consul Publilius,35 and more of their towns then submitted; some, however, still continued to resist, and amongst these Pedum, Tibur, and Preeneste, are particularly named. The consul Ti..Emilius laid siege to Pedum, but the defence was obstinate; and whatever was the true cause, Pedum remained to the end of his consulship unconquered. This was probably owing to the state of affairs in Rome. Out of the large tracts of domain land won in the last campaign, the assignations of Q. Publilius Philo dieland to the commons had in no case exceeded the amount of three tator. He brings forjugera to each man: all the rest was occupied, as usual, by the great Publilan laws. ecutions, which history, from a desire to soften s’

Something of this sort must be supposed, the picture, has omitted, Vol.

III. p. 159. The if Livy had any authority for his statement, that Romans, however, far from being ashamed of the consuls in the year 420, only ten years after such executions, rather gloried in them, and this period, still came into office on the 1st of even Livy himself relates with entire approba-July. (Livy, VIII. 20.) For as Manlius ention the cruel vengeance taken upon Capua in tered on his consulship before the winter was the second Punic war. The moment that the well ended, and triumphed as early as May, the war was at an end with any of the Latin states, consular year must have begun from that time it was the policy of Rome to avoid driving them forwards, not in July, but in the early spring, again to despair by any bloody executions; and unless it had again been altered by some subseas the deportation of the senators of Velitrte is quent change. But the whole chronology of mentioned as an instance of remarkable severity, this period is still so uncertain in its details, that it seems reasonable to believe that no blood was it is impossible to arrive at any certain conclushed except on the field of battle. sion. -‘ Livy, VIII. 11. Mr.

Twiss supposes that 95 Livy, VIII. 12. thirty talents were fixed upon as the annual pay-S6 The dates for these years furnished by the ment to be made to each century of the Campa-Fasti are as follow: nian equites, which would make one hundred T. Manlius triumphed on the 18th of May, and twenty talents for the whole four centuries; 413. Q. Publilius Philo triumphed on the 13th and as there were four hundred knights in each of January, 414; and L. Camillus and C. MnMcentury, it allows just four hundred and fifty nius triumphed on the 28th and 80th of Sepdenarii or drachmae to each individual. Nie-tember, 415. Now, asthe Fasti reckon the years buhr well observes that the yearly payment of of Rome from the 21st of April (the Palilia), the so large a sum as one hundred and twenty tal-traditionary date of the. foundation of the city, ents gives us a high idea of the wealth of Capua. it is obvious that between May, 413, and JanuThe coin paid is called by Livy “denarios num-ary, 414, there intervened twenty months, mos;” and although silver denarii were not coin-whilst between January, 414, and September, ed at Rome till a later period, yet this proves 415, there would be no more than eight. But nothing against their earlier use in Campania; whether these dates are correct is quite another and although Eckkel and Mionnet acknowledge question. I believe that it is impossible to fix onlya copper-coinage of ancient Capua, yetMicali the chronology of much of the fifth century of gives an engraving of a silver coin, with an Oscan Rome with precision, because it is impossible inscription, which must, undoubtedly, have be-to fix the history; and again, we cannot attempt longed to.Capua in the days of its independence. to fix the history by the chronology, becaus See plate 115 of Micali’s Atlas. that is in itself uncertain.

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270 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIX families of the aristocracy. Great discontent was excited at this, and other circumstances occurred, in all probability showing a design on the part of the patricians to take advantage of their successes abroad in order to recover their old ascendency. Niebuhr supposes that the majority of the senate was opposed to these projects, and cordially joined with the consuls in repressing them. Both the consuls were wise and moderate men; both had been amongst37
the five commissioners for the relief of the general distress in the year 403, whose merits were so universally acknowledged by all parties. There is no likelihood that such men should have indulged a spirit of faction or personal pique at such a moment, or should have proposed and carried laws of the greatest importance without any especial call for them, and yet without encountering any formidable opposition. Nor is it consistent that the senate, after having had some months’ experience, according to the common story, of the factious character of the two consuls, should have required them to name a dictator in order to get rid of them, when the very result which did take place might have been so easily foreseen, that iEmilius would name his own colleague. It is far more probable that the senate foresaw, and had in fact arranged that it should be so, in order that the reforms which were judged necessary might be supported and carried with the authority of the greatest magistracy in the commonwealth.

The reforms now effected were purely constitutional, and consisted mainly, as far as appears, in destroying the power of the aristocratical assembly of the curise, a body necessarily of a very different character from the senate, and in which the most one-sided party spirit was likely to be predominant. General assemblies of the members of a privileged or separate order38 are of all things the most mischievous; as they combine with the turbulence and violence of a popular assembly all the narrow-mindedness and exclusiveness of a particular caste. It seems that no greater benefit could have been conferred on Rome than the extinction of the power of the curiae; and accordingly one of Publilius’ laws deprived39 them of their power as a branch of the legislature with regard to all laws passed by the comitia of tribes; and another reduced it to a mere formality with respect to all laws submitted to the comitia of the centuries:40 whatever law was proposed by L7 Livy, VII. 21. ” Meriti sequitate curaque ehacted; bnut Niebuhr’s explanation is so consunt ut per omninum annalium monumenta sistent and so probable that I have been incelebres nominibus essent.”

duced to adopt it. “I It scarcely needs to be observed that our 40 ” Ut legumn qune comitiis centuriatis ferrenhouse of lords resembles the Roman senate, and tur ante initnm suffragium patres auctores fienot the comitia of the curia. If our nobility rent.” I need not say that “‘patres” here was were like that of the continent, so that all a generally supposed to mean the senate, and I peer’s sons were noble or like the patrician or-have no doubt that Livy so understood it; but der at Rome, so that all his descendants in the I think Niebuhr is right in understanding it of male line were noble, a representative body the patrician curine, who had before possessed chosen out of and by so large a privileged class, a distinct voice as a branch of the legislature. without any mixture of new creations, would The power of the curiae was likely to be disbe a very different thing from our house of puted earlier than that of the senate; the peers, and would give a tolerable idea of the na-senate was now a mixed body, composed of ture of the Roman comitia of curiae. Compare the most eminent men of both orders; it also the spirit, at once factious and intolerant, was a true national council; and that such a which has marked the convocations of the body should exercise the power of deciding clergy, and particularly the lower house of con-what questions should be submitted to the vocationas opposed tothe upper; thatis, agai.:, comitia of the people at large, was nothing the curima as opposed to the senate.

Consider more than what was common in Greece even at also that worst of all possible assemblies, the this very period; and it was held not to be indiet of the nobles of Poland. compatible with a democracy, provided that the 9 I have followed Niebuhr in his explanation body in which this power was vested was not of the Publilian laws. Vol. III. p. 169, et seqq. of too narrow and exclusive a character. AEz Livy says the purport of the first law was ”’ ut p,‘v yiap ETvat TL rotoirov y lrprfXieS C’UraL rov.

4ov plebiscita omnes Quirites tenerent:” evidently7 rpoflJovsU tv’..

rTOiro, v ou rviyo pt v pOpTo’p aIvCy understanding it to have had the same purport dALa yXLK6v. Aristotle, Politica IV. 15. See witlilthe Valerian and Horatian law of the year also the institution of the voAoV6eXaKtS at Athens: 306, which enacted, “ut quod tributim plebes rpoypdovut &a Te flovX r rg 7 1KK~aias ussisset populum teneret.” III. 55.

It is cer-vrqp we X piartLav. Pollux, - from Aristainly possible that the same law having fallen totle, VIII. ~ 95. It is not probable then that into disuse, or rather being obstructed by the the senate at Rome should have thus early lost power of a party, should be again solemnly re-a power which still existed generally in Greece;

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CasP. XXIX.] SETTLEMENT OF LATIUM. 271 the senate to the centuries, and no measure could originate with the latter, was to be considered as having the sanction of the curira also: so that if the centuries passed it, it should have at once the force of a law. A third Publilian law enacted that one of the two censors should necessarily be elected from the commons; a fourth, as Niebuhr thinks, provided that the preetorship also should be thrown open, and that in each alternate year the praetor also should be a plebeian. “( The patres,” says Livy, ” thought that the two consuls had done the commonwealth more mischief by their domestic measures than service The Publilian laws apby their conduct of the war abroad.” If the term patres be unproved by a majority derstood of the majority of the patrician order, Livy is probably of the senate. right; but if he meant to speak of the senate, he must have judged them overharshly. That assembly contained the best and wisest of the aristocracy, but it did not represent the passions and exclusiveness of thepatrician vulgar. The majority of the senate, whether patricians or commoners, saw the necessity of the Publilian laws, and had the rare wisdom to pass them in time. Accordingly, they were followed by no demands for further concessions; but by a period of such unbroken peace and order, that for many years the internal dissensions of the Romans are heard of no more; and the old contests between the patrician order and the rest of the people may be said to have ended forever. The Hortensian laws, about fifty years later, were occasioned by contests of another sort, such as marked the latter period of the commonwealth; contests of a nature far more dangerous where the object sought for is not so much political power for its own sake, but as the means of obtaining bread. In the following year the war with the Latins was brought to a conclusion. The new consuls were L. Furius Camillus, perhaps a grandson4’ Final submission of La of the great Camillus, and C. Meenius. Camillus marched against tium. Pedum, while his colleague attacked the Antiatians, who were supported by the people of Velitrae, Aricia, and Lavinium. Both were completely successful; Pedum was taken by Camillus,42 and the people of Tibur and Prseneste, who endeavored to relieve it, were defeated; while Mmnius gained a victory over the Antiatians and their allies near the river, or rather stream, of Astura.

Then all the cities of Latium severally submitted, as did also the people of Antium; garrisons were placed in them, and the future settlement of Latium was submitted by the consul, Camillus, to the decision of the senate. It appears that the case of each city was considered separately, and its fate was settled as justice or expediency might seem to dictate.

Unluckily, Livy either could not find, or grew impatient of repeating, what was the particular sentence passed upon each state; he has only noticed the fate of a few, and we are left to conjecture what was determined with respect to the rest. First of all, it was ordered as a general law, that there should be from henceforth no common meetings, assemblies, or councils for any two or Sottlement of Latiun. more of the cities of Latium;43 and that they should be made as Dissolution of theo Latin federacy. foreigners to one another, with no liberty of intermarriage, or-of on but that the curiae should be deprived of it was peaceably, and, so far as we hear, without a perfectly natural. And as Niebuhr observes, struggle. that the principal members of the senate, head-41 He is called in the Fasti, “Spurii filis, ed by the dictator and supported by the mass Marci nepos.” The great M. Camillus is known of the people, should have triumphed over the to have had a son named Spurius, who was the ultra aristocratical spirit of the curiTa, is easily first pruetor. Livy, VII. 1. The other consul, conceivable: but the senate would not so read-C. Menius, must have belonged to one of the ily have yielded an important prerogative of its most distinguished families of the comulons, own; and it is not possible to believe that had for although we have no yearly lists of tribunes the senate joined the body of the patricians in preserved, yet thiee tribunes of the name of resisting the dictator’s measures, they could M2enius are incidentally mentioned at different have been carried without some violent convul-times by Livy, IV. 53, VI. 19, and VII. 16. sions. Whereas the Publilian laws, very un-42 Livy, VIII. 13. like the Hortensian, the Genucian,-the Canu-43

“Ceteris Latinis populis connubia comleian, or any other of the great measures carried merciaque et concilia inter se ademerunt.” Livy, by the commons against the inclination of the VIII. 14. senate as well as of the patricians, were passed

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‘272 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIX purchasing or inheriting lands in each other’s territories. All notion of a Latin state or union was to be utterly done away; and each city was to be isolated from its neighbors, that all community of interests and feelings between them might as much as possible be destroyed. This was the system on which the Romans settled the kingdom of Macedon after their final victory over Peresus: it was split up into four distinct portions,44 and each of these was debarred from any interchange of the rights of citizenship with the other three. Tibur and Prseneste, the two most powerful cities of Latium, were deprived of their domain land 45 and probably of any dominion which they Condition of the severalnd Latin states. Tibur nd may have exercised over the decayed towns or districts in their immediate neighborhood. They retained their own laws and municipal independence, and there was still to exist between them and the Romans the old mutual right of assuming at pleasure each other’s citizenship, so far as regarded the concerns of private life. But in war they were bound to follow where Rome should lead, and to furnish soldiers as auxiliaries or allies to the the Roman legions. Lanuvium obtained the full rights of Roman citizenship, and its people formed the whole or a part of one of the new tribes which were created at Lasnuviuam, & the next census.46 It is probable that several other districts of Latium obtained the same privilege: perhaps such as had been hitherto dependent on some of the larger towns, since the decay or destruction of their own cities. In this manner the inhabitants of Scaptia and Gabii, which once were among the thirty cities of Latium, but had since fallen to decay, may have become latterly subjects of the Tiburtians, and now, in all likelihood, received the full citizenship of Rome, and composed the Scaptian tribe, which was created five years afterwards. Aricia,47 Pedum, Nomentum, and perhaps Tusculum, obtained the Roman citizenship without political rights; in other words, they were placed, Pedu’, & in the condition of provincial towns, without any municipal or corporate privileges, and justice was administered amongst them by a proefect sent from Rome. Their law was altogether that of Rome; their citizens were enlisted in the legions, and their taxation was in all respects the same as that of the Romans. In Velitrse, from some reason to us unknown, the aristocracy appear to have 44 Livy, XLV. 29. censors, Q. Publilius and Sp. Postumius. It 45 Livy, VIII. 14. That Tibur remained a derived its name, according to Paulus, the distinct state is proved by the language of Livy, epitomator of Fests, “a quodam castro.” And IX. 30, where he speaks of the RoEmans sending Livy, VI. 2, speaks of a place near Lanuvium, ambassadors to the people of Tibur; and still whichhe calls “ad Miecium.” The probability more by the fact that Roman citizens might is, therefore, that the Maecian tribe contained choose Tibur as a place of exile, as was also the in it the people of Lanuvium. case with Preneste. Late in the sixth century ” This may seem at variance with Livy s of Rome, we have instances on record of this, statement, who says that they were admitted to Livy, XLIII. 2; and Polybius, writing early in the rights of Roman citizens on the same footthe seventh century, speaks of the same right as the people of Lanuvium. But it is true that as still existing, adding, as the reason of it, that Lanuvium, immediately after the war, did rethe Romans were bound by solemn treaties to ceive no more than the civitas sine suffragio; the people of these cities. These treaties,!apKLa, it could not enjoy the full franchise till its peoare rightly understood by Niebuhr to have been ple were admitted into some tribe; and this the old terms of the Latin lague, including the did not take place till the next census. But interchange of all the private rights of citizenship that from the time of the next census, Lanubetween the citizens of the two countries;,co-vium was in a different condition from Aricia, rXrtefa. On the other hand, the political ddpend-and, probably, also from Pedum and Nomenence of Tibur and Preneste upon Rome is evi-tum, appears from the famous article ” Munident: Papirius Cursor, when consul, had a sum-cipium” in Festus; Niebuhr’s commentary on mary power of life and death over the general of which (Vol.

II. chap. 4, pp. 55-60, Eng. Transl.) the Prsenestine auxiliary troops serving in his is one of the best specimens of his unrivalled army, Livy, IX. 16, so that the alliance probably power in discerning the true political relations containedthe famous clause which distinguished of the ancient world. I would refer the reader a dependent from an equal ally: “

Majestatem continually to this passage in Niebuhr for a fill populi Romani comiter conservato.” See Cice-explanation of the various rights included somero,pro Balbo, 16. Compare Livy, XXXVIII. 11. times under the common term of “municip4 The Msecian tribe was created in 422 by the imnm.”’

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CHAP. XXIX.] -SETTLEMENT OF LATIUM. 273 been zealous supporters of the late war, while the people were well disposed to the Romans. Accordingly, the walls of the town were de-Velitra. stroyed,48 and all the senators deported beyond the Tiber, with a heavy penalty upon their return to Latium. All their lands, whether domain or private property, were taken from them and given to some Roman colonists who were sent to supply their place. Yet the people of Velitree appear to have received the full Roman citizenship five years afterwards, and to have been included at that time in the new Scaptian tribe.49 Larentum, which had taken no part in the war, remained, as before, municipally independent,50 enjoying an interchange of all the private rights of Laurentum. citizenship with Rome, but bound to aid, or in other words, to serve, the Romans as an ally: and this, probably, was the condition also of Ardea. The relations of some Volscian and Campanian towns, which Relations of Volscian had taken part in the late contest, were also fixed at this time. nndCampaniann towns. The people of Antium5t were obliged to surrender all their ships of war, and forbidden to send any more to sea for the time to come. A. col-At. ony was to be sent thither, but the Antiatians might themselves, if they chose, be enrolled amongst the colonists; that is to say, their territory was to be divided into lots, according to the Roman method of assignation, and all former limits or titles of property were to be done away; but every Antiatian might receive a portion of land in the new allotment, as a member of the Roman colony of Antium. The municipal independence of Antium ceased, as a matter of course; the Roman laws superseded the old laws of the city; and the Antiatians became Roman citizens in all their private relations, but with no political rights. Fundi and Formiae,52 which had remained neutral, Capua, for whose fidelity its own aristocracy would be a sufficient guarantee, and several other Fundi, Forie,. Campanian towns, such as Cumze, Suessula, Atella, and Acerrme,, F were either now, or shortly afterwards, made capable of enjoying the private rights of Roman citizens, but retained their own laws and government. Their soldiers in war formed distinct legions,53 and were not numbered amongst the 48 Livy, VIII. 14. in “Municeps.” Festus says expressly ofFuncli, 49 The Octavii belonged to the Scaptian tribe Formise, Cumse, and Acerrse, that after a certain (Suetonius in Augusto, 40), and their original number of years they became Roman citizens,. country was Velitrae. The tale which Suetonius that is, in the full sense of the term, being en adds, of their having come to Rome in the time rolled in a tribe, and being made eligible to all of Tarquinius Priscus, and having been made public offices. But the “certain number of patricians by Servius Tullius, but afterwards years”

was about a century and a half; for the havino_ chlsen to become plehbeians, is merely date of the admission of Fundi and Formice to one of’ the ordinary embellishaients of a great the full citizenship happens to be known, and man’s pedigree, invented after he has risen to it did not take place till the year 564. (Livy, eminence. XXXVIII. 36.) What can be meant by the exa50 s CaU Laurentibus renovari fcedusjussum, pression that the people of Cumve and Acerra: renovaturque ex eo quotannis post diem deci-after some years became Roman citizens, it is mum Latinarum.” Livy, VIII. 11. not easy to decide; but it may be that they re51 Livy, VIII. 14.

Antium became a mari-ceived the full franchise later than the period time colony, and as such was exempted from included in the last remaining book of Livy; furnishing soldiers to the legions (Livy, XXVII. and for that subsequent period we have no de38); it was obliged, however, to furnish sea-tailed information. men for the naval service. (Livy, XXXVI. 3.) 3

“In legione merebant,” says Festus,, in. With regard to the prohibition to send ships to “Municeps.” The Campanian soldiers who sea, it must be understood only of triremes andl made themselves masters of Rhegium alittle bequinqueremes; for that the Antiatians after this fore the first Punic war, are called by Livy,. period not only had many smaller vessels, but Legio Campana; and the name of their leader, were accustomed to sail even as far as the Greek Decius Jubellius, is clearly Campanian. Yet seas, appears from the complaints of their pira-these same soldiers are called by Polybius (I.cies addressed to the Romans successively by 6. 7), and by Appian (Samnitic. Fragmn. 9), Alexander and by Demetrius Poliorcetes.

Stra- “Romans,” and Orosius calls them:the “eighth. bo, V. p. 232. legion”

(IV. 3); nor should it be forgotten, that L Livy, VIII. 14, compared with Festus in Polybius in his list of the forces at the disposal, “Municipium.” Acerrae is mentioned by Livy, of the Romans in the great Gaulish war of 529, VIII. 17, and by Festus in ” i[unicipium,” and reckons the Latins and the other Italian nations in ” Municeps.”’ Atella is mentioned by Festus separately, but classes the Romans and Cam0 18

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274 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXIX auxiliaries; a distinction which perhaps entitled them to a larger share of the plunder, possibly also these states may have even received portions of conquered land to add to their domain. Equestrian statues of the two consuls by whom this great war had been brought Honors paid to the con-to a conclusion, were set up in the Forum;54 and the beaks of the suls. Te rostra. Antiatian ships were affixed to the front of the circular stand or gallery, between the comitium and the Forum, from which the tribunes were accustomed to address the people. From this circumstance it derived its wellknown name of rostra, or the beaks. Three years were sufficient to finish forever the most important war in which The war with Latium Rome was at any time engaged; whilst with the Samnites the conn endeiiyforbot natrl test was often renewed, and lasted altogether for more than sevpartieo. enty years.

It was not that the Samnites were a braver people than the Latins, but that the Latin war found immediately its natural termination in a closer union, which it was hopeless and not desirable to disturb; whereas, in the Samnite contest, such a termination was impossible; and the struggle could end in nothing short of absolute dominion on one side, and subjection on the other. The Samnites were complete foreigners, remote in point of distance, with a different language and different institutions; they and the Romans were not likely to form one people, and neither were willing to be the others’ mere subjects. But between Rome and Latium nature had given all the elements of union; and the peculiar circumstances of the Latins precluded that mischievous national pride which has sometimes kept two nations apart, when nature, or rather God speaking in nature, designed them to be one. Had Latium been a single state like Rome, neither party55
would willingly have seen its distinct nationality merged in that of the other; but the people of Tusculum or Lanuvium felt no patriotic affection for the names of Tibur or Prmneste: they were as ready to become Romans as Tiburtians; and one or the other they must be, for a mass of little states, all independent of each other, could not be kept together; the first reverses, appealing to the sense of separate interest in each, inevitably shattered it to pieces. Those states that received the full Roman franchise became Romans, yet did not cease to be Latins; the language and manners of their new country were their own. They were satisfied with their lot, and the hope of arriving in time at the same privileges was a prospect more tempting even to the other states than any thing which they were likely to gain by renewed hostilities. Tibur and Praneste, thus severed from their old confederates, could not expect to become sovereign states; they must, according to the universal practice of the ancient world, be the allies of some stronger power; and if so, their alliance with Rome was at once the most natural and the most desirable.

Thus panians together, and names the amount of had two flights of steps leading up to them, one their joint force. This seems to show that the on the east side, by which the preacher ascended, connection between Rome and Campania from and another on the west side, for his descent. the great Latin war to the invasion of Hannibal See Ducange, Glossar. Med. et Infim.

Latinit. was unusually intimate; and we know also that in ” Ambo.”

Specimens of these old pulpits a mutual rite of intermarriage prevailed be-are still to be seen at Rome in the churches of tween the inhabitants of both countries. Livy, St. Clement, and S. Lorenzo fuori le mure. XXIII.

4. Bunsen aptly’compares the platform of the ros54 Livy, VIII. 13, 14. For the description of tra, on which the speaker moved to and fro as the rostra given in the text, see Niebuhr, Vol. he wished to address different parts of his au  III. note 268; and particularly Bunsen, ” Les dience, to the hustings of an English election.;Forum de Rome,” p. 41. Bunsen, judging from 55 The rights of succession in an hereditary the views of the rostra given on two coins in his monarchy may affect a union between two possession, supposes that it was a circular build-countries, by the crown of each devolving on lug, raised on arches, with a stand or platform the same person, which would have been uton the top bordered by a parapet; the access terly impracticable had either of them been a to it being by two flights of steps, one on each republic. As it was, the union of the crowns of side. It fronted towards the comitiur, and the England and Scotland preceded the union of rostra were affixed to the front of it, just under the kingdoms by more than a century; and had the arches. Its form has been in all the, main not the crowns been united, what human power points preserved in the ambones, or circular pul-could ever have effected a union of the two parpits, of the most ancient churches, which also liaments’

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CHAP. XXX.] ALEXANDER’S CONQUESTS IN ASIA. 275 the fidelity of the Latins was so secured that neither the victories of Hannibal, nor the universal revolt of all Italy in the social war, tempted it to waver: one strong proof amongst a thousand, that nations, like individuals, cheerfully acquiesce in their actual condition, when it appears to be in any degree natural, or even endurable; and that their desire of change, whenever they do feel it, is less the wish of advancing from good to better, or a fond craving after novelty, than an irresistible instinct to escape from what is clearly and intolerably bad, even though they have no definite prospect of arriving at good. CHAPTER XXX. GENERAL HISTORY TO THE BEGINNING OF THE

SECOND SAMNITE WARPRIVERNU{I PAL2EPOLIS-A. U. C. 418-428-413-423, NIEBUHR. Tiv lia tdaov {avuaatv’ rig p) alftoaet 7dAqjov 7hLrp eOl oEtaVa OVtK3 cP&K5 J(atcEt.-Toer sip ipyOS CS 6thrirat a(7efrco, Kai t~epitia oVitc?lhos av I)5vnjv aivriIv KetS3ivaL.-TIIUOYDIDES, V. 26. AcCORDING to the synchronism of Diodorus, the same year which witnessed the final settlement of Latium, was marked also by the first military Alexander’s conques. i enterprises of Alexander, by his expedition against the Illyrians, and in Asia contemporary his conquest of Thebes. During the twelve following years, the ithely following the period nearly which I propose to comprise within the present chapter, Asia beheld with astonishment and awe the uninterrupted progress of a hero, the sweep of whose conquests was as wide and as rapid as that of her own barbaric kings, or of the Scythian or Chaldvean hordes; but far unlike the transient whirlwinds of Asiatic warfare, the advance of the Macedonian leader was no less deliberate than rapid: at every step the Greek power took root, and the language and the civilization of Greece were planted from the shores of the A~goean to the banks of the Indus, from the Caspian and the great Hyrcanian plain to the cataracts of the Nile; to exist actually for nearly a thousand years, and in their effects to endure forever.’ In the tenth year after he had crossed the Hellespont, Alexander, having won his vast dominion, entered Babylon; and, resting from his career in that oldest seat of earthly empire, he steadily surveyed the mass of various nations which owned his sovereignty, and revolved in his mind the great work of breathing into this huge but inert body the living spirit of Greek civilization. In the bloom of youthful manhood, at the age of thirty-two, he paused from the fiery speed of his earlier course; and for the first time gave the nations an opportunity of offering their homage before his throne. They came from all the extremities of the earth, to propitiate his anger, to celebrate his greatness, or to solicit his protection. African tribes2 came to congratulate and bring presents to him as the sovereign of Asia. Not only would the people bordering on Egypt upon the west look with respect on the founder of Alexandria and the son of Jupiter Ammon, but those who dwelt on the east of the Nile, and on the shores of the Arabian gulf, would hasten to pay court to the great king I leave out of sight the question as to the ties afforded by the diffusion of the Greek langreater or less influence exercised upon the civ-guage and civilization in Asia and Egypt to the ilization of India by the Greek or semi-Greek early growth of Christianity. kingdoms of the extreme eastern part of Alex-2 See Arrian, VII. 15, ander’s empire, and refer merely to the facili

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276 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXX whose fleets navigated the Erythreean sea, and whose power was likely to affect so largely their traffic with India.

Motives of a different sort influenced the barbarians of Europe. Greek enterprise had penetrated to the remotest parts of the Mediterranean; Greek traders might carry complaints of wrongs done to them by the -petty princes on shore, or by pirates at sea, to the prince who had so fully avenged the old injuries of his nation upon the great king himself. The conqueror was in the prime of life; in ten years he had utterly overthrown the greatest empire in the world: what, if having destroyed the enemies of Greece in the east, he should exact an account for wrongs committed against his nation in the west? for Carthaginian conquests, for Lucanian devastations, for Etruscan piracies? And he would come, not only having at his command all the forces of Asia, whose multitude and impetuous onset would be supported in time of need by his veteran and invincible Macedonians, but already the bravest of the barbarians of Europe were eager to offer him their aid; and the Kelts and Iberians, who had become acquainted with Grecian service when they fought under Dionysius and Agesilaus, sent embassies to the great conqueror at Babylon, allured alike by the fame of his boundless treasures and his unrivalled valor. It was no wonder, then, that the Carthaginians,3 who had dreaded a century earlier the far inferior power of the Athenians, and on whose minds Timoleon’s recent victories had left a deep impression of the military genius of Greece, dispatched their ambassadors to secure, if possible, the friendship of Alexander. But some of the Italian nations, the Lucanians and the Bruttians, had a more particular cause of alarm. They had been engaged in war for some years with Alexander, king of Epirus, the uncle by marriage of the conqueror of Asia. Alexander of Epirus had crossed over into Italy as the defender of the Italian Greeks against the injuries of their barbarian neighbors: in this cause he had fallen, after having long and valiantly maintained it, and his great kinsman could not have heard without indignation of the impious cruelty with which his enemies had outraged his lifeless body.4 Thus the Lucanians and Bruttians are especially mentioned as having sent embassies to Alexander at Babylon: it is not unlikely that their kinsmen, the Samnites, who had been their allies in the war, joined with them also in their endeavors to escape the dreaded vengeance, although their name was either not particularly known, or not thought worthy of especial record by the great Macedonian officers who were their king’s earliest and best historians. “The Tyrrhenians also,” said Aristobulus and Ptolemaeus, “sent an embassy EmbassiesfromItalyto to the king to congratulate him upon his conquests.”

The ports Alexander in Babylon. of the western coast of Italy swarmed at this time with piratical vessels, which constantly annoyed the Greek traders in those seas, and sometimes ventured as far as the eastern side of the Ionian gulf. This reproach was not confined to the Etruscans; it was shared certainly by the people of Antium; it may be doubted whether Ostia, Circeii, and Tarracina were wholly free from it. These piracies had been reported to Alexander,5 and he sent remonstrances to Arrian, VII. 15.

bring the death of Alexander of Epirus to the 4 Livy, VIII. 24. Livy sets the death of Alex-consulships either of M. Valerius and M. Atilius ander of Epirus in the consulship of Q. Pub-in 420 (415), or of T. Veturius and Sp. Postulilius and L. Cornelius. -This consulship, ac-mius, in the year following. Yet the treaty of cording to Diodorus, synchronizes with Olymp.

Alexander of Epirus with Rome is placed in the 113-3 and he places the embassies to Babylon consulship of A. Cornelius and Cn. Domitius,. and the death of Alexander two years later, in that is, in 422 (417); and this is likely to be a Olymp. 114-1. But his reckoning in this place sure synchronism, because the treaty would is confused, and his Fasti differ from those of naturally contain the names of the Roman maLivy; for with him there is a year between the gistrates who concluded it. It seems impossiconsulships of Publilius and Cornelius and Pce-ble to fix exactly the date of the death of Alextelius and Papirius, which, according to Livy, ander of Epirus, but it seems from every calcuwere next to one another. Again, Livy places lation that we may safely place it so earlv as to the death of Alexander of Epirus in the same make it certain that his nephew must have heard year with the foundation of Alexandria. But of it at the time when he received the Italian am Alexandria, according to Arrian, was founded bassadors at Babylon. in Olymp. 112-1, and, according to Diodorus, Strabo,V. p. 232.,A6rep Kai’AVXMavlpos 7rp’r. one year later, in Olymp. 112-2, which would pov EyKaX~,v riEarsrc, Kai ars7rplto5

VT’rqpo’. Some

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CHAP. XXXI.] L. PAPIRIUS CURSOR. 297 paid. The gods would not be mocked with the trickery of a childish superstition, which endeavored to abuse their holy names for the support of perfidy and injustice.” So Sp.

Postumius and his companions were given back to the Roman feciales, and returned unhurt to their own army. Such is the account which the Roman annalists have given of the famous defeat and treaty of the pass of Caudium. It differs in many respects, Exaggerated tori,, o probably, from the truth; yet it is accurate and trustworthy when L. Papirius Cursor compared with the stories of the transactions which followed. L. Papirius Cursor was one of the favorite heroes of Roman tradition; his remarkable swiftness of foot, his gigantic strength, his enormous capacities for food; and the iron strictness of his discipline, accompanied as it was by occasional touches of rough humor,54 all contributed to make his memory popular, somewhat in the same way as Richard Coceur de Lion has been admired amongst us; and his countrymen boasted that he would have been a worthy champion to have fought against Alexander the Great, if Alexander had ever invaded Italy. This favorite leader was consul in the year immediately following the affair of the pass of Caudium; so great a warrior must have signally avenged that disgrace; and, accordingly, he wanmade to realize the most sanguine wishes of the national vanity; he retook Luceria,55 the fatal town which had tempted the consuls of the last year to rush blindly into the defile of Caudium; and in it he recovered all the arms and all the standards which had been taken from the Romans, and, above all, he there found the six hundred Roman knights who had been given up as hostages, and delivered them all safe and sound. Thus every stain of the late disaster was wiped away; but the pride of the Samnites must also be humbled: seven thousand Samnite soldiers were taken into Luceria, and were sent away unhurt after having been made to pass half naked under the yoke, and C. Pontius himself, by the especial favor of the gods, was their commander, so that the ignominy which he had inflicted on the Romans was now worthily returned upon his own head. No wonder, after such a marvellous victory, L. Papirius should have entered Rome in triumph; and never, since M. Camillus had triumphed over the Gauls, had there been seen, it was said, so glorious a spectacle. The two triumphs, indeed, may well be compared with one another; both are equally glorious, and both also are either wholly or in part the inventions of national vanity. The Fasti Capitolini for this year are, unluckily, only partially legible; but it is remarkable that they contain the names of three dictators, of But the Romans were only one of whom there is the slightest notice in Livy, and thatthey really very successful. place the triumph of L. Papirius not in this year, but in the following, when, according to them, he was for the third time elected consul. One of the three dictators was L. Cornelius Lentulus; and as the Cornelian house was very numerous and powerful, there were not wanting writers who claimed for him the glory of all the supposed victories56 of this year, which others had given to L.

Papirius. Victories as unreal as the pretended conquest of Luceria might well be ascribed to differen’ persons; that town had only been just taken by the Samnites, and it is impossible to believe that they would have kept their most precious trophies and the whole number of their hostages in. a foreign and conquered city, rather than in the cities of Samnium itself.

Besides, there is reason to doubt whether Luceria was recovered at all before the year 440, at which time Livy places what, according to him, was its second recapture, as it had just before revolted to the enemy. The real events of this year cannot be ascertained; but there is every probability that the Romans were, in truth, successful; that they did much to remove the feeling of discouragement from the minds of their own 4 See the character given him by Livy, IX. are to be found in Dion Cassius, Fragm. Mi, 16, and the anecdotes related there, and by Dion XXXVIII., in Dionysius, Fragm. Vaticauna Cassius, Fr. Mai, XXXIX. XXXVI., and in Florus, I. 16. 65 Papirius’ campaign is given at length by 56 Livy, IX.

15. LiVy, IX. 13-15. Traces of the same story

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278 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXA that they were in the next year joined by the Opicans of Cales,‘1 whom Livy A. U. C. 419. calls Ausonians. Cales stood on the edge of the plain of Capua, not more than ten miles from the city:” its example might become contagious, and therefore the Romans now roused themselves in earnest, and sent both consuls to act against this new enemy; and, having driven both the Sidicinians and the Ausonians within their walls, they chose M. Valerius Corvus as consul for the succeeding year, and committed the war especially to his charge. He laid regular siege to Cales, and took the place: but although both he and his colleague, M. Atilius Regulus, proceeded afterwards to attack the Sidicinians, yet on them they could make no impression. And although Cales was immediately made a colony, and garrisoned with 2500 colonists,‘2 yet the Sidicinians held out during the two following years; their lands were wasted, but their principal city, Teanum, was not taken, and as neither victories nor triumphs over them appear in the annals or in the Fasti, and the termination of the war is never noticed, we may suppose that they, after a time, obtained favorable terms, and preserved at least their municipal independence. Before the close of this contest it was noticed in the annals‘3 that Samniumn League between the was become suspected by the Romans. This was in 421, and the Romnns and Alexander same thing is remarked of the year following; so that the Romans heard with pleasure in that year, that Alexander, king of Epirus, brother of Olympias, and thus uncle to Alexander the Great, had landed in LuA. U. c. 422. cania,l4 near Paestum, and had defeated the united armies of the Lucanians and Samnites.

Immediately after this battle, the Romans concluded a treaty of peace with the conqueror; a treaty which could have no other object than to assure him of the neutrality of the Romans, and that the alliance, which had so lately subsisted between them and the Samnites in the Latin war, was now virtually at an end. Whether there were any stipulations for a division of the spoil, in the event of his making territorial conquests in Italy, must be merely matter of conjecture; but the Romans, at any rate, took advantage of Alexander’s invasion; and when, in 424,‘5 the VoIscians of Fabrateria sent an embassy to solicit their protection against the Samnites, they received it favorably, and threatened the Sarmnites with war if they did not leave Fabrateria unmolested. And yet the Samnites, in attacking it, were but putting down the last remains of the Latin confederacy on the upper Liris, exactly as the Romans had done in Campania; the Volscians of Fabrateria and the Sidicinians had been alike allied with the Latins against Rome and Samnium, and as Rome was now engaged with the latter for her own separate advantage, so it was just that Samnium should gain her own share of the spoil by conquering the former. But the Romans treated the Samnites now as they treated the.Etolians after the battle of Cynocephalm, or the Achaeans after the defeat of Perseus: as soon as the common enemy was beaten down, the allies who had aided Rome in his conquest became her next victims. Two years afterwards, in 426,16 the Romans went a step further, and actually planted a colony of their own at Fregellke, a Volscian city, which, as we have seen, had been taken and destroyed by the Samnites, so that its territories were now lawfully, so far as the Romans were concerned, a part of Samnium. But fortune had now turned against Alexander of Epirus, and his power was no longer to be dreaded; the Samanites, therefore, were in a condition to turn their attention to 19 Livy, VIII. 16. 13 In 422 it is said that “Samnium jam alten Cales is the modern Calvi, six Neapolitan rum annum turbari novis consiliis suspectum miles from the modern CapuLa, and therefore erat.” Livy, VIII. 17. about eight Neapolitan miles from the ancient 14 Livy, VIII. 17. Capua, which stood on the site of the modern 15

Livy, VIII. 19. Fabrateria is the modern village of S. Maria di Capua. But eight Nea-Falvaterra, standing on a hill on the right bank politan miles are about ten English ones, the of the Trerus or Tolero, a little above its junENeapolitan mile being nearly 14 English mile. tion with the Liris.

11 Livy, VIII. 16. -” Livy, VIII. 22.

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ClaP. XXX.] WAR WITH PRIVERNUM. 279 other enemies; the war between Rome and the Greeks of Palapolis and Neapolis immediately followed, as we shall see presently, and this led directly to an open renewal of the contest between Rome and Samnium. In the mean time the Romans had gained a fresh accession of strength nearer home. The unconnected notices of these events recorded’ that in War with Privemum. 424 a war broke out with the people of Privernum, in which the A. U. C. 42. people of Fundi took a part, notwithstanding the favorable terms of their late treaty with Rome. Not a word of explanation is given as to the causes of this war, but the name of its leader has been recorded: Vitruvius Vaccus, a citizen of Fundi, who, availing himself of the interchange of all private rights of citizenship between the inhabitants of the two countries, had acquired property at Rome, and actually possessed a house on the Palatine Hill. His influence at Privernum, as well as the fact of his having a house at Rome in such a situation, prove him to have been a man of great distinction; and probaiby he was ambitious of being admitted to the full rights of a Roman citizen,l8 and like Attus Clausus of RegilIus in old times, of becoming a member of the senate, and obtaining the consulship. Disappointed in this hope, he would feel himself slighted, and seek the means of revenging himself. Privernum had been deprived of a portion of its domain after the late war, and had seen this land occupied by Roman settlers; motives, therefore, for hostility against Rome were not wanting; and hopes of aid from Samnium might encourage to an attempt which otherwise would seem desperate. But either these hopes were disappointed, or Vitruvius had rashly ventured on an enterprise which he could not guide. He was defeated in the field, and fled to Privernum after the battle: his own countrymen, the people of Fundi, disclaimed him, and made their submission; but the Privernatians held out resolutely against two consular armies till the end of the Roman civil year; and the new consuls, who continued to beset Privernum with the whole force of Rome, did not finish the war for some months afterwards. At length Privernum submitted;19 Vitruvius Vaccus was taken alive, kept in the dungeon at Rome till the consuls’ triumph, and then was scourged and beheaded; some others were put to death with hinm; the senators of Privernum, like those of Velitrs, were deported beyond the Tiber: the consuls, L. _/Emilius and C. Plautius, triumphed, 20
and.,Emilius obtained the surname of Privernas, in honor of his conquest over so obstinate an enemy. What follows is almost without example in Roman history, and though, like every other remarkable story of these times, its details are in some respects uncertain, yet its truth in the main may be allowed,2’ and it is well worthy of mention, 7 Livy, VIII. 19.

full length would have run, C. Plautius Hyp-‘s The case of L. Fut 4us of Tusculum, a very saus Decianus.-See Eckhel, Doctr. Num. Vol. few years later, seems to throw light upon the V. p. 275. views of Vitruvius ~
accus. It is mentioned of 2 The details are uncertain, because DionysFulvius, that in one year he commanded a Tus-ius places its date in the year 398, and ascribes c-ulan army against Rome, and in the next was the questions put to the Privernatians, not to a himself elected Roman consul, having in the Plantius or 2Emilius, but to a Marcius; that is interval obtained the full citizenship of Rome. to say, to C. Marcius Rutilus, the first plebeianr Circumstances favored him, and were adverse dictator and censor. There are also some variato Vitruvius; but the object in view was, in both tions in the circumstances of the story. It apcases, probably the same. pears to me that the story itself was of Priver19 Livy, VIII. 20. natian origin, and that when the Privernatians 20 See the Fasti Capitolini, which also give the became Roman citizens, they used to relate-with consul Emnilius his title of Privernas. pride this instance of the unflattering nobleness The coins of the Plautian family, struck at the of their fathers. When it became famous at. very end of the seventh century of Rome, still Rome, the Romans, as it reflected credit on them record the triumph over Privernum; in the also, were glad to adopt it into their history, and legend, C. HVPSAE. COS. PREIVER. CAPT. then the several great families which had conHIypsmus was one of the cognomina of the Plauducted wars at different periods against Privertian family, and in later times the prevailing num, were each anxious to appropriate it to one; but the conqueror of Privernum, accord-themselves. Thus the Marcii wanted to fix it ing to the Fasti, was C. Plautius l)ecianus. to the earlier war with Privernumn, which had That is, apparently, he was a Decius adopted been carried on by an ancestor of theirs; while into the Plautian family, so that his name at the 2Emilii and Plautii claimedit for the last war,

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280 HISTORY OF ROME. Lc[0r. XXX Story of the bold Ian. as a solitary instance of that virtue, so little known to the Romans, guagei used. by a Pri-respect for the valor of a brave enemy. After their triumph, ve ornatn deputy before the Roman senate. the consuls brought the case of the people of Privernum before the senate, and urging their neighborhood to Samnium, and the likelihood of a speedy war with the Samnites, recommended that they should be gently dealt with, to secure their fidelity for the future. Some of: the senators were disposed to adopt a less merciful course; and one of these called to the Privernatian deputies, whb haid be;in sent to Rome to sue for mercy, and asked them, “Of what penalty, even in their own judgment, were their countrymen deserving?” A Privernatian boldly answered, “Of the penalty due to those who assert their liberty.” The consul, dreading the effect of this reply, tried to obtain another of an humbler strain, and he asked the deputy, ” But if we spare you now, what peace may we expect to have with you for the time to come?” “Peace true and lasting,” was the answer, “if its terms be good; if otherwise, a peace that will soon be broken.” Some senators cried out that this was the language of downright rebellion: but the majority were moved with a nobler feeling, and the consul, turning to the senators of highest rank who sat, near him, said aloud, “These men, whose whole hearts are set upon liberty, deserve to become Romans.” Accordingly, it was proposed to the people, and carried, that the Privernatians should be admitted to the rights of Roman citizenship: in the first instance, probably, they were admitted to the private rights only, but ten years afterwards two new tribes were formed, and one of these, the Ufentine, included among its members the inhabitants of Privernum.“2 The year 425 is further marked by an alarm of a new Gaulish invasion, which Alarm of anew Gaulish was thought so serious, that the workmen in the several trades, and invasion.

even those whose business was altogether sedentary,23 are said to have been enlisted as soldiers; and a large army, composed in part of such’materials, marched out as far as Veii to look out for and oppose the expected enemy. A similar alarm”4 had led to the appointment of a dictator, and to an unusual strictness in the enlistment of soldiers, three years before; but in neither instance did any invasion actually take place. Polybius says,25 that at this period, ” the Gauls, seeing the growing power of the Romans, concluded a treaty with them:” he does not mention what were the terms of this treaty, and Livy seems to have known nothing of its existence. Probably the Gauls found that their arms might be turned against other nations with more advantage and less risk than against Rome; while the Romans, looking forward to a war with Samnium, would be glad to purchase peace on their northern frontier by some honorary presents to the Gaulish chiefs, and by engaging not to interfere with them, so long as they abstained from attacking the Roman territory.

On theimr southern frontier, the Romans, still with a view to the expected war The R s found with the Samnites, secured their direct communications with CamsolonyatAx..uu,or.Tr-pania, by sending a small colony or garrison of three hundred settlers to occupy the important post of Anxur,26 or Tarracina. Each man received as his allotment of land no more than two jugera, so that the whole extent of ground divided on this occasion did not exceed 400 English acres. We are not to suppose that these three hundred colonists composed the whole population of the town; many of the old inhabitants, doubtless, still resided tlere,27 and had continued to do so ever since the place had become subject in which their ancestors had been the consuls. a Roman colony given by Servius, IEn. I. 12, The Privernatian story, in all probability, men-that ” deducti sunt in locum certum sedificiis tioned no Roman general by name. munitum.1” The colonists were sent to inhabit 22 Festus, in ” Oufentina. a town already in existence, not to build a new 25 ( Sellularii.” Livy, VIII. 20. one for themselves; and thus by the very na24 Livy, VIII. 17. ture of the case, they would generally form a.25 Livy, II. 18. part only of the whole population of such a:2 Livy, VIII. 21. town, as the old inhabitants would rarely be al7 It is a part of the wellknown definition of together extirpated.

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CHAP. XXX.] WAR WITH THE GREEKS OF PARTHENOPE. 281 to the Romans; but they had ceased to form a state or even a corporate society; all their domain was become the property of the Roman people, and they were governed by a magistrate or pruefect sent from Rome. The Roman colonists, on the other hand, governed themselves and the old inhabitants also; they chose their own magistrates and made their own laws: and over and above the grant of two jugera to each man, a portion too small by itself to maintain a family, they had, probably, a considerable extent of common pasture on the mountains, the former domain of:the city of Anxur, and of which the colonists would have not, indeed, the sovereignty, but the beneficial enjoyment. It should be remembered, too, that as they retained their Roman franchise,.they could still purchase or inherit property in Rome, and intermarry with their old countrymen; and thus, if any of them returned to Rome at a future period, they would easily enrol their names again amongst the members of their old tribe, and so resume the exercise of all their political rights, which had been suspended during their residence in the colony, but not actually forfeited. Two years after the war with Privernum, there began that course of events which finally involved the Romans in open hostilities with the Sam-W.r with the Greeks nites. When the Latin confederacy was broken up by the victory of Parthenope. of Manlius and Decius, Capua, as we have seen, was punished for her accession to it by the loss of her domain land; and the territory thus ceded to Rome had been partly divided out by the government to the commons in small portions of three jugera to each settler, and partly had been occupied, after the usual manner, by families of the aristocracy. Thus a large body of strangers had been introduced into Campania; and disputes soon arose between them and the inhabitants of the Greek towns of the seacoast.2 Of these, PalEepolis and Neapolis, the old and new towns of Parthenope, were at this period almost the sole survivors. They were both Cumaean colonies; but Cumee itself had, about eighty years before, been taken by the Samnite conquerors of Capua; and since that period it had ceased to be a purely Greek city: a foreign race, language, and manners were intermixed with those of Greece, and lately Cumre, like the neighboring towns of Capua and Acerree, had become intimately connected with Rome. The two Parthenopean towns, on the contrary, had retained,their Greek character uncorrupted; when their mother city had been conquered, they opened their gates to the fugitives29 who had escaped from the ruin, and received them as citizens of Parthenope; and although a short time afterwards they formed an alliance with the Samnites, perhaps from dread of the ambition of Dionysius of Syracuse, yet this connection had not interfered with their perfect independence. They kept up also friendly relations with the people of Nola, whose admiration and imitation of the Greeks was so great as to give them, in some respects, the appearance of a Greek people.” Now, for the first time, they were brought into contact with the Romans, who accused them of molesting the Roman settlers in Campania, and demanded satisfaction for the injury. Certainly the Greeks had no scruples to restrain them from making spoil of the persons and property of barbarians; but the hostility was generally mutual; the Greek cities in southern Italy had suffered greatly from the attacks of their Lucanian neighbors;, and the Roman settlers and occupiers of land in Campania might sometimes relieve their own wants by encroaching on the pastures or plundering the crops of the Greeks of Parthenope. What account the Neapolitans gave of the origin of their quarrel with Rome, we know not; but the Roman story was, that when their feciales were sent to 2[ Livy, VIII. 22. Dionysius’

statement rep-29 Dionysius, XV. 6. Fragm. Mali. resents the wrong as offered to the Campa-30 NwXdaviov s t6pa rubS’EXXAiYva &or:alopi*ev.

nians themselves; and that the Romans took Dionys. XV. 5. The coins of Nola closely reup the cause of their dependent allies, or, in the semoble those of Neapolis, and the legend is in wellknown Greek term, of those who were the Greek, not in the Oscan character. b,?4Kxoo ri’PeOleaiev evyjEovlaS. See Dionys. XV. E. Fragmn. Mai.

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282 HISTORY OF ROME. LHArP. XXX Itinolves the Roman Palaepoliss3 to demand satisfaction, the Greeks, being a tonguein awarwith the Sam-valiant people, returned an insulting refusal. Upon this the senate! submitted to the centuries the resolution that war should be declared with the people of Palkepolis; and the centuries having approved of it, war was declared accordingly. Both consuls were sent into Campania; Q. Publilius Philo to attack the Greeks, L. Cornelius Lentulus to watch the Samnites, who were expected to aid them. It was said that a Samnite garrison of 4000 men,3
together with 2000 men from Nola, were received into Palaepolis; and L.

Cornelius reported to the senate that enlistments of men were ordered all over Sam-, nium, and that attempts were making to excite the people of Privernum, Fundi, and Formime to rise in arms again against Rome. Upon this, the ambassadors were sent by the Roman government to the Samnites, to obtain redress for their alleged grievances. The Samnites wholly denied their having tampered with Privernum,33 Fundi, and Formise; and the soldiers who had gone to Palaupolis were, they said, an independent body, who had volunteered into the Greek service, and had not been sent by any public authority. This was probable enough, at a period when Campanian, or Opican, or Samnite mercenaries,-for the same men were called indifferently by all these names,-bore such a high renown for valor, and were enlisted into the service of so many different nations. But the Samnites further charged the Romans with a breach of the treaty on their part, in having planted a Roman colony at Fregellae; a place which, having been conquered by the Samnites from the Volscians in the late war with the Latin confederacy, belonged rightfully to them as their share of the spoil. The Roman annalists seem to have known of no adequate answer that was made to this charge: the Romans proposed, it is said, to refer the question to the decision of some third power, keeping possession, however, of Fregellm in the mean time. But the Samnites thought their right so clear, that it was idle to refer the matter to any arbitration,34 and to allow the Romans in the mean while to exclude them from entering upon their own land. They replied, that no,negotiations, and no mediation of any third party, could decide their differences; the sword alone must determine them. “Let us meet at once in Campania,” they said, “and there put our quarrel to issue.” The answer was characteristic of the Romans: ”’ Our legions march whither their own generals order them, and not at the bidding of an enemy.” Then the Roman fecialis, or herald,35 stepped forward: ”’ The gods of war,” he said, “will judge between us.” And then he raised his hands to heaven and prayed, “If the Roman commonwealth has received wrong from the Samnites, and shall proceed to take up arms because she could obtain no justice by treaty, then may all the gods inspire her with wise counsels, and prosper her arms in battle! But if Rome has been false to her oaths, and declares war without just cause, then may the gods prosper neither her counsels nor her arms 1” Having said thus much, the ambassadors departed; and L. Cornelius, it is said, crossed the frontier immediately, and invaded Samnium. But the year passed away unmarked by any decisive actions. Q. Publilius Q. Publilius Philo i established himself between Paliepolis and Neapolis, so as to inade proconsul. tercept all land communication between them, and to be enabled to lay waste their territory. He did not venture, however, to besiege either city, 31

Dionysius, in all his account of these olis, was founded in a more advantageous sitaffairs, makes mention only of Neapolis; the uation, the old town, or Palsepolis, went to dename of Palnepolis does not once occur in cav. his narrative. In the Roman story, Palepolis 52 Livy, VIII. 23.

holds the more prominent place; for no other 33 Livy, VIII, 23. reason, apparently, than because Palnpolis was 94 See the answer of the Corinthians when conquered by force, and enabled Publilius to the Corcyrseans, like the Romans, first beobtain the honor of a triumph, while Neapolis sieged Epidamnus, and then offered to refer entered into a friendly treaty with Rome. But the dispute to the arbitration of some third Palepalis must really have been a very insig-party. Thucyd. I. 39.

nifil ant place; for it followed almost as an in-35 Dionysius, XV. 13.

Fragm. Mai. falli 9le rule, that whenever a new town, Neap

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CHAP. XXX.] ATTEMPT TO INFRINGE THE LICINIAN LAW. 283 and as the sea was open to their ships, they were not likely to be soon reduced to famine.

Thus when the consular year was about to close, Q. Publilius was empowered to retain his command as proconsul,“6 till he should have brought the war to a conclusion; and this is the first instance on record of the name and office of proconsul, and proves the great interest which Publilius must have had both in the senate and with the people at large; for certainly no urgent public necessity required that he should receive such an extraordinary distinction. It might have seemed of much greater consequence to leave the same general in the command of the army in Samnium; but Cornelius37 was only excused from returning to Rome to hold the comitia, and was required to nominate a dictator for that purpose; as soon as the new consuls came into office, the conduct of the war was committed to them. The consul named as dictator M. Claudius Marcellus, a man who had been himself consul four years before, but was of a plebeian family. Patricin ealousiee aAnd here we may observe a confirmation of Niebuhr’s opinion, gainstia plebeian diethat the spirit of the senate at this period was very different from that of the more violent patricians, or probably of a majority of the order. The senate had just conferred an unprecedented honor on the man whom the patricians most hated-on the author of the Publilian laws. This probably excited much bitterness; and although M. Claudius Marcellus seems to have given no personal cause of offence, yet as he was a plebeian, the more violent patrician party determined to vent their anger upon him. They could not stop the proconsulship of Publilius, for that was solely within the cognizance of the senate and people; but the dictatorship of Marcellus might be set aside by a power which was still exclusively patrician, and for that very reason was likely to be animated by a strong patrician spirit, the college of augurs. Reports were spread abroad that the dictator had not been duly appointed, that some religious impediment had occurred; and of this question the augurs were alone judges. It was referred to them, and they pronounced that in the appointment3s the auspices had not been properly taken, and that it was therefore void. The dictator accordingly resigned his office; but the decision of the augurs, although not legally questionable, was openly taxed with unfairness. The consul, it was said, was in the midst of his camp in Samnium; he had arisen, as was his custom, at the dead of night, and had named the dictator when no human eye beheld him.. He had mentioned nothing of evil omen to vitiate his act; there was no witness who could report any, and how could the augurs, whilst living quietly at Rome, pretend to know what signs of unlucky import had occurred at a given time and place in Samnium? It was plain to see that the real impediment to the dictator’s appointment consisted in his being a plebeian. The patricians appear to have been so encouraged by this victory, as to venture upon another attempt of a far more desperate nature: they Attempts to set aside seem to have tried to set aside the Licinian law, and to procure the Liciian w. the election of two patrician consuls, This at least is the most likely explanation of the fact that after the dictator’s resignation, when the comitia were to be held by an interrex, the election was so delayed39 that thirteen interregna, a period of more than sixty-five days, were suffered to elapse before the new consuls were appointed. The fourteenth interrex was L. AEmilius Mamercinus, a man whose family, since the days of the good dictator Mamercus LEmilius, had always been opposed to the high patrician party, who was himself a friend40 of Publilius Philo, and whose brother had been Publilius’ colleague and associate in the year in which he had passed his famous laws. He brought on the election without delay, and took care that it should be conducted according 38 Livy, VIII. 23. 39 Livy, VIII. 23. 7

Livy, VIII. 23. 40 He had named Publilius his master of the‘8 Livy, VIII.

23. ” Vitiosum videri dicta-horse a few years earlier, when he was himself torem pronuntiaverunt.” dictator. Livy, VIII. 16.

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284 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXI, to law; and thus the efforts of the patricians were baffled, and a plebeian con. sul, C. Pcetelius,41 was elected along with the patrician L. Papirius Mugillanus. It was an untimely moment for the renewal of party quarrels, when Rome was Feelngsof bothnations entering upon her second and decisive war with Samnium. In the atthe beginning of the first contests the two nations had met without animosity, and the second Saranite war. war was ended between them soon and easily. But in the fourteen years which had since elapsed their feelings had become greatly changed. They were now well aware of each other’s power and ambition; their dominions were brought into immediate contact; neither could advance but by driving back the other. The Latin states were now closely united with Rome, and it was become a question which of the two races, the Latin or the Sabellian, should be the sovereign of central and southern Italy. The second Samnite war, therefore, was carried on with feelings of bitter hostility; and instead of ending, like the first, within three years, it lasted, amidst striking vicissitudes of fortune, for more than twenty. CHAPTER XXXI, SECOND S

AMNITE WAR-L. PAPIRIUS CURSOR-AFFAIR OF THE FORKS OR PASS OF

CAUDIUM-BATTLE OF LAUTULE Q. FABIUS, AND THE WAR WITH ETRURIA.-A. U. C.

428-450: 428-444, NIEBUHR. “Samnites quinquaginta annis per Fabios et Papiriospatres eorumque liberos, ita subegit a,’ domuit (populus Romanus), ita ruinas ipsas urbium diruit, ut hodie Samninum in ipso Samnio requiratur; nee facile appareat materia quatuor et viginti triumphorum.”’

FLoRus, I. 16. THiE second Samnite war brings us to the middle of the fifth century of Rome, Chronology of the ee and within little more than three hundred years of the Christian ond Samnlte war. era. Alexander died almost before it had begun; and neither Aristotle nor Demosthenes were living when the Romans, in the fifth year of the contest, were sent under the yoke at the memorable pass of Caudium. At its conclusion, sixteen years later, we are arrived at the second generation of Alexander’s successors; Eumenes and Antipater were dead, Demetrius Poliorcetes was in the height of his renown; and Seleucus and Ptolemy had already assumed the kingly diadem, and founded the Greek kingdoms of Syria and of Egypt. So completely had Greece arrived at the season of autumn, while at Rome it was yet the early spring. The war on which we are going to enter lasted, on the lowest computation, eneral nature and ob about twenty years. It was full of action, but its events present jecta of the war. so complicated a tissue, that it is not easy to comprehend its general principle. Here, however, as in the Peloponnesian war, it was a great object with either party to tempt the allies of the other to revolt; and thus the Roman armies were so often employed in Apulia, and in the valley of the upper Liris, while the Samnites were eager at every favorable opportunity to pour down into Campania. At first the fidelity even of the Latin states to Rome seemed doubtful; but that was secured by timely concessions, and Rome and Latium, firmly united, were enabled to send out armies so superior in number to those of the Samnites, that while revolt from the Romans was an attempt of the greatest 41 Livy, VIII. 25.

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CHAP. XXXI.] THE ALLIES OF ROME. 285 danger, revolt to them was prompted both by hope and fear. The Etruscan war, like 11 the other military attempts of that divided people, offered no effectual diversion; and at last Samnium saw her allies stripped, as it were, from around her, and was obliged herself to support the havoc of repeated invasions. She then yielded from mere exhaustion; but was so unsubdued in spirit that she only made peace till she could organize a new force of allies to assist her in renewing the struggle. Q. Publilius Philo,1 in his new office of proconsul, was continuing his land blockade of the Greeks of Parthenope; while the new consuls of The Lucanians and the year 428 with their united armies were ordered to invade ApoiaDs b.ecome the Samnium. But the Romans, according to the policy which they of invariably pursued in their later wars, did not choose to carry on a systematic war in their enemy’s country till they had secured the alliance of some state in his immediate neighborhood. Thus, before they commenced their operations, they concluded treaties of alliance2 with the Lucanians and Apulians, or, at any rate, with some particular states or tribes of these two nations. The Lucanians, although a kindred people to the Samnites, were politically distinct from them; and they had, moreover, their own internal factions,3 each of which would gladly apply for foreign aid to enable it to triumph over its rival.

Besides, they were the old enemies of the Greek cities on their coasts; and as Rome was now in open war with Neapolis, and on the brink of a quarrel with Tarentum, this very circumstance would dispose the Lucanians to seek her alliance. As for the Apulians, they were treated by the Samnites, it is said, almost as a subject people;4 and they might, therefore, as naturally look to Rome for deliverance, as the allies of Athens in the Peloponnesian war were ready to revolt to Lacedaemon. But the Samnite government had not the active energy of the Athenian; and the Romans were still more widely distant from the pusillanimity and utter unskilfulness which marked the military plans of Sparta. We know nothing but the mere outside of all these transactions; the internal parties whose alternate triumph or defeat influenced each state’s Endof the warwiththe external relations, are mostly lost in the distant view presented Gee, ibeof rethesop. by the annalists of Rome. But it is recorded5 that the war with ally of the Romans. the Greeks of Parthenope was ended by the act of a citizen of Palhepolis, who, preferring the Roman to the Samnite connection, found means to admit the Romans into hit city. Publilius obtained a triumph for his conquest, and Palaepolis is no more heard of in history; but Neapolis, warned in time by the fate of her sister city, did not allow one of her own citizens to place her at the enemy’s mercy, but at once concluded peace for herself, and was admitted into the Roman alliance.6 From that day forward the political history of Neapolis is a blank to us, till, in the revolutions of ages, the Chalcidian colony became the seat of an independent duchy, and afterwards of a Norman kingdom. The people of Tarentum,7 it is said, were greatly concerned at the issue of 2 Livy, VIII. 25. (Diodorus, XVI. 62-88.) But of the subsequent 2 Livy, VIII. 25. relations between Tarentum and the Lucinians 3 This, Niebuhr observes, appears from the we have not a word; the whole of the 17th and statement that Alexander of Epi’us, during his 18th books in their present state being devoted wars in Italy, was attended by about two hun-exclusively to the affairs of Greece and Asia; dred Lucanian exiles; and that tnese exiles and the portion of the history which treated of treated with the opposite party, and purchased the contemporary events in Sicily and the west, their return to their several estates by betray-having been entirely lost. ing him and murdering him.-Livy, VIII. 24. 4

Livy, IX. 13. See chap. XXVIII. of this It is vexatious that Diodorus, or rather his work history, note 28. as it now remains to us, makes no mention of 5 Livy, VIII. 25. the affairs of Italy during this period. He no-6 Livy, VIII. 26, speaks of a “fcedus Neapolitices the war between the Lucanians and Taren-tanum,” not “Palepolitanum,” which he actum in the 110th Olympiad, in which Archid-counts for by saying “Eoenim (scil.

Neapoln), amus, the king of Sparta, fought on the side of deinde summa rei Grsacorum venit.” But see the Tarentines and was killed; and which was chap. XXX. note 31. exactly contemporary with the battle of Chsero-Livy, VIII. 27. pea, and the beginning of the great Latin war.

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286 HISTORY OF ROME. [C0Ar. XXXI. The Lucnninos revolt this war, and were anxious by every means to stop the alarming from Rome, and again growth of the Roman power. A strange story is told of their deceiving the Lucanians by false representations of outrages offerred by the Roman generals to some Lucanian citizens; and the effect of their trick, it is said, was so great, that the whole Lucanian nation, in the very same year in which they had concluded their alliance with Rome, revolted and joined the Samnites.

But the Samnites, mistrusting this sudden change, obliged them to give hostages for their fidelity, and to receive Samnite garrisons into their principal towns. It is quite evident that we have not here the whole explanation of the conduct of the Lucanians. Some internal revolution must have prepared Obscurity of these accounIts. Operations of the way for it, and then any stories, whether true or false, of the the first campaign. w insolence of the Roman generals might be successfully employed to excite the popular indignation. But how the Roman party was so suddenly and completely overthrown, and why neither of the consular armies made any attempt to restore it, it is impossible to conjecture. The whole account of the operations of the two consuls is confined to the statement,8 that they penetrated some way from Capua up the valley of the Vulturnus, and took the three towns of Allifam, Callifae, and Rufrium. But no success was obtained of sufficient importance to deserve a triumph, and the conquered towns were in all probability immediately abandoned, for the Romans could not as yet hope to maintain their ground permanently on the upper Vulturnus; and it appears that fifteen years afterwards Allifea was still held by the Samnites. Thus, at the end of the first campaign, the aspect of the war was not favorable to Rome. The next year opened still more unpromisingly; for the Vestinians9 joined the A. U. C. 429. Second Samnite confederacy; and if the Romans attacked them, it was capTaign. War with likely that the Marsians, Marrucinians, and Pelignians, would all take up arms in their defence. These four nations lay on the north and northwest of Samnium, and their territory reached from the coast of the Adriatic to the central chain of the Apennines, and to the shores of the lake Fucinus.

If they were hostile, all communication between Rome and Apulia was tendered extremely precarious; and Samnium was secured from invasion except on the side of the valley of the Liris, or from Campania. The Romans, therefore, boldly resolved to declare war at once against the Vestinians, and by a sudden attack to detach them from the Samnite alliance. One of the new consuls, Dec. Junius Brutus, marched immediately into their country; the neighboring nations remained quiet, and the Vestinians, overpowered by a superior force, saw their whole country laid waste; and when they were provoked to risk a battle they were totally defeated, and were reduced for the rest of the season to disperse their army, and endeavor only to defend their several cities. Two of these,‘0~
however, were taken, and although it is not mentioned that the Vestinians sued for peace, yet the communication between Rome and Apulia seems for the future to have been carried on through their country without interruption. Meanwhile the other consul, L. Furius Camillus, who was to have invaded L. Pepirius cursow dic-Samnium,”. was taken ill, and became unable to retain his comtator. mand. Being then ordered to name a dictator, he fixed upon L. Papirius Cursor, who accordingly appointed Q.

Fabius Rullianus his master of the horse, and marched out to attack the Samnites. Livy’s carelessness, and the extreme obscurity of the small towns and villages in Sarmnium, make it impossiLivy, VIII. 25. included that highest part of the whole range 9.J,;Livy, VIII. 29. of the Apennines known by the name of “Il I’ Cutina and Cingilia.-Livy, VIII. 29. Both gran Sasso d’ Italia.” But the sites of the names are entirely unknown, and both, there-several small towns in it, which in all probabilfore, as usual, are given with great variations ity had perished long before the Augustan age, in the MSS. The country of the Vestinians lay it is impossible to ascertain now. on the left bank of the river Aturnus, and it ” Livy, VIII. 29.

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CHAP. XXXI.] L. PAPIRIUS AND Q. FABIUS. 287 ble to ascertain the seat of this campaign exactly. We cannot even tell whether the Romans invaded Samnium,‘2 or were obliged themselves to act on the defensive, and to meet the Samnite army in the valley of the upper Anio, under the Imbrivian or Simbrivian hills, about half way between Tibur and Sublaqueum. The faint and obscure outline of the military transactions of this campaign affords a strong contrast to the lively and full picture of the dispute Story of his sorrity between the Roman dictator and his master of the horse, which towards Q. Fabius, his the annals have given amongst the events of this year. As the master ofthe horse. story would be considered honorable to both the actors in it, the traditions and memoirs of both their families would vie with each other in recording it; and the historian, Fabius Pictor, in honor of his own name and race, was likely to give it a place in his history. It is told by Livy with his usual power and feeling; but here, as in the story of T. Manlius and his son, it will be best merely to repeat the outline of it, as we have no other knowledge of it than what we derive from Livy himself, and to give it again in detail would be either to translate him, or to describe with less effect what in him is related almost perfectly. When the auspices were taken,‘3 as usual, by the dictator at Rome, previously to his marching out to-war, the signs of the will of the gods were Q. Fabius appeals to the not sufficiently intelligible. It whs necessary, therefore, to take tribunes; and the people, by their entreaties, them over again; and as they were auspices‘4
which could only be peiI oen the dictator taken lawfully within the precinct of the old Ager Romanus, the tospare his fe. dictator was obliged for this purpose to return to Rome. He charged his master of the horse to remain strictly on the defensive during his absence; but Fabius disobeyed his orders, and gained some slight advantage over the enemy; an advantage which the annalists magnified into a decisive victory, with a loss to the Samnites” of 20,000 men. However, Papirius, as soon as he heard of this breach of his orders, hastened back to the camp, and would have executed Fabius immediately, had not the violent and almost mutinous opposition of the soldiers obliged him to pause. During the night Fabius fled from the camp to Rome, and immediately summoned the senate to implore their protection; but ere the senators were well assembled, the dictator arrived, and again gave orders to arrest him. M. Fabius, the father of the prisoner, then appealed to the tribunes for their protection, and declared his intention of carrying his son’s cause before the assembly of the people. Papirius warned the tribunes not to sanction so fatal a breach of military discipline, nor to lessen the majesty of the dictator’s office, by allowing his judgments to be reversed by any other power. The tribunes hesi12 Livy fixes the scene of action in Samnium, other countries were either ager peregrinus, or and calls the place at which the action was ager hosticus, or ager incertus; and these refought “Imbrinium.” VIII. 30.

But Niebuhr’ quired different auspices.-See Varro, V. ~ 33. observes, that the circumstances of the story Ed. Miiller. which follows, imply that the Roman army 5 Livy, VIII. 30. Some writers not content could have been at no great distance from with this, asserted that two pitched battles had Rome; and the Imbrivian or Simbrivian hills been fought during the dictator’s absence, and of the upper valley of the Anio are well known.

that Fabius had been twice signally victorious. In this Samnite war, wherever we have any de- ” In quibusdam annalibus tota res prsaterulissa tails of a battle, the geography of the campaign est,” says Livy; that is, the action was of no is generally more perplexed than ever; because importance in itself and therefore was omitted such details always come from stories pre-in those annals which did not enter into the deserved by the several families of the aristocracy, tails of the story of Papirius and Fabius. But, whether in writing or traditionally; and these, as it made a necessary part of that story, it was caring nothing for the military history of the mentioned, of course, in every version of it; previous operations, only sought to describe and both the Papirian and the Fabian tradithe deeds of their hero in the battle. tions would be disposed to exaggerate its im13 Livy, VIII. 30. p Eortance: the latter, from an obvious reason; 14 This appears from the wellknown passage but the former would be disposed to do it in Varro, in which he gives the augurs’

division equally, for the glory of the character of Papirof all countries, according to the rules of their inus was placed in his unyielding assertion ol art; that is, according to the several kinds of the sacredness of discipline; and this would be auspices which were peculiar to each of them. rendered the more striking, in proportion to The ager Romanus and the ager Gabinus are the brilliancy of the action, which he, notwith classed apart, because in these two districts the standing, treated as a crime, because it had been auspices might be taken in the same way. All fought contrary to his orders.

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288 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXI tated; they were unwilling to establish a precedent of setting any limits to the absolute power of the dictator, a power which was held essential to the office; and yet they could not bear to permit an exercise of this power so extravagantly severe as to shock the sense and feelings of the whole Roman people. They were relieved from this difficulty by the people themselves;“1 for the whole assembly, with one voice, implored the dictator to show mercy, and to forgive Fabius for their sakes. Then Papirius yielded; the absolute power of the dictator, he said, was now acknowledged: the people did not interfere to rescind his sentence,l1 but to entreat his mercy. Accordingly, he declared that he pardoned the master of the horse; “and the authority of the Roman generals was established,” says Livy, “no less firmly by the peril of Q. Fabius than by the actual death of the young T. Manlius.” This is true, if by peril we understand not only that he was in danger, but also that he was no more than in danger, and that he did not actually perish; for the execution of Fabius would, perhaps, have been more ruinous to discipline than any other possible result of the transaction, as the reaction of feeling produced by laws of extreme severity has a direct tendency to utter lawlessness. It may be observed also, that, according to this story, the tribunes possessed the power within the city of staying the execution, even of a dictator’s sentence; and there is no doubt that in him, no less than in an inferior magistrate, it would have beeh a breach of the solemn covenant of the Sacred Hill to have touched the person of a tribune. And, in the same manner, the people in their centuries could, undoubtedly, have taken cognizance of the offence of Fabius themselves, and removed it out of the jurisdiction of the dictator. But neither the tribunes nor the people wished so to interfere, because it was held to be expedient that the dictator’s power should be, in practice, unrestrained; and, therefore, it was judged better to save Fabius by an appeal to the clemency of Papirius, rather than by an authoritative reversal of his sentence. From this story we return again to the meagerness of the accounts of the war.

Successes of Papirius. It is said, that whilst Papirius‘8 was absent in Rome, one of his Truce orayer. foraging parties was cut off by the Samnites; and that after his return to the army, the soldiers were so unwilling to conquer under his auspices, that in a bloody battle, fought under his immediate command, with the enemy, the fortune of the day was left doubtful. Then, said the story,‘9 Papirius saw how needful it was to win the love of his soldiers; he was assiduous in his attentions to the wounded; he commended them by name to the care of their respective officers; and he himself, with his lieutenants, went round the camp, looking personally into the tents, and asking the men how they were. The affections of the army were thus completely regained; another battle followed, and the victory of the Romans was so decisive, that the Samnites were forced to abandon the open country to the ravages of their enemies, and were even driven, so said the stories of the Papirian family, to solicit peace. The dictator granted an armistice, and ambassadors from the Samnites followed him to Rome, when he returned thither, about the end of February,“0 to celebrate his triumph. But as the terms of a lasting peace could not be agreed upon, nothing more was concluded than a truce for a single year; a breathing-time which both parties might find convenient.

The new consuls, however, were engaged in hostilities with the Samnites in the course of their magistracy, so that the Roman annalists accused Third campaign. Confusion of the history of the Samnites of having broken the truce as soon as Papirius went tisy yr. A.U.. 43i. out of office.” In the utter confusion of the chronology of this period, and the obscurity of its history, we cannot tell whether the charge was l” Livy, VIII. 35. 19 Livy, VIII. 36. 17 1” Non noxa eximitur Q. Fabins, sed noxse 20 See the Fasti Capitolini. damnatus donatur populo Romano, donatur tri-21 Livy, VIII.

37. ” Nec earum ipsarum (inbuniciae potestati, precarium non justum aux-duciarum) sancta fices fuit: adeo, postquam ilium ferenti.”-Livy, VIII.

35. Papirium abisse magistratu nuntiatum est, ar,’ Livy, VIII. 35. recti act bellandum animi sunt.”

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CHAP. XXXI.] RISING OF THE CITIES NEAR ROME. 289 well founded or no. But the events of this year, 431, according to the common chronology, have been more than ordinarily disguised and suppressed, for the annalists represent it as a year marked by no memorable action; whereas, in fact, it witnessed a coalition against Rome, which was indeed quickly dissolved, but in the mean time had exposed the republic to the most imminent jeopardy. We must attempt to restore the outline at least of the real but lost picture. The Samnites had employed the year of the truce in endeavoring to procure assistance for themselves amongst the allies and subjects of Rome. The consuls march into They succeeded, either wholly or in part, with the Apulians: some Apuliaaad Samnium. of whose cities22
revolted from the Romans, and called in the Samnites to assist in reducing those who refused to join them. Thus when the truce was either ended, or broken, Q. Aulius Cerretanus,93 one of the consuls, was obliged to march with one consular army into Apulia; whilst the other consul, C. Sulpicius Longus, was sent into Samnium. Whether he made his attack on the side of Campania, or from the country of the Pelignians and Marsians, we know not; but it appears, at any rate, that both consuls were engaged at a distance from Rome, and their communications with it would, therefore, be liable to great interruption. Five years had now elapsed since the rights of Roman citizenship had been bestowed on the people of Privernum; thirteen years had passed since the same privileges had been given to the Tusculans. But near R…o to lainm tho full rights of citizenas this citizenship extended only to private rights, and conferred ship. L. rFulvius onel no political power (for neither the Privernatians nor the Tuscu-of lans were as yet included in any Roman tribe, and,‘consequently, they enjoyed no rights of voting), so it was felt to be a degradation rather than a benefit; or, at any rate, it was fitted only for a temporary measure, which ought to pave the way for a more perfect union. We may conjecture also, from what has taken place in other countries, that hopes had been held out, or even promises made, by the Romans, of which the fulfilment was afterwards indefinitely delayed; and the nobility of Privernum and Tusculum, connected with those of Rome in their private relations, and aspiring to share with them also their political distinctions, were especially impatient of their actual condition. The Samnite war, and, above all, the absence of both the consular armies in remote parts of Italy, seemed to afford them an opportunity of enforcing their claims, and obliging the Romans to grant them a full equality of rights. Suddenly, therefore, like the Irish volunteers of 1782, the people of Tusculum and Privernum flew to arms; and the spirit which actuated them must, indeed, have been general, if it be true that the people of Velitrse,24 although already included in a Roman tribe, were yet persuaded to join them. One of their leaders was L. Fulvius Curvus, of Tusculum, and, like the leaders of the Italian allies in the great war of the seventh century, he was invested with the title of consu1.25 A Privernatian leader was, probably, 22 Livy, VIII. 37.

ment of the language of the bill is likely to be 28 Livy calls him Q.

-milius Cerretanus, but authentic, we might venture, even from that says “Aulium quidam annales habent.:” He alone, to supply the defects of the other part of himself calls him Aulius, however, when he Livy’s narrative, even if we had not Pliny’s rementions his second consulship in the year markable notice of L. Fulvius, which throws a 429.-Livy, IX. 15. light upon the whole transaction. 24 In the bill proposed afterwards by M. Fla-25, Est et L. Fulvius inter insignia exempla. vius for the punishment of the Tusculans, it Tusculanorum rebellantium consul; eodenmwas proposed to punish all those “quorum ope que honore quum transisset exornatus conferac consilia Veliterni Privernatesque populo Ro-tim a populo Romano: qui solus eodem anno mano bellum fecissent.” This can only allude quo fuerat hostis Romae triumiphavit ex iis qu-i to the short war of this year; but the account rum consul fuerat.” Pliny, Ristor. Natur. VII. of these events in Livy is so meager that if we 44. Now, the title of consul was Roman excluonly followed his narrative the allusion would sively, and not Latin; the Latins had prwetors be unintelligible; for not a word had been said and dictators, but no consuls; which would natof Privernum since the war of 425, nor of Veli-urally be the case if the origin of the name at tren since the great Latin war. Drakenborch, Rome were as accidental, and as connected with therefore, is naturally at a loss to understand the peculiar circumstances of the time, as I have the meaning of the passage; but as the state-supposeditto have been. See p.120. It; thein, 19

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290 HISTORY OF ROME. [CIIAP. XXX1 associated with him in this dignity, in intimation that Tusculum and Privernum were resolved to form a distinct Roman commonwealth of their own, they too being Roman citizens, if the inhabitants of the capital persisted in excluding them from the government and honors of their common country. Their measures seem to have been taken with the most careful secrecy, and Night.march ofL. Fu~- the execution of them fell upon the Romans like a thunderbolt. denids o the insurIn the dead of the night, an alarm was given that an enemy was gentsare granted.

before the walls of Rome;26 the citizens arose in haste, each man seized his arms, and ran to the Capitol, or to defend the walls and secure the gates of the city. The attempt of L. Fulvius to surprise Rome, not less bold than the march of C. Pontius Telesinus upon the Colline gate, was timely baffled; and, finding the city secured against a surprise, he retreated as rapidly as he had advanced. But although this single blow had failed, it still revealed the magnitude of the actual danger. If Velitrse had joined in the revolt, what hope was there that the other cities of Latium. would remain faithful? and if the whole storm of the Latin war should again gather, when the Samnites were no longer allies of Rome, as in the last war, but her deadly enemies, what prospect was left of victory? The pride of the Roman aristocracy was obliged to yield; and the selfsame conduct which: in Vitruvius Vaccus five years before they had punished with death, they were now obliged, in the case of L. Fulvius Curvus, to reward with the consulship. What security they could give that they would keep their plighted faith, we know not; but L. Fulvius was so satisfied that he went over to the Romans, and his -countrymen and their allies, assured that their demands would be granted, laid down their arms.

A mad, if not a treacherous, attempt to disturb this understanding was made by M. Flavius,27 one of the tribunes; he proposed a law for-visiting with condign punishment those citizens of Tusculum who had been the instigators of the late insurrection. This must,. undoubtedly, have included L. Fulvius himself; and had the law passed, the Latins, in indignation and despair, would have risen as one man; and the quarrel would lhave become utterly irreconcilable. One tribe, the Pollian, voted in favor of it, and even expressed its wish for a still’bloodier vengeance on the whole people of Tusculum, such as the Athenians had taken upon the revolted Melians and Sciontans. But all the other tribes, to the number of eight and twenty, had the wisdom to reject the bill. In the very next census the Tusculans28 and Privernatians received the full rights: of citizenship; but L. Fulvius obtained the object of his ambition even without this short delay; he was elected at once Roman consul; and the man who in one year had led a hostile army to assail the very walls of Rome, was in the next year invested with the highest civil and mili-.tary power in the Roman commonwealth. Fulvius was really called consul, and not prm-have ruiled his design. That he should have tor, the title must have been chosen with the retreated instantly, as soon as he found that he same feeling as in the Italian war; when the was discovered, was, of course, necessary: and Italian allies, claiming to be the true representa-thus there would have been no enemy to be tives of the Roman nation, elected their two seen from the walls of Rome when the day consuls and twelve prautors in opposition to the broke; and yet the alarm in the night was any consuls and proators of the city of Rome. thing but imaginary. 2’

Livy, VIII. 37. ” Romeo nocturnus terror 2 Livy, VII. 37. ita ex somno trepidam repente civitatem excivit, 28 This is known with regard to the Privernaut capitolium atque arx mceniaque et portse ple-tians, because they were included in the tribe na arnlatorum fuerint, et cum concursatum con-Ufentina, or Oufentina, which was created ir clamatumque ad armna omnibus locis esset, pri-436. See Livy, IX. 20. Diodorus, XIX. 10. With ma l ce nec auctor nee causa terroris compa-regard to the Tusculans it is only a conjecture; ruit.” The story thus given is a mere absurd-but we never hear of them afterwards, except ity; but it is probable enough, if explained as as full citizens; and their being enrolled in the in the text.. We read of a similar night attack Papihian tribe (which is known from Livy, VIII. made by the -AEquians upon Tusculum.towards 37). seems to suit with the supposition that they the close of the third century of RoIme, Livy, were admitted to the full franchise by L. PapirIII. 23; and in the same manner Appius Her-ius Cursor, who, as appears from the Fasti Cadonius had actually surprised the Capitol at pitolini, was one of the censors of the year 436, Rome in the year 294. It may be that Fulvius when the Falerian and Ufentine tribes were creexpected to be joined by a party within Rome ated. itself, and the f. ailure of this cooperation may

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CIAP. XXXI.] FOURTH CAMPAIGN.-ROMAN VICTORIES. 291 What became of the consular armies in Samnium and Apulia, while these important events were passing in the neighborhood of Rome, we have Fourth campaign of the no means of discovering. It is certain that they gained no victo-war.

victories of the ries; it is possible that they may have sustained some defeats, ~ us and that their ill fortune may have helped to break the spirit of Roman government, and to enforce a compliance with the demands of the Tusculans. But when the seeds of dissension near home were destroyed, and Tusculum and the other neighboring cities were cordially united with Rome, the war in Samnium assumed a different aspect. The Roman annals represent the year 432 as one marked by most brilliant victories; although some accountst” ascribed the merit of them to the consuls, Q.

Fabius and L. Fulvius, while others gave it to a dictator, A. Cornelius Arvina. All agreed, however, in saying that the Samnites sustained a bloody defeat, insomuch that the party in Samnium which was favorable to peace obtained, for the moment, an ascendency. This party resolved to purchase the friendship of Rome by the humblest concessions: all prisoners30 and all plunder taken from the Romans were to be restored; all the demands of the Romans before the war were to be fully satisfied; and Brutulus Papius, the leader of the war party, was to be given up to the Romans, as the man who had broken the peace between the two nations.

Brutulus Papius, it is said, would not be given up alive; he killed himself, and only his lifeless body was offered to the vengeance of his enemies. But the Romans, thinking that a party which could yield so much would not dare to refuse any thing, rejected even these terms, and would be contented with nothing less than that the Samnites should acknowledge their supremacy, and become their dependent allies.31 One unsuccessful campaign was not enough to reduce so brave a people to such a humiliation; the whole nation resolved to try the chance of war once more; and their choice of an imperator, or captain-general, for the approaching campaign fell on a man who has deserved, to be called the Samnite Hannibal, or Caius Pontius of Telesia.32 The military history of the ensuing year is more than ordinarily obscure, because the annals were filled with nothing but the stories about the Fifth ca. The disaster of Caudium; and, as usual, these stories never think of Roon..s nv.ndo Samnium, from Campania.

connecting the event to which they relate with the circumstance which led to it, but plunge into the midst of it at once. The two new consuls, it is said, T. Veturius and Sp. Postumius, at the head of two consular armies, consisting each of two Roman legions, and a considerable force of auxiliaries, marched from Rome into Campania; as if it was intended to strike a blow at the great Samnite cities on the southern side of the Matese at Caudium, and Telesia, and Benmventum, or, as it was then called, Maleventumr. The last campaign in Apulia had, probably, recovered the revolted cities in that country, and the Roman party amongst the Apulians was supposed to be strong enough to retain their countrymen in their alliance with Rome. Thus the seat of war was removed entirely to the southern frontier of Samnium; and C. Pontius, the Samnite general, was prepared to defend the passes which lead from the plain of Naples to Beneventum and the higher valleys within the line of the Apennines. But, in order to tempt the Romans to plunge blindly into these defiles, Pontius contrived to mislead them by a false report that the whole Thoy onter the pass of Samnite army was gone off into Apulia,33 anrd was there busily cutio… engaged in besieging Luceria; as if trusting to the natural strength of their own 29 Livy, VIII. 38, 39. a descendant of the Pontius who defeated the 30 Livy, VIII. 39. Dion Cassius, Fragm. Romans at the pass of Caudium. Ursin. 143. 33 Livy, IX. 2. At what period in this cam”1

Appian, III. Fragm. 4. paign, or by what forces, Luceria was really won‘2

Ilie is called Pontius Telesinus by the au-over to the Samnlite alliance, it is not possible thor of the little work “d ce Viris Illustribus,” to say. A part of the Samnite forces may have in the notice of Sp. Postumius.

The great Sam-been in Apulia when the Romans entered Samnite leader who fought so obstinately against niumn; and C. Pontius may have won his vicSylla was also Pontius Telesinus, and, possibly, tory with an army much inferior in numbers to

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292 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXI country to withstand the invasion of the Roman consuls. The consuls believed this story, and, thinking on the one hand, that the danger of their allies made it necessary to choose the shortest route into Apulia, while the absence of the Samnite army would enable them to force their way through Samnium without difficulty, they entered the fatal pass of Caudium. This was a cut or valley in the outer line or wall of the Apennines, leading from the plain of Campania under the foot of Tiburnus to Maleventum. The modern road from Naples to Benevento still runs through it, and it is now called the valley of Arpaia.34 In this valley the Roman army found itself on a sudden surrounded by the They are defeated,and enemy, who showed themselves on both flanks and on the rear, as theirretreatiscutoff. soon as the heads of the columns were stopped by the obstacles with which the Samnites had blocked up the road in front of them. Thus entangled in a situation nearly similar to that of Flaminius at Thrasymenus, the Romans were completely defeated.3 - Night, however, saved them from total destruction; but to retreat to the plains was impossible: the pass in their rear, by which they had entered the valley, was secured by the enemy; so that they had no other resource but to encamp in the valley, not far from the scene of their defeat, and there hopelessly to abide the issue. The Samnites, having thus got them in their power, waited quietly till famine should do their work for them. Occupying the road, both in front and on the rear of the Romans, and guarding every possible track by which the enemy might try to escape over the hills on either side of the valley, they easily repulsed some desperate attempts made by the Romans to break out; and a large army, surprised on its march, with all its communications cut off, and hemmed in within a single narrow valley, could not possibly have the means of subsistence beyond a very short period. -Accordingly, the Romans soon threw themselves on the mercy of the conqueror: “Put us to the sword,“36 they said, ” sell us as slaves, or keep us as prisoners till we are ransomed: only save our bodies, whether living or dead, from all unworthy insults.” They might have remembered how their own countrymen were accustomed to lead their captive enemies in triumph, and to execute them in cold blood in the common prison; nay, how they had lately demanded even the lifeless body of a noble Samnite, Brutulus Papius, to be given up to them, and had deprived it of the rites of burial. But now they could understand that it became a noble nature to show mercy, and that an unfortunate enemy deserved to be treated with compassion. that of the Romans. But the history of this name of a plain. It is said that the valley of campaign cannot be completely restored. Arpaia is too open to suit such a description. “a The situation of the pass of Caudium has Both Niebuhr and Mr. Keppel Craven call it, been a matter of dispute. Mr.

Gandy, in a me-however, a narrow valley, and the Romans, as moir published by Mr. Keppel Craven, in his they have disguised every other part of the tour through the southern provinces of Naples, story, were likely also to exaggerate the natural p. 12-20, places it in a narrow gorge on the lit-difficulties of the ground, in order to lessen the tle stream of the:Isclero, above Sant’ Agata shame of their defeat. de’ Goti.

But Niebuhr adheres to the common‘5 Livy, as is well known, makes the Romans opinion that it was the valley between Arienzo surrender without a blow, overcome by the insuand Arpaia, through {which the present road perable difficutkies of the ground where they had from Naples to’

Benevento runs. A village in been entrapped. ButAppian, when he enumerthe midst of this defile is still called Forchia, ates the officers who signed the capitulation afterand Niebuhr says that the defile itself was, even wards, names only twelve military tribunes, and in the middle ages, distinguished by the name says that those who signed were all who were of la Furcula Caudina. The’ dispute has been surviving; vupravrtS ~aoL

#pero,Tb isE00qapplvoug only occasioned by the supposition that Livy’s oxov. II. IFragm. 4, 6. Now two consular description of the scene was topographically armies consisted of four legions, andhad twentycorrect, and by the difficulty of reconciling it four military tribunes; so that half of the full with the actual character of the valley of Arpaia. number must have been either killed or disaBut Livy’s descriptions, unless we can be sure bled by their wounds. And Cicero, in two that they are taken from some writer who was places, quoted by Niebuhr (De Officiis, III. 30, careful about such matters, deserve no credit; and De Senectute, 12), expressly says that there and the picture which he gives of the pass of was a battle of Caudium, in which the Romans Caudium is but a representation of almost all were defeated. mountain valleys, which contract at intervals 6. Appian, III. Fragm. 4. 2. Compare Dio. into mere gorges, and expand’ between these nysius, XVI. 4. Fragm. Mai. gorges into something almost deserving the

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CuAP. XXXI.1 C. PONTIUS OF TELESIA. 293 They spoke to one who could feel this in the hour of triumph, and not merely when fortune had turned against him. The father of C. Pontius C. Pontius of Telesis. had been no stranger to the philosophy of Greece; his intercourse He offers terms to the with the Tarentines had made him acquainted, it was said, with Roma..

Archytas:37 nay, he had even taken part in a philosophical conversation, respecting pleasure, so went the story, not with Archytas only, but with Plato. These particulars may not be historical: but the connection with Tarentum was likely to have an influence on the most eminent Samnites; and C. Pontius was probably far more advanced in cultivation of mind than any Roman general of that age. He resolved to use his victory generously, and to make it, if possible, the occasion of an equal, and therefore of a lasting peace.38 “Restore to us,” he said to:the consuls, “the towns and the territory which you have taken from us; and call home your colonists whom you have unjustly settled upon our soil; and conclude with us a treaty which shall acknowledge each nation to be alike independent of the other. If ye will swear to do this, I will spare your lives, and let you go without ransom; each man of you giving up his arms merely, and keeping his clothes untouched; and you shall pass in sight of our army as prisoners whom we had in our power, and whom we set free of our own will, when we might have killed them, or sold them, or held them to ransom.”

When Pontius had announced these terms, he called for the Roman fecialis, whose office it was to conclude all treaties and to take the oaths The consuls accept in behalf of the Roman people.39 But there was no fecialis with them. the army; for the Romans had resolved to make no peace with the Samnites, and to receive no proposals from them but their absolute submission. So the consuls and all the surviving officers took the oaths; and six hundred Roman knights were to be delivered as hostages to the Samnites to insure the ratification of the peace by the Roman people. When the Spartans were hopelessly cut off from all aid in the island of Sphacteria, the Athenian commanders agreed to a truce,40 in order to But the Roman govern. allow time* to the Spartan government to send an embassy to ment was not likelyto Athens, and to purchase, if they could, the deliverance of their soldiers by oonsenting to reasonable terms of peace.

Why Pontius did not act in a similar manner, and insist upon treating, not with the generals of the blockaded army, but with the senate and people of Rome, whose consent was obviously essential to the validity of any treaty of peace, the suspicious and imperfect accounts of the Roman writers will not enable us to explain. Did he know so little of the Romans as to expect that they would ratify the treaty because its terms were so moderate, and because he had spared the lives of so many thousands of their citizens?

But, according to Roman notions, no peace was endurable unless they themselves dictated its conditions; and the mercy of an enemy was a deadly insult, because it reminded them that they had been vanquished. Or did he trust to the force of natural affection; that the six hundred knights whom he had demanded as hostages, and who were probably the sons Cicero, de Senectute, XII. ~41. Cicero makes life of Archytas, speaks of a discussion on Cato relate this story on the authorityofNearchus bodily pleasures between him and Polyarchus, of Tarentum, whom he had himself person-and he seems to give a reality to the conversaally known, and who had repeated it to him on tion, by stating that Polyarchus came to Tarenthe authority of some old men, as a Tarentine tum on an embassy, which had been sent thither tradition. Cato is made to add, that according by the younger Dionysius. (Athensus, XII. to his own calculation, Plato’s visit to Taren-64.) At any rate, as Niebuhr himself allows, tum had taken place in the consulship of L. the very introduction of the name of C. Pontus Camillus and App. Claudius; that is, in the into a philosophical dialogue with Archytls year of Rome 406, according to the common and Plato would show that the eminent Samreckoning. Niebuhr thinks that Nearchus’ nites had acquired, through their intercourse story only means that Nearchus had himself with Tarentum, an interest in and an acquaintwritten a dialogue 7repi’SoV3sv9, in which Archy-ance with the Greek philosophy. tas, Pontius, and Plato were made the speakers. 30 Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. IV.

i 5. Livy, (Vol. III. note 373.) But Aristoxenus, a scholar IX. 4. of Aristotle, and therefore removed from the ” Appian, Samnit. Fragm. IV. ~ 5
time of Archytas only by one generation, in his 4O Thucydides, IV. 15, 16.

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294 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXJ or near relations of the most influential members of the senate, would be so fat regarded by their fathers, as to tempt them for their sakes to impair the majesty of Rome? But those fathers were the countrymen and contemporaries of T. Manlius, who had ordered his son to be put to death, even when victorious, rather than allow of any example which might be injurious to military discipline; how, then, could the lives of sons who had degraded themselves by becoming prisoners to the Samnites be purchased at the price of national humiliation? Or was Pontius really guilty of no such imprudence; and was it his only fault that he relied on the solemn faith of a people whose care was not to observe their treaties honestly, but to devise some pretext by which, whilst they broke the spirit, they might still save the letter? It is expressly mentioned4’ that not only the officers of the army, but two of the tribunes of the commons, gave their sanetion to the treaty; and it seems certain that they gave it as tribunes, and that they were not merely elected tribunes after the surrender, having been at the time no more than tribunes of the soldiers. But if two tribunes of the commons, as such, signed the treaty, how came they to do so, or how was it that during the term of their sacred office they were abroad with the army, and not within the walls of Rome? Were they sent to the camp for the very purpose of deceiving the Samnite general, by accepting the treaty, and assuring him that it would be ratified; and did he, knowing their sacred character, and that they were the leaders and representatives of the Roman commons, rely too confidently on their word, without requiring that formal authority for it, which alone, according to the casuistry of the Romans, could make the nation responsible? When the consuls, quaestors, tribunes of the soldiers, and the two tribunes of the commons, had taken the oaths, the first fulfilment of the their arms an.d ma ie treaty immediately followed. The Romans gave up their arms, out nder t yke. and marched out of their camp wearing or carrying with them nothing but one single article of clothing,42 the campestre or kilt, reaching from the waist to the knees, and leaving the upper part of the body naked, now that: the soldiers had been obliged to give up their coats of mail. Even the consuls were obliged to appear in this humble plight, for their war cloaks, paludamenta, were taken from them, and their lictors ordered to leave them the instant they came out of the camp. The six hundred knights were then delivered up to the Samnites, and the rest of the Roman army, stripped of their arms and baggage, passed in order through an opening purposely made for them in the Samnite lines of blockade.43 Two spears were set-upright in this opening, and a third was fastened across them at the top; and through this gateway the vanquished army marched out, as a token that they had been conquered in war, and owed their lives to the enemy’s mercy. It was no peculiar insult devised for this occasion, but a common usage, so far as appears, in all similar cases;44 like the modern cere4’ Cicero, de Officiis, III. 30, 109. Cicero’s observed that this condition of allowing each words are “Eodeimque tempore Ti. Numicins, soldier to march out with a single article of Q. Mselius, qui tum tribuni plebis erant, quodc clothing was granted by the Athenian comeorum auctoritate pax ersat facta, dediti sunt, ut mandclers to the Potidnans, when Potidsea was pax Samnitium repudiaret-Lr.” The expression, taken in the second year of the Peloponnesian “quod eorum-auctoritate pax erat facta,” shows, war; and that the Athenian government comI think, that they were tribunes of the complained of the treaty as too favorable to the vanmons when they signed the treaty, and that the quished:-See Thucydides, II. 70.‘auctoritas” here spoken of was the sanction 43‘0 co E l6VTa rapaeaag V toV 6a9 ELXiLaof their sacred office. Livy also mentions the juaroa. Appian, Frag. IV. 6. AmaretXpa, fact, that two men who were tribunes of the ” a cross or dividing wall,” because the Samlrit commons in that year were amongst those who blockade would be effected merely by carrying signed the treaty, IX. 8. two lines across the valley, one above’

the Ro-‘42’Eiauroa {v ofv v iparti. Appian. Samnit. man camp and the other below it. The nature Fr. IV. ~ 5, “cum singulis vestimentis in-of the ground rendered a circumvallation, or ermes.” Livy, IX. 5. In this state Livy calls reGPLTEiXLt a unnecessary. them ” seminudi,” IX. 6, because all the upper 44 This is shown by the story of Cincinnatus, part of their bodies was naked: Dion Cassius which represents the AEquians as made to pass less correctly calls them yvp vo-s-‘EKEXevov airoas under the yoke by Cincinnatus under similar si; ri air5 evyov yuvvov’ eIetAOevE a orrep iAierOEivTe circumstances. And Dionysius expressly calls efOqaav, Frag. Mal. XXXVII. It may be it a Rgman custom to make an enemy who had

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CHAP. XXXI.] THEY RESOLVE TO BREAK THE TREATY. 295 mony of piling arms when a garrison or army surrender themselves as prisoners of war. So far, indeed, was Pontius from behaving with any unusual insolence, that he ordered carriages to be provided for the sick and wounded of the Roman army; and furnished45 them with provisions sufficient to support them till they should reach Rome. In far different plight, and with far other feelings than they had entered the pass of Caudium, did the Roman army issue out from it again upon the plain of Campania. Defeated and disarmed, they knew Thdfrom th tncCretpur not what reception they might meet with from their Campanian to Rome. allies; it was possible that Capua might shut her gates against them, and go over to the victorious enemy. But the Campanians behaved faithfully and generously;46 they sent supplies of arms, of clothing, and of provisions to meet the Romans even before they arrived at Capua; they sent new cloaks, and the lictors and fasces of their own magistrates, to enable the consuls to resume their fitting state; and when the army approached their city the senate and people went out to meet them, and welcomed them both individually and publicly with the greatest kindness. No attentions, however, could soothe the wounded pride of the Romans: they could not bear to raise their eyes from the ground, nor to speak to any one; full of shame, they continued their march to Rome: when they came near to it, all those soldiers who had a home in the country47 dispersed and escaped to their several houses, singly and silently; whilst those who lived in Rome lingered without the walls till the sun was set, and stole to their homes under cover of the darkness. The consuls were obliged to enter the city publicly and in the light of day, but they looked upon themselves as no longer worthy to be the chief magistrates of Rome, and they shut themselves up at home in privacy. Nor was the blow less deeply felt by the senate and by the whole people. The actual loss in the battle, and the captivity of six hundred of Grief and humiliation of the senate and peethe flower of the youth of Rome, were enough of themselves to pie. throw the nation into mourning; how much more grievous were they when accompanied by such utter defeat and humiliation!48 All business was suspended; all orders put on mourning; the knights and senators laid aside their gold rings, and took off the wellknown red border of their dress which marked their rank: in every house there was weeping and wailing for those who had returned home dishonored, no less than for those who were dead or captive: and all’ceremonies of rejoicing, all festivals, and all private marriages, were suspended, till they could be celebrated in a year of better omen. A dictator49 was named to hold the comitia for the election of new consuls; but the augurs declared that the appointment was null and void; another dictator was then chosen, but the same objection was repeated; till at last, as if the gods abhorred every magistrate of this fatal yeai, the elections were held by an interrex. This interrex was M. Valerius Corvinus, and the consuls chosen5~ were two of the most eminent citizens in the commonwealth, Q. Publilius Philo,- the author of the Publilian laws, and L. Papirius Cursor, who had so sternly upheld military discipline in his late dictatorship. We cannot suppose that the Samnites would have allowed their victory to remain long unimproved, without assuring themselves whether it was the intention of the Roman government to ratify the treaty or the treaty and to give up to the enemy the no. But the’chronology and history of these events are alike so geneals and officers meager, or so wilfully falsified, that it is scarcely possible to ascer-ho signedit. surrendered pass under the yoke, III. 22, p. 47 Appian, Fragm. IV. 7. Livy, IX. 7. 469, Reiske. The same thing is implied in the 48 Appian and Livy, ubi supra. definition of the terms “jugum,” and “sub 49 Zonaras says, that the consuls were obliged jugum mitti,” in Festus. to resign their office immediately; 7rapaavr(a 45 Appian, Fragm. IV. 6.

c7raunrav VII. 26. 46 Livy, IX. 6. Dion Cassius, Fragm. Mai, 50 Livy, IX.

7. XXXVI.

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296 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIL tain either the dates or the real character of the transactions which followed. As soon as the new consuls came into office, the question of the ratification of the treaty”’ was brought before the senate. Sp. Postumius, one of the consuls of the last year, being called upon to deliver his opinion, declared at once that tho treaty ought not to be accepted, but that himself and his late colleague, T. Veturius, with every officer who had taken the oaths to the Samnites, should be given up to them, as having promised what they were unable to perform. The senate embraced his proposal; and to many of the senators it involved a personal sacrifice scarcely less than that which he was making himself, inasmuch as they were exposing their sons, who were amongst the six hundred hostages, to the vengeance of the enemy. But the Romans were as regardless of their own individual feelings as of the laws of justice and good faith, when either was set in the balance against national pride and ambition. The consuls and all the other officers who had sworn with them to the Samnites, were committed to the charge of the feciales, and were by them conducted into Samnium. They were then half stripped, as when they passed under the yoke, their hands were bound behind their backs, and the feciales solemnly delivered them over to the Samnites as men whose persons were justly forfeited to them in atonement for their breach of faith. No sooner was this surrender completed, than Sp. Postumius struck the Roman fecialis52 violently with his knee, his hands and feet being fettered; and cried out, “I now belong to the Samnites, and I have done violence to the sacred person of a Roman fecialis and ambassador. Ye will rightfully wage war with us, Romans, to avenge this outrage.” It is hard to say whether this trickery, at once so base and so foolish, should be ascribed, to mere hypocrisy or to fanaticism; for the fanatic is as prone to falsehood as to cruelty, and justifies to himself the one no less than the other, by holding that the end sanctifies the means. Yet it is a fanaticism, less wicked, indeed, but even more extraordinary, when a Pontius refuses to.c. man like Livy can describe such a scene, and can represent, as he cept them. has done, the conduct of Pontius in such strong contrast with that of the Romans, without appearing to feel any admiration of the one or any shame for the other. Pontius refused the offered victims: “They were not the guilty persons,“53 he said, “nor would he, by transferring the punishment to them, acquit their country. The Roman government had reaped all the advantages of the treaty of Caudium, but refused to fulfil its conditions. Either the legions should be replaced in their desperate position, from which nothing but that treaty could have delivered them, or the stipulated price of their deliverance should be‘1 Livy, IX. 8. slaves had plundered the Roman territory, the 52

Livy, IX. 10. Niebuhr supposes that Romans would have called upon the Samnites there must have existed between Rome and to give them satisfaction for the wrong; and in Samnium at this period a relation of isopolity; this sense a Samnite slave had now insulted a that is, that t,i citizens of either country, on Roman fecialis; and Rome had thus received a losing or relinqmshing their own franchise, wrong; for which she might either demand satmight take up at pleasure that of the other; isfaction, or seek it herself by arms. The latter and that in this sense Sp.

Postumius, when course might lawfully be taken, unless there given up by the Romans, and so having ceased was a special treaty by which the contracting to be a Roman citizen, Vumediately took up his parties had bound themselves to appeal to nefranchise as a citizen of Samnium. But this gotiation in case of any dispute between them, supposition appears to me unnecessary and im-before they had recourse to arms. And accordprobable. Sp. Postumius could have no choice ingly we find such a clause in the truce conof becoming a citizen of Samnium, for he was cluded between Athens and Lacedoemon, in the given up by the Samnites, deditus, and there-ninth year of the Peloponnesian war, Thucyd. fore had no rights whatever in relation to them, IV. 118, where the parties mutually ergage rri but became their absolute property. See the ajikoWeya iK,7,aXtyv evev, rXifeov. ]gut the language held with respect to the Campanians Spartans at the beginning of the war had chosen when they surrendered themselves to Rome, to follow a different course, and to seek redress according to the Roman story, to obtain protec-for their alleged grievances by a direct appeal tion against the Samnites. Livy, VII. 31. The to arms, without any negotiation.-See Thumeaning of Postumius’ action and words was cyd. I. 86.

tfiis: that he now belonged to the Samnites, 53 ion Cassius, Fragm. Mai, XXXVI. Livy, aend that they were responsible for his actions, IX. 11. as for those of their slaves. If the Samnite

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CHAP. XXXI.] L. PAPIRIUS CURSOR. 297 paid. The gods would not be mocked with the trickery of a childish superstition, which endeavored to abuse their holy names for the support of perfidy and injustice.” So Sp.

Postumius and his companions were given back to the Roman feciales, and returned unhurt to their own army. Such is the account which the Roman annalists have given of the famous defeat and treaty of the pass of Caudium. It differs in many respects, Exaggerated stori~’ of probably, from the truth; yet it is accurate and trustworthy when L. Papirius Cursor compared with the stories of the transactions which followed. L. Papirius Cursor was one of the favorite heroes of Roman tradition; his remarkable swiftness of foot, his gigantic strength, his enormous capacities for food; and the iron strictness of his discipline, accompanied as it was by occasional touches of rough humor,54 all contributed to make his memory popular, somewhat in the same way as Richard Coeur de Lion has been admired amongst us; and his countrymen boasted that he would have been a worthy champion to have fought against Alexander the Great, if Alexander had ever invaded Italy. This favorite leader was consul in the year immediately following the affair of the pass of Caudium; so great a warrior must have signally avenged that disgrace; and, accordingly, he watmade to realize the most sanguine wishes of the national vanity; he retook Luceria,55 the fatal town which had tempted the consuls of the last year to rush blindly into the defile of Caudium; and in it he recovered all the arms and all the standards which had been taken from the Romans, and, above all, he there found the six hundred Roman knights who had been given up as hostages, and delivered them all safe and sound. Thus every stain of the late disaster was wiped away; but the pride of the Samnites must also be humbled: seven thousand Samnnite soldiers were taken into Luceria, and were sent away unhurt after having been made to pass half naked under the yoke, and C. Pontius himself, by the especial favor of the gods, was their commander, so that the ignominy which he had inflicted on the Romans was now worthily returned upon his own head. No wonder, after such a marvellous victory, L. Papirius should have entered Rome in triumph; and never, since M. Camillus had triumphed over the Gauls, had there been seen, it was said, so glorious a spectacle. The two triumphs, indeed, may well be compared with one another; both are equally glorious, and both also are either wholly or in part the inventions of national vanity. The Fasti Capitolini for this year are, unluckily, only partially legible; but it is remarkable that they contain the names of three dictators, of But the Rman.were only one of whom there is the slightest notice in Livy, and thatthey really very successfu. place the triumph of L. Papirius not in this year, but in the following, when, according to them, he was for the third time elected consul. One of the three dictators was L. Cornelius Lentulus; and as the Cornelian house was very numerous and powerful, there were not wanting writers who claimed for him the glory of all the supposed victories56 of this year, which others had given to L.

Papirius. Victories as unreal as the pretended conquest of Luceria might well be ascribed to differen) persons; that town had only been just taken by the Samnites, and it is impossible to believe that they would have kept their most precious trophies and the whole number of their hostages in a foreign and conquered city, rather than in the cities of Samnium itself.

Besides, there is reason to doubt whether Luceria was recovered at all before the year 440, at which time Livy places what, according to him, was its second recapture, as it had just before revolted to the enemy. The real events of this year cannot be ascertained; but there is every probability that the Romans were, in truth, successful; that they did much to remove the feeling of discouragement from the minds of their own 6 See the character given him by Livy, IX. are to be found in Dion Cassius, Fragm. Mai, 16, and the anecdotes related there, and by ion XXXVIII., in Dionysius, Fragm. Vaticana, Cassius, Fr. MIai, XXXIX. XXXVI., and in Florus, I. 16. 55 Papirius’ campaign is given at length by X6 Livy, IX.

15. TJivV. TX_ i1 i TreaP nf thar. gamp. storv

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i2ns9831 HISTORY OF ROME. [CAIIA. XXXL soldiers, and to lower the confidence of the Samnites. It appears. that the victors of the pass of Caudium had not been a solitary-advantage to the enemy; for they had also taken Luceria in Apulia, and driven the Roman colonists out of Fregellme,5
the occupation of which place had been one of the immediate causes of the war. The people of Satricum58 also, in the heart of Latium, are said to have revolted to the Samnites; a fact which is thus barely noticed, with the remarkable addition, that the Satricans took an active part in the recovery of Fregelle. Thus the consuls, Publilius and Papirius, had an arduous task to accomplish; and they well justified the confidence of their countrymen, who had selected them above all other citizens to retrieve the honor and the fortune of Rome. Fregellae, on the upper Liris, and Satricum, in the heart of Latium, the one The Roman consuls in on the upper road, the Via Latina, from Rome to Capua, the other Apulia. nearly on the lower road, by Anxur and Fundi, were now fallen into the power of the enemy; and the war might, at any moment, by the revolt of the Hernicans, or of a greater number of the Latin or old Volscian cities, be brought under the very walls of Rome. Yet the Romans resolved at once to fix the seat of war in Apulia, in the same spirit of courage and wisdom which made them send troops to Spain, even when Hannibal was in the heart of Italy. Luceria had fallen, and unless the Romans could effectually support their party in Apulia, that whole country would soon be lost to them and strengthen the power of their enemy. Accordingly, L. Papirius Cursor marched”g into Apulia by the longer but uninterrupted route through the country of the Vestinians and along the coast of the Adriatic; while Q. Publilius was to force his way through Samnium, and so effect a junction with his colleague. If the main force of the Samnites was employed in Apulia, it is possible that a Roman consular army, consisting of two Roman legions and an equal number of allied troops, might have found no army in Samniumn strong enough to obstruct its march; and it would of itself avoid engaging in the siege of any of the Samnite cities.

- But the account of Publilius’ exploit is so extravagant, and at the same time so vague,60 that we cannot tell by what line he reached Apulia: it is only certain that both consuls were engaged on the other side of Italy during the whole campaign, and that, whether they retook Luceria or not, the progress of revolt in Apulia was effectually checked. Meanwhile the neighborhood of Rome could not be left defenceless; and the dictators of this year were, probably, appointed to provide for the Successive dictatorships hi t Romefor theprotec-safety of the capital, and to prevent the example of Satricum from taon of the city. spreading amongst the other cities of Latium. But traces of the old patrician party spirit may here be again observed, as in the dictatorship of M. Marcellus six years before. Q. Publilius had named C. AMenius6’ as dictator, 57 Livy, IX. 12. eign country, which was at that very time the 58 Livy, IX. 12, 16.

seat of active warfare: to say nothing of the abu0 Livy, IX. 14. ” Locis maritimis pervene-surdity of an army accomplishing a march of rat Arpos.”

such a distance in a disorderly and scattered 60o The account is vague, for it names noscele flight. ” Apuliam dissipati pettinre.” of action more definite than Samnium. “Pub-m51 Only fragments of the Fasti Capitolini are lilius in Samnio substitit adversus Caudlinas le-here legible, so that the names of the three dicgiones.” Livy, IX. 12. “Adversus Caudinas tators of this year, and of their masters of the legiones” is also a vague expression, for it may horse, are mutilated, and stand thus: signify either the troops that had lately been C. MA… engaged at Caudium under C. Pontius, or the M. Fos… forces of the city of Caudium, or of the whole iL. CORN… tribe or district of the Candinians, one of the;L.

PAPIRU.. great divisions of the Samnite nation. Andl it T. MANLI… is extravagant, because it represents the Sam-L. PAPIRIU. nites as flying from the field of battle in Sam-That the first dictator and master of the horse nium directly into Apulia, when they were in were C. Msenius, spelt Mainius in the Fasti, such a state of total rout that they did not yen-and M. Foslius, admits of no doubt:, as the Fasti, ture to defend their own camp. Had this been in noticing the dictatorship of C. M0enius six the case, they would rather have fled for shel-years later, call him then dictator for the second ter to their own cities, than have gone to a for-time. [II. DICT.I The, second dictator is clearly

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CHAP. XXXIJ] TRUCE FOR TWO YEARS. 299 a man of a plebeian family like himself, and who, together with himself, was made the subject of-a more violent attack from the patricians in his second dictatorship six years afterwards. The augurs, no doubt, declared his appointment to have been invalid, as they had done in the case of Marcellus; and, accordingly, he resigned, and a patrician was appointed to succeed him, P. Cornelius Lentulus. Thus far the accounts are intelligible; but why Lentulus also should have resigned, and the consuls have been required to make a third choice, it is not so easy to discover.: This third dictator was T.

Manlius, apparently the same Manlius who eighteen years before had gained the great victory over the Latins by Mount Vesuvius; and it is probable that by him were held the comitia for the following year, at which L.

Papirius Cursor was again elected consul, together with Q. Aulius Cerpetanus. It may be that the patrician party were anxious to secure the re-election of Papirius; and that P. Lentulus had been opposed to it.

Manlius, on the contrary, so.much resembled Papirius in the sterner points of his character, that he was likely to-agree with those who thought his re-election desirable. Papirius, in his military conduct, justified the confidence of his countrymen. He recovered Satricum,62 while his colleague carried on the war with continued success in Apulia. The authors of the revolt of R ofSatricu. Satricum were executed; the people were disarmed, and the town secured by a strong garrison. Thus again the sparks of a Latin insurrection, the greatest of all dangers, were put out before they could burst into a flame. In the next year the Samnites63 are said to have concluded a truce with the Romans for two years; but it may be that this truce only restrained the two parties from directly invading each other’s terri-T”ofortwoye.. tories, while it left them at liberty to support their respective allies in Apulia. At any rate, the war continued in that country without intermission, but with uniform’ success on the side of the Romans. Teanum, Canusium, and Forentum,64 submitted to Rome, and became her dependent allies; and Apulia was so far reduced that the consuls, towards the end of the second year of the truce, 437-8, proceeded to carry the war into Lucania, and took a place called Nerulum.65 But no further progress was made in that quarter. During these two years of truce the Romans were engaged in consolidating their power in their own immediate neighborhood. The censors, Two new Roman tribea L. Papirius Crassus and C.

Mmnius, created two new tribes66 in created. the years 436-7, the Ufentine and the Falerian, and enrolled in some of the old tribes an accession of citizens. The R-man settlers in Campania, who had received grants of land there after the L-ain war, were put under the government of a prmefect, who was yearly sent to Capua to administer justice amongst them and amongst the Roman citizens residing in Capua itself, according to the Roman law;6” and a new constitution was given to the colony of Antium, probably imL. Cornelius Lentulus, who is mentioned by therefore, that the second L. Papirius, who was Livy, and the third is as certainly T.

Manlius; master of the horse in this year, must have been but the two L.

Papirii, who are named succes-L. Papirius Mugillanus; the same man whom sively as masters of the horse, are very uncer-some annals, according to Livy, made consul tain. Sigonius makes the latter of them to have instead of L. Papirius Cursor in the year folbeen L. Papirius Crassus, who was censor two lowing. years afterwards, and the former, he thinks, was 62

Livy, IX. 16. CL. Papirius Cursor, the son of the consul, who -3 Livy, IX.

20. was himself afterwards so distinguished in the 64 Livy, IX. 20. third Samnite war. But the annals which Livy ivy, IX. 20. Ifthis place was the Nernotices as having made L. Papirius Cursor mas-lum of the Itineraries, the consuls must have ter of the horse to L. Cornelius,. meant, un-penetrated deeply into Lucania; for the Nerudoubtedly, L. Papirius the father, and not the lum of the Itineraries lay far to the south, nearly son. This, however, could not have been the between the Gre’ek cities of Laos on one sea, meaning of the Fasti Capitolini; for it is plain and Sybaris on the other. that they made L. Papirius consul in this year, L6

Livy, IX. 20. Diodorus, XIX. 10. although the names of the consuls do not exist 67 Livy, -IX. 20, and compare Niebuhr, Vol. on our present fragments, inasmuch as in the III. 339. next year they call him “Cos: III.”-I imagine,

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300 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXI proving the condition of the old Volscian population. The importance of Antiurn as a naval station made it desirable to leave there no seeds of disaffection; the more so, if the Tarentines, as is not improbable, furnished the Samnites with some naval assistance at this period, and made occasional descents on the coast of Latium. Whether there had been any interference of the Romans in the domestic affairs Unsettledstateofmen’s of the Campanian cities which excited jealousy; or whether the mindsin Campania. increasing success of Rome in the war of Samnium created a general alarm amongst her allies, lest they should be left without any power capable of checking her absolute ascendency, we find at any rate that about this time there was a general restlessness amongst the Campanians, and that the Samnites were encouraged to adopt the wiser policy of carrying the war into the territory of their enemies’

allies, rather than abide the storm passively at home. The Falerian tribe, which had been recently created at Rome, included that part of Campania known by the name of the Falerian territory; the Roman settlers there would certainly be enrolled in it, while it did not comprise the inhabitants of Cales, Fundi, or Formine. Privileges granted to some are a source of discontent if denied to others; and the creation of a Roman tribe so near to them, into which they were not admitted, might make the Campanian towns more impatient of their relation of mere alliance. Thus Nuceria68 had revolted in the preceding year, and other towns were ready, on the first opportunity, to follow its example. But here again the chronology and history are both involved in inextricable confusion. Livy’s account is so imperfect and so unreasonable cessful on the upper that it is clearly impossible to rely on it; that of Diodorus is far Uirir more sensible, yet it also has omissions which it is difficult to supply. As soon as the truce was over, the Samnites resolved to act on the offensive, and turned their attention to the valley of the Liris, where, as we have seen, they had recovered and still held Fregelle. They attacked and stormed the town of Plistia,69 an unknown place, but apparently situated somewhere in that neighborhood; they then prevailed on the Volscian population of. Sora to massacre the Roman colonists who held their town, and to join the Samnite confederacy. It is impossible to believe that while these events were taking place, the Roman consuls were sitting idle at Rome; it is much more likely that one consular army was, as usual, in Apulia, and the other either watching the Samnites in the valley of the Liris, or invading Samnium from the side of Campania. But when the news arrived of the fall of Plistia and the revolt of Sora, it was judged necessary to appoint a dictator; and L. 3Emilius,75 who was the dictator fixed upon, immediately began to act on the offensive, and laid siege to Saticula. Whether this town belonged to the Samnites, or was only in alliance with them, and was still possessed by the old Opican population of Campania, is not easy to determine. The Samnites made a desperate effort to relieve the place, but they were defeated by the besieging army with considerable loss, and Saticula was obliged to surrender.7 68

Diodorus, XIX. 65. Compare Livy, IX. stating, that in the following year, which, ac38, 41. cording to the Fasti, was the year of Rome 438’ Diodorus, XIX. 72. or 439, according to the common reckoning, and ~ Fasti Capitolini, and Livy, IX. 21. But 434 according to -Niebuhr, L. Papirius Cursor Livy makes the appointment of A. EGmilius pre-and Q. Publilius Philo were again elected concede the fall of Plistia and the revolt of Sora. suls together; and Diodores places the battle I have followed the order of Diodorus, who, of Lautulke expressly in their consulship.

Niewithout naming Amilius, places the siege of buhr’s latest criticism (Vol. II. p. 627, 2d edit.) Saticula, which he conducted, after the other seems to have rejected this consulship as an two events. interpolation; and it is remarkable that Livy, Saticula stood within the first line of hills although he certainly makes a year intervene which rise immediately from the plain of Na-between the consulship of Sp. Nantius and M. iples, in a small valley which divides these first Popilius, and that of M.

Pcetelius and C. Sulhills from the higher and bolder mountains of picius, does not give the consuls’ names. He Taburnus. says, moreover, that they, like the consuls of it The Fasti Capitolini and Diodorus agree in the preceding year, stayed at Rome and did

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CHAP. XX.XI.] REVOLT OF CAPUA, ETC. 301 After the fall of Saticula the consuls of the new year, if these events really belong to two distinct years, proceeded on the one hand to in-They defeat the Rovade Samnium on the side of Saticula, and on the other to maa”tL““tul.. march as usual into Apulia. The army which invaded Samnium overran the country in the neighborhod of Saticula, and then either forced its way into Apulia, or turned aside to the left up the valley of the Vulturnus, and from thence crossed over by the line of the Latin road to the valley of the Liris, and advanced upon Sora, in the hope of punishing it for its revolt. A movement was made, at any rate, which left Campania open; and the Samnites, seizing the opportunity, called out, it is said,72 their whole population within the military age, and without withdrawing their armies from Apulia and Sora, they burst down into Campania with this third army, which, though hastily raised, was strong in its numbers and in its determined courage.

All Campania was at once in a ferment, and the Romans were obliged to name Q. Fabius Maximus dictator, and to send him out with all speed with such a force as could be found or raised in and near Rome, in order to check the spirit of revolt. Fabius advanced beyond Anxur, and occupied the pass of Lautulhe between Anxur and Fundi, already noticed as a post of importance on the coast road from Rome to Campania. Here the Samnites attacked him, and notwithstanding his high military reputation, they defeated him with great slaughter. Q. Aulius Cerretanusj the master of the horse, sacrificed his life nobly in covering the retreat, but theSamnites remained masters of the country, and it is stated in general terms that every place in the neighborhood revolted to them,“3 and that all through Campania,“4 and even at Capua itself, the party opposed to the Roman alliance began to obtain the ascendency. How the consuls effected their retreat from Apulia and from Samnium we know not, nor how far the Samnites either improved or neglected Consequences of thi their present opportunity. The Roman citizens of the new Fale-defect. rian tribe must have been exposed to the greatest dangers; for the open country of Campania was now in the power of the enemy, and as the Roman settlers had no strong towns of their own, they must have either taken shelter in the several cities of their allies, or have made their escape within the pass of Tarracina into the old Volscian country, now the Ufentine tribe, or even to Rome itself. But within the limits of the Campagna we hear of no disposition to revolt; there the timely gift of the full Roman franchise had converted Volscians and Latins into Romans, and neither Privernum nor Tusculum gave any cause for suspicion in this emergency. The new consuls were C. Sulpicius Longus and M. Pcetelius Libo; the latter had not till now commanded an army; the former had indeed been already twice consul, and must now have been advanced in years; but we do not know that he had acquired any remarkable distinction. The principal seat of the war in the next campaign appears to have been the country between Tarracina and the Samnite frontier; and both of Evoet of capuc nd the consuls were employed in this quarter. Their business was the ther townsofCamto watch the Samnites, and to protect the allies of Rome, but Pa. they did not for some time venture to encounter the enemy in the field. In spite of all their endeavors, however, Suessa Aurunca and Calatia75 either revolted or nothing, which in a time of such danger as this second battle after the defeat at Lautulse.  year must have been, even according to his own IX. 23. account, is an absolute impossibility. Diodo-74 Livy, IX. 25, 26. rus places the revolt of Sora, the siege of Sati- “I This appears, because Calatia is mentioned cula, and the battle of Lautulke, all in the same as retaken by the Romans in the following year which according to him was the year year; and a Roman colony was sent to Suessa, of the consulship of Papirius and Publilius.

which, it is said, ” Auruncorum fuerat.” That Amidst all this confusion it is impossible to de-a colony was sent there implies that the place termine the order of events with certainty. must have been conquered by the Ronmns, 72 Diodorus, XIX. 72. which could not have happened, unless it had 73 “, Circa omnia defecerunt,” are the words previously revolted from them, or been otherwhich Livy puts into the mouth of Fabius, wise in the enemy’s power. when he is urging his soldiers to venture a

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302 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXX were taken; and Capua itself, as if judging that the battle of Lautulse was now proved to have decided the fate of the war, broke off its alliance with Rome, and declared for the Samnites.76 This last misfortune obliged the Romans to name a dictator; and C. Muenius, who had once before filled that office, was now again invested with it, and was sent out with a third army to act especially against Capua. An obscure report, barely noticed by Livy,” has acquainted us with the existence of another danger which beset Rome at this time, and which must have been more alarming than all the rest. Cabals, and even conspiracies, were formed amongst some of the Roman aristocracy, to turn the perilous crisis of their country to their own personal advantage. Who were the individuals concerned in these plots, or what was their special object, we know not; we can scarcely be mistaken, however, in supposing that Appius Claudius, who was censor two years afterwards, was one of them; and his subsequent conduct makes it probable that he wished to make a party amongst the lowest of the people, and by their help, combined with the strength of the more violent patricians, to overthrow the actual constitution, and restore the exclusive ascendency of the old burgher aristocracy. Disasters in war excite discontent, and discontent readily attacks the existing order of things, however unconnected it may’be with the immediate evil; and in this manner the defeat of Lautulue might be made instrumental to a patrician revolution. But the domestic and foreign danger was alike dispelled by the military success of the consuls. While an aristocratical conspiracy at Rome The Ausonian cities are Uetrayed to the Ro-was threatening the most extreme evils, a similar conspiracy in mans. the Ausonian cities of Ausona, Minturnze, and Vescia, occurred most critically to revive the cause of Rome in the neighborhood of Campania.

Twelve of the young nobilityfs of those towns, dreading nothing so much as the ascendency of their political adversaries through Samnite assistance, offered to the Roman consuls to betray their respective countries into their hands. By their means Roman soldiers were put in possession of the gates of the three cities, and the mass of the people in each were put to the sword. Thus the Romans gained three places of considerable importance from their position; and the bloody execution done upon the inhabitants would spread the impression among the neighboring states, that to revolt from Rome might even yet be attended with danger. Still the Samnite force was yet unbroken, and availing themselves of the effect t victon of the produced by their victory at Lautule, the Samnite armies were Romlns atcinn. Sub-still acting on the offensive. Where the great battle was fought mission of Capua. which effectually turned lthe tide, it is not possible to ascertain. Livy places”9 the scene at the edge of the plain of Naples, where the road from Capua to Beneveun.um first ascends the hills of Samnium, apparently not far from the piss of Maddaloni. Diodorus fixes it at a place which he calls Cinna,6~ a name wholly unknown, nor will his account enable us so much as to guess its situation. But whatever was the scene of the action, the victory, of the Romans was complete, and the threatening consequences of the defeat at Lautulue were entirely.

prevented. The news of the battle instantly struck terror into the Campanians, and they at oncesl made their submission to the dictator, and agreed to give up to him the principal instigators of their revolt.

Amongst these are particularly named two men of one of the noblest families in Capua, Ovius and Novius Calavius. They, like Vibius Virrius and his associates in the war of Hannibal, chose to perish by their own: hands,, rather than by: the axe of the dictator’s lictors, and the principal: offenders having thus atoned for their revolt, the state of Capua was pardoned, and readmitted to its former alliance with Rome. “I Diodorus-XIX. 76. 7 Livy, IX. 25. 7 IX. 26.‘Nec Capua ipsa crimine caruit: 79 Livy, IX. 27. quin Romam quoque et ad principum quosdam 80

Livy, XIX. 76. iqiuirendos venturn est.” 81 Diodornus, XIX. 76.

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ICAP. XXXI.] COMMISSIONERS FOR NAVAL AFFAIRS. 303 The strength of the two parties in the Samnite wv xr was so essentially anequal that the loss of a battle pressed far more severely on the one than on the other.

Accordingly, after the defeat which rendered their theno….o. Coonioes victory at Lautulme fruitless, the Samnites were again reduced to.nte na Lumeramia, and the defensive, and saw the towns which they had won successively Ca..u. wrested from them. In the next two years82 Fregellme, one of the original causes of the war, Sora,83 which had revolted just before the battle of Lautulke, and Atina,s4 another Volscian city situated among the mountains which look down on the valley of the Melfa, one of the early feeders of the Liris, were all taken by the Romans; while in Campania and its neighborhood they made themselves masters of Suessa Aurunca, of Nola, and Calatia;s5 and in Apulia they finally obtained possession of Luceria.” They resolved, too, to secure these conquests by permanent occupation; and thus 25008s colonists were sent to Luceria; another colony was planted at Suessa Aurunca; a third in the: island of Pontia;88 and two more,-to consist of 2000 colonists each, were ordered to be founded at Interamna on the Liris, and at Casinumn on one of the feeders of the Liris. These three last colonies were settled on ground which had formerly belonged to the Volscians: Interamna and OCasinum were an advance of the Roman frontier on the upper road into Campania; but Pontia must have been colonized with a different object. Two years afterwards we find that two commissionerss-for naval affairs were for the first time created by the Romans; and this appointment, coupled with the occupation of Pontia, make it probable that during the war with Samnium the Roman coasts were exposed to continual plundering descents, and the Roman merchant-vessels often intercepted on their voyages. Whether this annoyance proceeded from the Lucanians, or whether the Tarentines had really lent to the Samnites the aid of their maritime power in this long struggle, are amongst the many points in the history of these events of which we must be content to be ignorant. The Samnite war lasted eight years longer; nor was even this latter period of the contest unchequered by some changes of fortune; still Rome Superiority of the Rowas,continually becoming more powerful, and the various attempts 1th p.nations.ophote.of made by several of the Italian: nations to check her growing su-to it premacy served only to set in a clearer light -the greatness of her resources. Etruria, which had remained at peace for nearly forty years, now, as if alarmed by the danger of the Samnites, exerted her whole strength against Rome, but in vain. The Umbrians, a people whose name we have scarcely hitherto had occasion to mention, attacked the Romans in entire ignorance of their own and their enemy’s power, and were defeated and struck down in an instant. The Hernicans, so long united with Rome in a close alliance, revolted only to become more completely subjected; the hardy nations of the Marsians, Pelignians, and Marrucinians, after having from jealousy stood aloof hitherto from their Sam-:nite kinsmen, now at last endeavored to aid them when it was too late, and did but involve themselves in their humiliation. Northwards, and southwards, in the central Apennines, and on the coast of the Adriatic, the Roman power was alike irresistible, and Rome towered above the nations who were jointly or severally assailing her, like one of the heroes of the Homeric poems when beset by a multitude of common men. To those who estimate the power of a nation by its geographical extent, this 82 Livy, IX. ~8. Diodorus, XIX. 101. rather of rocks, in the largest of which, now 83 Livy, IX. 24. Ponza, the Roman colony was founded. Ponza’ Livy, IX. 28.

has a good harbor, and was taken possession 85 Livy, IX. 28. Diodorus, XIX. 101. of by the British in 18113. It is volcanic and is 82 Diodorus, XIX. 72. Livy, IX. 26. about 14 Neapolitan miles in circumference 87 Livy, IX. 26. (nearly 17t British), and exhibits several re88 Livy, IX. 28.

Diodorus, XIX. 101-105. mains of ancient buildings. See Giustiniani, Niebuhr observes, that the plural form, “Pon-Dizionario del Regno di Napoli, in Ponza. ti%,” belongs only to the group of islands, or 89 Livy, IX. 30.

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304 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. XXXL It causes; the greater constant superiority of Rome may appear extraordinary: for un-.aptiolntn: the central doubtedly the portions of Italy possessed by the Etruscans, Umposition of Rsme, and brians, and Samnites, were many times larger than the territory the unity of its government. of Rome and her allies. But their superiority in population was by no means equally great; nor is it likely that either Etruria or Samnium were peopled as densely. as Latium and Campania. Livy does not. give the returns of the several census taken at this period, but he states generally, that the number of Roman citizens averaged about 250,000;90 to which the Latin and Campanian allies are to be added. Now we do not know what was the population of Samnium or Etruria at this. time; but if we may at all be guided by the famous return of the military force of the several nations of Italy in the great Gaulish war of 529,91 we may conclude that it fell far short of that of the Romans and their confederates.. To this must be added the still greater’advantages on the side of Rome, of a central position, a unity of counsels, and a national spirit, as systematic as it was resolute. A single great nation is incomparably superior to a coalition; and still more so when that coalition is made up not of single states, but of federal leagues; so that a real unity of counsels and of public spirit is only to be found in the individual cities of each league; which must each be feeble, because each taken separately is small in extent and weak in population. The German empire alone, setting aside the Spanish, Italian, and Hungarian dominions of the house of Austria, could never, even with the.addition of the Netherlands, have contended on equal terms with France. The sudden breaking out of the Etruscan war at this period was determined, Etruscan war. Aent no doubt, by the expiration of the forty years’ peace which had Etruscan nrmybes eges been concluded with the Tarquinians in the year 404.

As usual, Sutirium. Campaign of Q. Emilius aon the when the term of peace was drawing to a close, there would be Etruscan frontier and of c. Junius in Sam-some negotiation between the two countries,92 to ascertain whether the treaty would be renewed, or whether its close was to be followed by immediate war; and this explains Livy’s statement,93 that in the consulship of M. Valerius and P. Decius there arose rumors of hostilities with Etruria; and that great preparations were made by both nations, although no actual attack was begun by either till the year following. But if we may trust the Roman accounts,94 not Tarquinii only, but all the Etruscan cities except Arretium took part in the renewed quarrel. This probably was owing to a jealousy of the Roman power on the one hand, and to the cessation of the Gaulish inroads into northern Etruria on the other, so that Clusium and Perusia and Cortona were no longer prevented by a nearer danger, as in the last war with Veii, from giving A U.

C.433.B.C.311.their aid to the cities on the southern frontier.

Accordingly a great Etruscan army laid siege to Sutrium,95 which was still, as it had been nearly eighty years before, the most advanced point of the Roman doLivy, IX. 19. “Censebantur ejus setatis great Gaulish war, were more numerous than lustris ducena quinquagena millia capitum.” the Etruscans, Umbrians, Samnites, and Lu91 The return of free citizens within the mili-canians, nearly in the proportion of two to one. tary age, gave for the Samnites, Lucanians, And although in the course of the eighty oI Marsians, Marrucinians, Frentanians, and Ves-ninety years which elapsed between the second tinians, the number of 120,000 foot soldiers, Samnite war and the Gaulish invasion, the popand 14,000 horse. Polybius, II. 24.

The Umulation of Etruria and Samnium may be supbrians were 20,000; the Etruscans and Sa-posed to have decreased, while that of Rome bines together (the number of the Etruscans undoubtedly had increased by the accession oi separately is not given) were 50,000 foot and the Hernicans, LEquians, and a large part of the 4000 horse. Here we have a total of 190,000 Sabines, to the rolls of Roman citizens, yet still, foot and 18,000 horse. But the same return with every possible allowance that can be made, reckons the Romans, Latins and Campanians we must believe that the Romans and their at 330,000 foot and 23,000 horse, besides the allies in the second Samnite war considerably forces actually at that time in the field, which surpassed their enemies even in mere numamounted to 50,000

Romans and Campanians bers. more, and probably too at least 20,000 Latins, 02 See of this history, chap. xvi. note 48, and with not more than 40,000
of the Samnites, Lu-chap. xviii. p. 147. canians, &c., on the very highest calculation, 93 IX. 29. and probably much less. Thus the Romans, 4

Livy, IX. 32. Latins, and Campanians, at the time of the 95 Livy, IX. 32.

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CHAP. XXXI.] ETRUSCAN WAR. 305 minion on the side of Etruria. Q. EAEmilius Barbula, one of the consuls, marched with a single consular army to protect the Sutrians, and a battle was fought with no decisive result; but it was most obstinately contested, and the loss on both sides was immense.

The Etruscans, however, continued to besiege Sutrium, and they apparently constructed lines around it, as the Romans had done at Veii, in which they proposed to keep a part of their army through the winter, that the blockade might not be interrupted. Meantime the campaign of this year in Samnium had been decidedly favorable to the Romans, although the details are utterly uncertain; for, if we compare Livy’s account with that of Diodorus, no one would suspect that both writers were describing the events of the same war and the same period. According to Livy,96 the scene of action lay in Samnium, and one consular army only, that of C. Junius Bubulcus, was engaged. By this army, Bovianum, the chief city of the Pentrian Samnites, on the north side of the Matese, is said to have been taken; and afterwards, when the Samnites had nearly surprised the consul by an ambuscade, the practised valor of the soldiers repelled the danger, and even obtained a complete victory. According to Diodorus,9’ both consuls were employed, and the seat of war was Apulia. Here the Romans, after a battle which lasted two days, gained a complete victory, and from that time forwards they remained masters of the field, overran the open country without opposition, and took by storm or by the terror of their arms several of the enemy’s cities. In order to reconcile these apparent contradictions, we must suppose that Diodorus describes the winter campaign, and Livy that of the summer following: that both consuls, after entering upon their office in September or October, were employed in Apulia during the winter, which, as Niebuhr has observed, is the best season for military operations in that country; that in the summer of the following year the Etruscan war broke out, and that then Q. AEmilius was sent to relieve Sutrium, while C. Junius carried on the war in the centre of Samnium. The siege of Bovianum, where the climate is so cold, that the snow must render military operations impracticable till very late in the spring, and the ambuscade formed by the Samnites to surprise the Romans while pursuing the cattle into the high mountain pastures, clearly imply a summer campaign. And when C. Junius marched home with his army to celebrate his triumph on the 5th of August, he probably found his colleague still engaged with the Etruscans on the side of Sutrium. Q.

Fabius Maximus was elected one of the consuls for the new year; the same person who, when master of the horse fourteen years before, had A U. c.

44. crnso nearly forfeited his life for his disobedience to the orders of the pAign of Q. F~abiu dictator. L. Papirius Cursor.. As the Fabian house was both powerful and popular, he was a favorite hero in the stories of these times; and his exploits in this campaign have been disguised by such exaggerations that it is difficult to appreciate his real merit justly. We can hardly believe that he defeated the whole united force of the Etruscan nation in a great battle under the walls of Perusia, with such slaughter that sixty thousand Etruscans were killed or taken; nor were the Ciminian mountains so impassable a barrier as to justify the statement, that, before the daring expedition of Fabius they had not even been crossed by any Roman traders, and that the country beyond was as unknown as the wilds of Germany before the conquests of Drusus. Yet the campaign of Fabius was, doubtless, in a very high degree, able, enterprising, and successful, and the triumph which he obtained in the following year for his victories over the Etruscans was assuredly well deserved, According to Diodorus,98 both the consuls, R. Fabius and his colleague, C. Marcius Rutulus, marched together to relieve Sutrium; and it was by e to pen their joint force that the Etruscan besieging army, which had ven-trate into the heart eo tured to attack them, was beaten and obliged to take refuge within the enemys country. IX. 31. 97 XIX. 26. 98 XX. 8, 20

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306 HISTORY OF ROME. [(CHM. XXX1 its lines. But the employment of both the consular armies in Etruria was not unobserved by the indefatigable Samnites. They poured down into Apulia, and ravaged the territory of the allies of Rome in that country without meeting with any opposition. This obliged the Romans to recall C. Marcius from Sutrium. and to send him with his army against the Samnites. Fabius was thus left alone, and the Etruscan lines before Sutrium were too strong to be attacked with success.

But it struck him that a sudden and rapid invasion of central Etruria might oblige the enemy to recall their army from Sutrium, and would, at the same time, enrich his soldiers with the plunder of a wealthy and untouched country. It was thus that Hannibal hoped to relieve Capua by his unexpected march upon Rome; and the same policy led Scipio into Africa, as the surest method of obliging Hannibal to evacuate Italy. Fabius sent to Rome to acquaint the senate with his purpose, that an army of reserve99
might be raised to cover the Roman territory during his absence: he had also previously sent his brother“‘0 across the Ciminian mountains to collect information, and to persuade, if possible, some of the Umbrian states to ally themselves with Rome. His brother could speak the Etruscan language, and in the disguise of a shepherd, accompanied only by a single slave who had been brought up withhim from a child, and also was acquainted with Etruscan, he penetrated through Etruria as far as Camerte or Camerinum in Umbria, a town on the northern side of the Apennines, near the modern road from Foligno to Ancona. The Camertians received him in the most friendly manner, and desired him to assure the consul, that if he came into their neighborhood their entire force should join his army, and that they would supply him with provisions during a whole month. With this encouraging message the Roman officer returned to his brother, and Q.

Fabius resolved to lose no time in carrying his plan into execution, suspecting, perhaps, that if he delayed he might receive a peremptory order from the senate not to risk his army in so hazardous an enterprise.

The Ciminian hills, for we should scarcely call them mountains, are the ridge which The Ciminin hill. divides the valley of the Tiber from the basin of the lake of Bolsena, Fabi.s cross.es them, and firom the valley which runs from the foot of the lake down to and carries the war int Etruria. His victories the sea. Where the road from Viterbo to Rome crosses them therea. they are still covered with copsewood, and the small crater of the lake of Vico, which lies high up in their bosom, is surrounded by the remains of the old forest. In the fifth century of Rome the woods were far more extensive; and the hills, having now become the boundary between the Roman and Etruscan nations, were, perhaps, studiously kept in their wild state in order to prevent collisions between the borderers of both frontiers. They are a remarkable point, because, as they run up to a crest, with no extent of tableland on their summits, they command a wide view on either side, reaching far away to the southeast over the valley of the’iTiber, even to the Alban hills, whilst on the north and west they look down on the plain of Viterbo; and the lake of Bolsena is distinctly visible, shut in at the farthest distance by the wild mountains of Radicofani. ” That such an army was raised, appears from left bank of the Tiber, between Todi and AmeLivy, IX. 39; and Niebuhr well observes, that lia, is proved decisively, if, indeed, it could ever the mission of five senators, accompanied by have been reasonably doubted, by an inscriptwo of the tribunes of the commons, who arrived tion found at Camerino, in which the Camerin the camp before Sutrium too late to step the tians express their gratitude to the emperor expedition into Etruria (Livy, IX. 36), seems to Severus, for having confirmed to them “the imply that some earlier communications had equal rights of their treaty, ” “jure cequo fcedepassed upon the subject, and that Fabius hayv-ris sibi confirmato:” an allusion to their welling shown a disposition to disobey the prohibi-known foedus aequum, concluded at this very tion of the senate, the two tribunes were sent to time of the first Roman invasion of Etruria, and a.rrest him, which they alone, by virtue of their which existed to the end of the commonwealth, inviolable character, could do with safety. and nominally, at least, as the inscription above 100 Livy, IX. 36. That the Camertians, who quoted shows, to the third century of the Chrisconcluded the treaty with the Romans on this tian era. ~ It was in the territory of Camerinum occasion, were the people of Camerinum, the also that L. Scipio was defeated by the Gauls modern Camerino, and not, as Dr. Cramer sup-and Samnites in the third Samnite war. The poses, of the obscure place of Camerata, on the above inscription is given by Orelli, No. 920.

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CHAP. XXXI.] PAPIRIUS CURSOR APPOINTED DICTATOR. 307 Fabius, having sent on his baggage and infantry during the night, followed himself with his cavalry about the middle of the day following; and on the next morning the whole army crossed the summit of the Ciminian ridge, and poured down into the plains beyond. Some of the Etruscan chiefs”l’ assembled their peasantry, and attempted to stop the plunder of their lands; but they were de. feated with great loss; and the invaders overran the country far and wide, and carried off cattle and prisoners in great numbers. How far they penetrated into Etruria is uncertain. According to Livy it was a mere plundering inroad, and could not have extended beyond the territory of Vulsinii; but, according to Diodorus,‘02 the Roman army advanced into the very heart of Etruria, fought a great battle, and won a decided victory in the neighborhood of Perusia; insomuch that the siege of Sutrium was raised, and three of the greatest of the Etruscan cities, Pexusia, Arretium, and Cortona, sued for peace, and concluded a truce for thirty years. Livy‘03 represents the decisive victory as having been won near Sutrium after the return of the Romans from their expedition; an immense army of Etruscans, joined by the forces of some of the states of Umbria, hastened to pursue and take vengeance on the invaders, but did not overtake them within the Etruscan territory, and thus followed them to their old position in the neighborhood of Sutrium. Both accounts agree in describing the victory as signal, and in stating that it was followed by a peace with three of the principal cities of Etruria. Meanwhile, the war was raging with no less fury in Samnium. C. Marcius, after having been recalled from Sutrium, had marched with his Samnium. The Romans army into Apulia,‘04 and there at first relieved the allies of Rome Peapi defeated, ran L. from the plundering incursions of the enemy. But the Samnites poted dictator. had no intention to act merely on the defensive; they were eager to crush the army of Marcius, while Fabius was engaged in Etruria; and they attacked him with such vigor‘5’ that the Roman annals themselves acknowledge that the issue of the battle was doubtful, and that it seemed to be unfavorable, owing to the loss of several superior officers, and especially as the consul himself was wounded. The truth is sufficiently evident that the Romans were, in fact, defeated. When the news of this battle reached Rome, the senate resolved immediately that L. Papirius Cursor should be again appointed dictator; but it was necessary that one of the consuls should name him, and as nothing certain was known of the fate of C. Marcius, a deputation was sent to Fabius in Etruria, to request that he would perform this office. Fabius and Papirius were personal enemies: the consul had not forgotten how nearly he had once fallen a sacrifice to Papirius’ inexorable temper; and political difference had since, perhaps, contributed to keep alive the personal quarrel. The deputation sent to Fabius consisted, therefore, of senators‘0 of consular rank, whose private influence with him might be supposed likely to aid the expressed wish of the senate, and to induce him to sacrifice his own personal feelings. He heard the senate’s decree read, and listened to the arguments with which the deputies urged him to obey it; but he gave them no answer, either by look or word, and retired abruptly from the interview. In the dead of the night, however, according to the usual form, he pronounced the nomination of Papirius; but when the deputies ventured to thank him for his noble conquest over his feelings, he again heard them in silence, and finally dismissed them without any answer. The dictator found an army at once disposable in the troops which had been raised to cover Rome when Fabius began his march across the His great victory ann Ciminian hills. With this force he marched into Samnium; there eptendidtriunmph. SH The character of the Etruscan govermnment and Poland, formed the bulk of the national ar is well given in Livy’s short statement, ” tu-mies. mnultuarie agrestiunm Etruscorum cohortes re-1t2

Livy, X. 35..ente a principibus regionis ejus concitate, 103 IX. 3 IX. 36.

These ” principes” were the Luco-104 Diodorts, XX. 35. menes or nobles of Etruria, and the ” agrestium t65 Livy, IX. 38. cohortes” were their serfs, who, as in Russia t06 Livy, IX. 38.

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308 HISTORY OF ROME. [OrAr. XXXI. he was joined by the wreck of the consul’s army, and by the contingent of the Campanian allies of Rome; but he did not immediately venture upon a battle. again all the previous movements of both armies are unknown, nor is even the scene of the battle mentioned, but we are told‘07 that after a short time a general action took place, in which the dictator Papiriuso his master of the horse, C.

Junius Bubulcus, and his two lieutenants, M. Valerius and P. Decius, both men of consular rank, all alike distinguished themselves; and which ended in a complete victory on the side of the Romans. Papirius triumphed on the 15th of October;“0 and his triumph was distinguished by the splendor of the captured arms which were carried in the procession. There were a number of gilded and silvered shields‘09 which had been borne by two different bands of Samnites in the late battle; the silvered shields had belonged to a band, each man of which had been pledged by solemn oaths, accompanied by a ceremonial of the most mysterious and appalling character, to return victorious or to die. As sacred soldiers, these men had worn in the field coats of white linen, and silvered arms; and had their station on the right wing, which was the post of honor. The band with gilded shields had worn coats of various colors, like a plaid; and both bands had plumes of an imposing height waving on their helmets. All these particulars of the Samnite arms are mentioned for the first time at the triumph of Papirius; which proves that on no former occasion had the Samnites sustained so great a defeat, or had attached such great importance to the issue of the contest, as to adopt the unwonted expedient of a sacred or devoted band. It is added that these gay shields were divided out amongst the several silversmiths in the Forum,ll that they might hang them up to decorate their shops on those great festivals when the Forum was dressed up as a part of the pageant. The chronology is here again involved in confusion. According to the Fasti Cof.ioa again in th Capitolini, L. Papirius held his dictatorship for a whole year, durhronlology. Submis-ing which there were no consuls; and Q. Fabius commanded in Etruria as proconsul, and triumphed in that office on the 13th of November. To this version of the story belongs, apparently, the account of a second Etruscan campaign of Q. Fabius, of a great victory gained by him over the Umbrians, and of a second gained over the Etruscans at the lake of Vadimon; then of the revolt and subsequent submission of Perusia, of the occupation of that strong city by a Roman garrison, and of embassies sent from the other cities of Etruria to sue for peace. It would be difficult indeed to find room for all these great achievements in the single year of Fabius’ consulship; but, on the other hand, this second Etruscan campaign is unknown to Diodorus, and both he and Livy agree in making the second consulship of Q. Fabius follow immediately after his first, without any such interval as that mentioned in the Fasti. It is remarkable, also, that the little lake of Vadimon should have been the scene of two victories over the Etruscans, within a period of about thirty years; and we are tempted to ask whether the first of these battles has not been greatly exaggerated. Yet the Etruscans must have been signally humbled by Fabius; for, in the next year, when P. Decius invaded Etruria, he met with little opposition; the people of Tarquinii obtained a peace for forty years,1’ and the other Etruscan cities were glad to obtain a truce for a single year; and even this they 107 Livy, IX. 40. towns of Italy at this day. The shields were Fasti Capitolini. hung up on the outside front of the square 109 Livy, IX. 40. piers, or pile, looking towards the Forum. The 110 These shops of the silversmiths lined the butchers’ shops, which, in the time of the deVia Sacra, which, on its course from the Velia cemvirs, had occupied this side of the Forum, to the foot of the Capitol, ran along the north-had lately disappeared with the growing magern side of the Forum. They were like cells, nificence of the city, and had been succeeded open in front, built of peperino, and with a row by the shops of goldsmiths and silversmiths. of square massy supports, or. piers, in front of See Beschreibung der Stadt Rom, Vol. III 2d them, supporting the first story of the houses part, p. 25. above; exactly like the covered passages in 11 Livy, IX. 41. Diodorus, XX. 44. which the shops are ranged in so many of the

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CuAP. XXXI.] WAR WITH THE SALLENTINES. 309 purchased at the price of giving a year’s pay to the consul’s army, and two coats to each soldier.

Q. Fabius, who had been chosen consul for the third time as the colleague of P. Decius, had this year the conduct of the war in Samnium. But Continued uccee of the Samnites were so weakened, that their speedy subjugation Cwent Rodmns.Shortwar with the Umbrians. seemed inevitable; and this, we may suppose, filled the neighboring nations with a sense of their own danger if Samnium should fall, and induced not only the Marsians and Pelignians’L2 to take part with the Samnites, but even shook the long-tried friendship of the Hernicans with Rome, and aroused the Sallentines, at the southern extremity of Italy, to look on the Samnite cause as their own. But all was of no avail, and the success of the Romans was uninterrupted. Nuceria Alfaterna, in Campania, which had revolted seven years before, was now recovered, the Marsians and Pelignians were defeated, and Fabius was enabled to leave his province without danger, and to hasten into Umbria;113 the Umbrians, it is said, having raised so formidable an army as to threaten to march straight upon Rome, and P.

Decius having thought it necessary to retreat from Etruria, in order to watch over the safety of the capital. Here, again, we cannot but suspect some exaggeration; for Fabius is said to have won an easy victory over the Umbrians, and the Umbrian towns immediately submitted. This may be doubtful; but it is certain that the people of Ocriculum concluded an alliance with Rome, and that Fabius obtained no triumph either for his victory over the Umbrians, or for those which he is said to have won in Samnium. Yet his command in Samnium was continued to him for another year, with the title of proconsul: the new consuls were Appius Claudius and L.

Volumnius. As the Etruscan war was now over, and Q. Fabius continued to command the army in Samnium, only one of the consuls for this year was re-Wnr with the Sullenquired to take the field. This was L. Volumnius, and he was sent tine. against the Sallentines,“4 an Apulian or Iapygian people, who dwelt, as we have seen, at the extreme heel of Italy, and who were now attacked by the Romans, under pretence, we may suppose, of their having annoyed some of the Apulian allies of Rome. But Volumnius did nothing worthy of notice, although, according to Livy, he gained some victories, took several towns, and made himself very popular with his soldiers by his liberality in the disposal of the plunder. The Fasti Capitolini, however, show that he obtained no triumph; and one of the annalists, Piso,l5
omitted his consulship altogether, as if he doubted its reality.

Fabius,116 on his part, defeated the Samnites near Allifae, and obliged their army to surrender. The Samnites themselves he disarmed, and Tho Hornicans become then dismissed them unhurt; but all the other prisoners, to what-suopected by theo Roever nation they belonged, were sold for slaves. Amongst this mans. number, there were several who declared themselves to be Hernicans, and these were immediately sent off to Rome, and, by order of the senate, were committed to the custody of the several allied cities of the Latins. Q. Fabius then led his army home; but either his victory has been exaggerated, or it was balanced by some defeats which the Roman writers did not choose to mention, for he obtained no triumph.

The new consuls were Q. Marcius Tremulus, and P. Cornelius Arvina. They brought the case of the Hernican prisoners before the senate, which, The says Livy,”’ so exasperated the whole nation, that the people of Anagnia summoned a general council of deputies from every Hernican city, and all, with three exceptions, voted for war with Rome. It is manifest that something is omitted in this narrative, the decision of the senate upon the case which was brought before them. This it was, no doubt, which so exasperated the Hernicans; and no wonder, if, as there is every reason to believe, it ordered the pris2 Livy, IX. 41. 115 Livy, IX. 44. 1,S Livy, IX. 41. 116 Livy, IX. 42. 21 Livy, IX. 42. 117 Livy, IX. 42.

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310 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXI oners to be scourged and beheaded. Such a bloody execution would naturally excite a deep and general indignation, and the common feeling of the Hernican people would call aloud for vengeance. Meanwhile the indomitable spirit of the Samnites kindled at the prospect of Combined operations o this accession to their league against Rome; and they thought that if Combined op erations of ia Hernican and Sam-they could clear the valley of the Liris, and thus open their communications with the country of the Hernicans, their combined forces might possibly again carry the war into the heart of Latium, through the great mountain-portal by Praeneste. Accordingly, they attacked and carried the two posts of Calatia, on the Vulturnus, and Sora, on the upper Liris, and sold the prisoners as slaves.ll Thus the communication with the Hernicans was opened, and a Samnite army must have taken up its position in the valley of the upper Liris, on the edge of the Hernican country. The Romans then hoped, by a combined operation of both the consular armies, to penetrate into the heart of the enemy’s seat of war in two different directions; and Q. Marcius proceeded to invade the Hernican territory from the side of Latium, while P. Cornelius was to ascend the valley of the Liris from Campania, and to dislodge the Samnites from Sora. But the enemy held their ground so well,“l and availed themselves so effectually of their central position, that the consuls could make no progress; and, being kept in total ignorance of each other’s movements, it is likely that each successively sustained a severe check from a concentration of the enemy’s force against his particular army. This state of affairs excited great alarm at Rome; all citizens within the military age were enlisted, and two regular armies of two legions each were raised, to be ready for any emergency. Thus supported, Q. Marcius soon overbore the resistance of the Hernicans, The Henmicans soliit and obliged them to purchase a truce for thirty days by furnishand obtain a truce. ing the Roman army with two months’ pay and rations of corn, Sanmium ravaged for fiveu montbas by two and with clothing for each soldier. They then sued for peace, and were referred by the senate to the consul, who received accordingly their entire submission. He hastened to effect his junction with his colleague, and the Samnite army, oppressed by their united forces, was defeated with great slaughter.“‘2 Marcius returned to Rome and triumphed on the 30th of June,”’ and his services were accounted so eminent that an equestrian statue was set up in honor of him in the Forum,‘22 in front of the temple of Castor, or rather of the twin heroes, Castor and Pollux. After his triumph, he rejoined his colleague in Samnium, and their two armies being completely masters of the field, ravaged, the whole country with the utmost perseverance for the space of nearly five months;123 cutting down the fruit-trees, burning the houses that were not secured within the fortified towns, and doing all the mischief in their power, in the hope of forcing the enemy into submission. The consuls were thus detained so long in the field, that a dictator was named to hold the comitia; and L.

Postumius and Ti. Minucius were elected consuls for the year following.

Before the close of this year the senate had decided the fate of the Hernicans.‘“4 Three cities which had taken no part in the late war were left in Final submission and settlement of the Her. the enjoyment of their municipal independence; but Anagnia and the other towns were obliged to receive the Roman franchise without the right of voting; or, in other words, to become the subjects of Rome, without any share either in the general government or in their own municipal administration. They were forbidden to hold any common meetings, or to intermarry with one another, and their magistrates were prohibited from exercising any other function than that of superintending the performance of the rites of religion.‘s Livy, IX. 43. Diodorus, XX. 80. The temple of Castor was on the southern side n~ Livy, IX. 43. of the Forum, opposite to the line of the Via‘20

Livy, IX. 43. Sacra. 121 Fasti Capitolini. 123 Diodorus, XX. 80.‘H Livy, IX. 43. Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXXIV. 6. 124 Livy, IX. 43.

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CHAP. XXXI.] PEACE BETWEEN ROME AND SAMNIUM. 311 The long, contest with the Samnites was now drawing to a conclusion. Before the new consuls took the field, and after MarCius and Cornelius Decisive campaign ix had returned home, the Samnites revenged in some degree the tnoeeartof Samnium. devastation of their own country, by making several plundering inroads into the plain of Campania.ls But when the legions opened the campaign, the power of the Romans was again irresistible. The seat of the war was now in the very heart of Samnium, on the north side of the Matese, in the country of the Pentrians; and the two consuls attacked the two cities of Tifernum and Bovianum. One last desperate effort was made by the Samnite imperator or captain-general, Statius Gellius, to relieve Bovianum: but it was vain, although the battle was so stoutly contested, that the Roman consul Ti. Minucius was mortally wounded, and did not live to reap the fruits of his victory. But Gellius was himself taken prisoner, and the greater part of his army destroyed. Bovianum then surrendered, and the consuls, on their return home, recovered the towns which had been lately lost in the valley of the Liris, Sora, Arpinum, and an unknown place, Cerennia,‘6 or Censennia. This campaign was decisive. The new consuls were P. Sulpicius and P. Sempronius, and Sulpicius immediately took the field in Samnium.‘27 He gained some advantages, small perhaps in themselves, but imallies saubnit to lthe oportant, as the last drop poured into the brimming vessel and mans causing the water to overflow.

The Samnites at last sued for peace, and the Marrucinians, Marsians, Pelignians, and Frentanians followed the example. They were all obliged to become the allies of Rome, but the alliance was no longer on equal terms;‘28 they became, in fact, politically subject, and consented to acknowledge and respect the majesty, or, in other words, the supremacy of Rome. In comparison with such a full confession of the superior strength of the Romans, any partial acquisitions of territory were of slight import-Accessios gaineditote ance. But the Romans had obtained in the course of the war the Reman dominsion inthe course of the war. important position of Luceria in Apulia, which secured their ascendency in that part of Italy; and they had also won the whole line of the Liris, all those Volscian towns which had been the Samnite share of the spoil at the conclusion of the great Latin war. Campania had been retained, and its connection with Rome was rendered closer than ever; and above all, the timely extension of the full Roman franchise to so many of the Latin and Volscian cities in the neighborhood of Rome, had made the Roman power sound at the heart, and had consolidated that mass of citizens, and of allies scarcely less true than citizens, within the confines of Latium, of which neither the arms nor the arts of Hannibal could tempt a single individual to join his standard. The conquest of the Hernicans gave the Romans, it is piobable, a considerable accession of territory in the forfeited domain land of the several cities; and it put an end to the old equal alliance which entitled the Hernicans to a share of all plunder taken by the armies of the allied nations. The victories over the 15 Livy, IX. 44. Diodorus, XX. 90. year 401, he says that the Samnites solicited i26 Dioclorus calls it Serennia. Is not this the friendship of Rome; that “Legatis eorum place the ” Cisauna” in Samnium, mentioned comiter ab senatu responsumn; feedere in sociein the inscription on the tomb of L.

Scipio tatem accepti.” VII. 19. In the same manBarbatus? ner he misrepresents the early relations between 127 This appears from the Fasti Capitolini, Rome and Latium. But the negotiations had which state that Sulpicius obtained a triumph broken off in the year 432 onil this very point, for his victories over the Samrnites in this year. because the Samnites would not become the 128 Dionysius, Excerpt. de Legation. p.

2331. dependent allies of Rome; and as the Romans Reiske. His words are, speaking of the Sam-never receded from the conditions on which nites, rous SVrrtKd0VS blooXoysaavras aeaOaL. Livy they had once insisted, we may be sure that says, Feedus antiquLum Samnitibus redditum.” they would have granted no peace to the SamThis is because he never seems to have con-nites which did not include their complete subceived that any nation could ever have been mission; nor can we suppose that the Samthe equal ally of Rome, but that from the very nites would have persevered so long in carrying beginning it must have acknowledged the Ro-on the war amidst such repeated disasters, if man supremacy. Thus, when he speaks of the they could have ended it on any terms less infirst treaty between Rome and Samnium in the tolerable.

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312 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXI Etruscans and Umbrians had revealed the secret of the comparative weakness of those once dreaded nations, and had taught the Romans that their frontier might be extended as soon as they chose beyond the Ciminian hills. Thus in the twenty years of the second Samnite war Rome had risen to the mewas now thefirst first place, beyond dispute, amongst the nations of Italy. And power inItaly. amidst the divisions and corruption of the several kingdoms which had grown up out of the fragments of Alexander’s empire, there was scarcely a power in the civilized world, except Carthage, which could have contended successfully with Rome single-handed. Half a century was yet to elapse before Carthage entered upon the contest. Meanwhile the Roman power was yet to be sharply tried; what Etruria and Samnium could neither singly nor by their joint efforts effect, they were to try again with the help of the Gauls; what they had Etiled to accomplish through barbarian aid, they were to attempt in their last struggle with the assistance of the arms and discipline of the Macedonian phalanx, and guided by the genius of Alexander’s genuine successor, the hero-king of the race of Achilles. CHAPTER XXXII, INTERNAL

HISTORY FROM 428 to 454-ABOLITION OF PERSONAL SLAVERY FOR

DEBT-DICTATORSHIP OF C. MAIENIUS-CENSORSHIP OF APPIUS CLAUDIIJSCENSORSHIP

OF Q. FABIUS AND P. DECIUS-THE OGULNIAN LAW. ” Nothing has contributed more than this lenity to raise the character of public men. Ambition is of itself a game sufficiently hazardous and sufficiently deep to inflame the passions, without adding property, life, and liberty to the stake.”-EDINBURGH REVIEW, No. XCV. p. 161. WE have seen that m the year immediately preceding’the first campaign of the Altered position of Samnite war, several symptoms had been manifested by a strong arte ora lermeo. The party amongst the patricians of the old jealousy towards the party. commons; M. Marcellus, a plebeian, had been forced to resign his dictatorship by the augurs, on the alleged reason that his appointment was invalid from some religious objection; and the most obstinate attempts were made to set aside the Licinian law, and to procure the election of two patrician consuls. In the course of the Samnite war occasional traces of the same feeling are discernible. But its shape was no longer what it had been in the earlier days of the commonwealth. It was no longer a struggle between an aristocracy in the exclusive possession of the government, and a people impatient of their own exclusion from it. It was no longer a struggle between the whole patrician order on one side, and the whole body of the commons on the other. A considerable portion of the patricians and a majority of the senate were well reconciled to the altered state of things, and cordially received the distinguished commoners who had made their way to the highest offices in the commonwealth, and composed a new nobility fully worthy to stand on equal terms by the side of the old. Thus the moderate patricians, the new nobility of the commons, and the mass of the old plebeians were now closely linked together; and their union gave that energy to the Roman councils and arms, which marks in so eminent a manner the middle of the fifth century. But as these elements had tended more and more towards each other, so they parted off on either side from other elements with which, at an earlier period, they had been respectively connected. The moderate

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CHAP. XXXII.] RISE OF A NEW POPULAR PARTY. 313 patricians stood aloof from the high or more violent party, who still dreamt of recovering the old ascendency of their order: whilst a new popular party, though as yet very inconsiderable in power or influence, was growing up distinct from the old plebeians, regarding them with envy,1 and regarded by them in turn with feelings of dislike and suspicion. This new party consisted of freedmen, and of citizens engaged in the various trades and occupations of a city life, who were despised by the old agricultural plebeians as a low and unwarlike populace, and who, by a strong public opinion, were excluded from all prospect of political distinctions. Many of these persons, indeed, had not even the right of voting, as they were not included in any tribe; and they bore this exclusion as impatiently as the old plebeians had borne their exclusion from the highest curule offices. This was a class which was daily becoming more numerous, in proportion as Rome grew in wealth and population, and it formed the origin of the popular party of the later period of the commonwealth; a party very different, both in its character and feelings, from the commons of its earlier history. These extremes of civil society, the highest aristocrats and the lowest populace, have often made common cause with each other against that mid-Coalition of the two exdie class which both hate equally. And when the malcontent tremeo parties against aristocratical families are few in number, but of the highest nobil-e oderato party. ity, any ambitious individual among them is tempted to court the populace for objects more directly personal; he tries to make them the instrument, not of the greatness of his order, but of his own. Thus it was commonly remarked of the tyrants of the ancient world, that they began by playing the demagogue. In such a union between the highest and the lowest classes of society, the gain is mostly for the former; the latter derived little advantage from the alliance, except the pleasure of the horse in the fable, when he saw his old enemy, the stag, effectually humbled. But the coalition is not solely one of political expediency; it arises partly out of certain moral affinities existing between those whose social and political conditions are the extremest opposites. The moral bond between them is their common impatience of law and good government; that anarchical and selfish restlessness, which sees in the existing order of society an equal restraint upon the pride and passion of the highest, and on the needy cupidity of the lowest.2 This is the feeling which has so often brought together the proudest despot or the most insolent aristocrat and the lowest and most profligate populace; and it was this, though in a far milder degree, which associated in one common party This is the progress of all popular parties, is so difficult, that it has rarely or never been from the necessity of the case. As the ruling attempted; the excluding party, strengthened body in the earliest state of society is extremely by all those who were once excluded, is now exclusive, the popular party then comprises extremely powerful, and its power is moral as what Sieyes would call the nation minus a well as physical; the excluded or popular privilegec individual or a very small privileged party, no longer a nation contending against a class. Each success of this party satisfies the caste, but yet much more than a worthless facwishes of a portion of its members, and thus tion contending against a nation, are conscious makes them for the fhture its enemies. And a of a wrong done to them, and are embittered repetition of this process would at last place the by this feeling; but being unable to carry their antipop]ular party ift that same position which point, and, from their very inability to obtain a was at first occupied by their adversaries; they share of the benefits of society, becoming more would, in their turn, become the nation, minus and more morally unfit to enjoy them, their tria very small excluded class, a class, in fact, ex-umph and their continued exclusion are, alike eluded by nothing but their own ignorance or deplorable. Their triumph is but the triumph profligacy. This would be the natural perfec-of slaves broken loose, full of brute ignorance tion of a state, but, unhappily, this as yet has and wickedness; their continued exclusion is a never been attained to; the process has gone on perpetual cancer, wasting away the nation’s healthfully in its first stages, satisfying succes-life; and it is a moral evil, moreover, because it sively all those whose exclusion was wholly un-involves injustice. The great and hardest probnatural, that is, who were excluded by dis-lem of political wisdom is to prevent any part tinctions purely arbitrary, or overbalanced by of society from becoming so socially degraded many more points of resemblance and fitness by poverty, that their political enfranchisement for political power. But when it reaches those becomes dangerous, or even mischievous.

who differ really from the governing body, as 2 Rev Trevtia avadyKc TIv rT6Xav 7rapeXovca, a in the case of the rich and the poor, then con-1’

itovoia i/3pEL TrlyV XeovEtlav Kai bpovIUartL… vulsion and decline have mostly followed. The 1fayovetv es roes Kctvvrsovs. Thucydides, II, work of smoothing down these real differences

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314 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXII at Rome, in the period now before us, the humblest of the city populace and the representative of the proudest family in the commonwealth, Appius Clau dius. But in these coalitions, which are forever occurring in history, the two coaCharacterof such coa.

lescing parties are far from deserving the same judgment. Hislitions.

torians have justly pronounced their full condemnation on the selfish hypocrisy of the tyrant, who talks of liberty in order to establish his own despotism. And for those who, despising all the honors and benefits of society which are fully open to them, aspire to a rank and greatness of a higher and more exclusive sort than the nature of society allows, no condemnation can be too severe, for no wickedness can be greater. But the lowest class, when they are misled into such alliances, deserve even in their worst excesses a milder sentence. Not only are they entitled to all the excuse which may be claimed by ignorance, and an ignorance arising rather from their condition than from their choice; but in their quarrel against the existing order of things, there is, and ever will be, amidst much of envy, and cupidity, and revenge, a certain mixture also of justice. Nothing is more horrible than the rebellions of slaves; yet it is impossible to regard even these with unmixed abhorrence. Nor can we ever place on the same level those who, being excluded from the benefits of society, do but seek a share of them, and those who, enjoying all these benefits in ample measure, cannot rest without something more. Neither are the middle classes apt to be wholly guiltless in their treatment of those below them; when they have established their own rights against the aristocracy, they become a new aristocracy themselves, and having themselves passed through the door, they shut it against those who would fain follow. But here, as in their own earlier contest with the old aristocracy, the fault does not consist in denying political rights to those who are not yet fit for them, for this may be often necessary and just; but in preventing them from ever becoming fit, by retaining institutions which have an inevitable tendency to keep the lowest classes morally degraded, or, at the best, by taking no pains to introduce such as may improve them. In the high aristocratical party at Rome during the period now before us, two individuals are eminent: L. Papirius Cursor, and Appius Claudius. Eminent men of this period. O. Of the high But their objects seem to have been different. Papirius appears aristocratical party, L. Pnpirius Cusorand Ap-to have been sincerely attached to the old aristocratical constitupius Claudius tion, and to have honestly wished to restore what in his eyes was the uncorrupted discipline of the Roman commonwealth. Appius, like his ancestor the decemvir, or Dionysius of Syracuse, wished to overthrow the existing order of things, not in favor of the old patrician ascendency, but of his own personal dominion. The moderate or middle party, composed as it was of the majority of the sen2.

of the middle or ate and of the whole body of the old commons, numbered amongst moderate party. its members most of the distinguished men of the time. To this party belonged Q. Fabius Maximus, eminent alike in peace and in war, and who Q. Faius ximus. enjoyed the love3 of his countrymen no less than he commanded their admiration and esteem. With him stood his friend P. Decius Mus, thrice his colleague in the consulship when Rome needed the services of her P. Deciausas. bravest and ablest generals against her foreign enemies; and his colleague also in that memorable censorship, which required and found in them all the statesman’s wisdom.

P. Decius might have disputed the palm of happiness in Solon’s judgment with Tellus the Athenian. Born to the truest nobility, the son of that P.

Decius, who, when consul, had devoted himself 9 When he died the people contributed by Fabius Gurges, the son of the old Q. Fabius, subscription a large sum for the expenses of his employed the money in giving a public enterfuneral, which seems to have been a method of tainment to one part of the people, epulum, expressing the public feeling towards the dead, and in sending portions of meat to the rest, viseven when his family was too wealthy to require ceratio. See the writer “de Viris Illustribus,”’ it as an actual assistance. On this occasion, Q. in his’life of Q. Fabius.

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CnA. XXXII.] EMINENT MEN OF THIS PERIOD. 315 to death for his country in the great battle with the Latins, he, like his father, obtained the highest honors with the purest fame; and after having performed the greatest services in peace and in war, and having been rewarded in the fullest measure with the respect and affection of his fellowcitizens, he too, like his father, devoted himself to death to save Rome from defeat, and so consigned the glory of his life,4 safe from all stain, and crowned with the yet higher glory of his death, to his countrymen’s grateful memory forever. Of the same band, yet rather to be ranked first than third,. was M. Valerius Corvus, to whom, no less than to Decius, Solon might have allowed the name of happy. His youth had caught the last rays of the romantic glory of earlier times; and his single combat with the giant Gaul, and the wonderful aid which the gods had then vouchsafed him, was sung in the same strains as the valiant acts of the heroes of old, of Camillus, or Cincinnatus, or Cornelius Cossus. His manhood was no less rich in glory of another sort, which, if less brilliant, was more real.

Elected consul for the first time at three-and-twenty, five years afterwards, in his third consulship, he won this famous battle of Mount Gaurus against the Samnites, and gave in the victorious issue of the first encounter a happy omen of the final result of the long contest between the two nations. He was elected consul three times afterwards, and twice dictator; and in his political course, true to the character of his family, he finally relieved the long distress of the poorer commons, and appeased the most dangerous commotion which had ever yet threatened Rome; and he re-enacted the famous Valerian law in his fifth consulship, that great law of appeal from the sentence of the magistrate which the Romans regarded as the main bulwark of their freedom. In his sixth consulship he was nearly seventy years old, but he lived thirty years longer, and died at the full age of a hundred years,5 after having witnessed the triumphant end of the long contest with the Samnites, which three generations earlier had been under his own auspices so successfully begun. Next to these three great men we may rank Q. Publilius Philo, the author of the Publilian laws, praetor,6 dictator, censor, and four times consul, who was chosen.

PubliliuaP-o. consul with L. Papirius Cursor after the disaster of Caudium, as being with him the man most able to retrieve the honor of Rome. Nor should we omit C. Maenius,7 twice dictator, a man odious to the high patrician party for the firmness with which he opposed their projects, but repelling their attacks by the spotless innocence of his public life. To the same party belonged also, in all probability, Q.

Aulius Cerretanus,8 twice consul, chosen master of the horse by Q. Fabius in his first Q. Aulius Ce.re..anu dictatorship, who sacrificed his life in covering the retreat of the Romans in the route of Lautulae, and M.

Foslius, master of the horse to C. Maenius in his second dictatorship, like him obnoxious to the high patrician party,9 and like him protected by his integrity. AcI4 aO t aL yot v &Vlpbg ~pS fETr Lpjrr T rsE p;i-two last consulships, and they cannot be fixed viouVcaa Ka rctzuraia sftgatovoa l oyv Tvrs Kacraa-positively. In his first consulship he was only rpop6. Thucydid. II. 42. In Decius’ case his three-and-twenty (Livy, VII. 26); which, foldeath was not the “first indication” of his lowing the chronology of the Fasti, would give worth, but the ”’ last confirmation”

of it; it was 382 for the year of his birth. He lived, therethe worthy close of a noble life. fore, to the year 482 [475, Niebuhr]; that is, to 6

Pliny, Iistor. Natur. VII. 48. Pliny says the year after the capture of Tarcntum, and the that forty six-years intervened between his first end of the fourth Samnite war. consulship and his sixth. His sixth consulship 6

Livy, VIII. 15. VIII. 12. VIII. 17. For was in the year 453, according to Pliny’s own his four consulships see Livy, VIII. 12-22, IX. chronology [446 Niebuhr], if we place it four 7, and Diodorus, XIX. 66, and the Fasti Capityears after the consulship of P. Sempronius and olini. P. Sulpicius, which with Pliny is the year 449. 7 For his second dictatorship, see Livy, IX. (Hist. Natur. XXXIII. ~ 20.) His first consul-26; for his first, see the fragments of the Fasti ship accordingly would fall in 406, but accord-Capitolini, and note 61 of Chap. XXXI. of this ing to the Fasti Capitolini, which place his sec-volume. cud consulship two years afterwards, in 407, it 8 Livy, VIII. 87, IX. 15, and for his death would fall in 405. His third according to the see the Fasti Capitolini, and Diodorus, XIX. same chronology was in 410; and his fourth in 72 Livy, IX.

23. 418. The Fasti are wanting at the period of his Livy, IX. 26.

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316 HISTORY OF ROME. [CRAP. XXXI1 The third or new popular party could not be expected, from its very nature, S. Of the new popular to produce, as yet, any men of high distinction. Yet one individual party. Cn. Flavius.

belonging to it made himself remarkable, and will claim a place in this history, Cn. Flavius, the scribe or clerk, who divulged the secrets of the pontifical calendar, and of the technicalities of actions at law, and was rewarded with the curule sedileship in spite of his humble origin and occupation. That we are able to notice so many individual characters at this period, shows that we are arrived at the dawn of what may be called real history. And this previous sketch of the parties of the commonwealth, and of their most eminent members, may, perhaps, make the account of the transactions in which they were engaged, not only clearer, but more interesting. During the first half of the Samnite war, but in what yearl0
is uncertain, there Abolition of personal was passed that famous law which prohibited personal slavery for.avery for debt. debt; no creditor might for the future attach the person of his debtor, but he might only seize his property; and all those whose personal freedom was pledged for their debts (nexi), were released from their liability, if they could swear that they had property enough to meet their creditor’s demands. It does not appear that this great alteration in the law was the work of any tribune, or that it arose out of any general or deliberate desire to soften the severity of the ancient practice. It was occasioned, we are told, by one scandalous instance of abuse of power on the part of a creditor towards his debtor, who, according to the old law, had been given over to him as a slave (addictus), because he had pledged his person for his debts, and had been unable to redeem his pledge. The outrage excited so general a feeling, that the senate immediately passed a bill for the effectual prevention of such atrocities for the future; and the consuls, or rather, as it would seem, the dictator, C. Pcetelius, was desired to propose it to the people, that it might become a law. But although personal slavery for debt was thus done away, yet the consequences of insolvency were much more serious at Rome than they are in modern Europe. He whose property had been once made over to his creditors by the preetor’s sentence, became, ipso facto, infamous; be lost his tribe, and with it all his political rights; and the forfeiture was irrevocable, even though he might afterwards pay his debts to the full; nor was it even in the power of the censors to replace him on the roll of citizens. So sacred a thing did credit appear in the eyes of the Romans; and so just did they consider it, that a failure in the discharge of one of the most important social obligations should be visited with a forfeiture of social and political righnts. As the internal history of Rome during this period can only be collected from State of parties with a few detached notices, we are’compelled to pass over in silence reSet tosths aSngi of those memorable years which were marked by the rising of the vernatians. Tusculans and Privernatians, and by the defeat at the pass of Caudium. This last disaster, indeed, was such as to still for a time all domestic disputes, and to make every Roman feel alike for the national calamity; and the election of L. Papirius Cursor and Q. Publilius as consuls for the following year, seems to show a common desire to appoint the two ablest generals of 5 Livy places the story in the consulship of Miiller has corrected this into, ” loc C. Popilio C.

Pcetelius, in the very first year of the war; auctore Visolo dictatore sublatum.” ” Visolo” VIII. 28. But as Dionysius (Fragm. Vol. IV. having been a conjecture of Anton. Augustino, p. 2338, Reiske) and Valerius Maximus (VI. 1, and approved by Scaliger, because the cogno~ 9) relate it as having happened after the affair men of C. Pcetelius was Visolus, as we learn of the pass of Caudium, Niebuhr refers it to the from the Fasti Capitolini. But I would rather dictatorship of C. Pctelius, in the 12th year of read ” C. Popilio provocante,” in the former part the war. (Livy, IX. 28.) A passage in Varro, of the sentence, than ” C. Popilio auctore.”

de Ling. Lat. (VII. 105, ed. M’illerj, relates to 11 “In pudoris notam capitis pcena conversa, this subject, but is so corrupt in the MSS. that bonorum adhibitA proscriptione, suffunderemaits testimony cannot be appealed to with cer-luit hominis sanguinem quam effundere.o -Tertainty.

It runs ” Ho C. Popilio vocare Sillo tullian, Apologet. 4. dictatore sublatum ne fieret, ut omnes, qui bo-See also the strong language of Cicero pro nam copiam jurarunt, ne essentnexi, sed soluti.” Quintio, 15, 16.

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CHAP. XXXII.] C. MKENIUS DICTATOR. 317 the commonwealth, without any reference to party distinctions. But the war with Tusculum, Privernum, and Velitrme was of another character; and the claims of these cities, and the treatment which should be shown to them, must have been judged of very variously. Are we mistaken in supposing that the moderate ol middle party supported the liberal policy which was actually pursued, while the new popular party, the party of the populace, called aloud for severity and vengeance? We know that L. Fulvius Curvus, who had so lately led the Tusculans to assail the city of Rome, was elected consul,12 together with Q. Fabius; and that, six or seven years afterwards, he was appointed master of the horse‘3 by L. Emilius Mamercinus; and both Fabius and 2Emilius were eminent amongst the leaders of the moderate party. WVe know also that M. Flavius, the tribune, who brought forward the bill for the punishment of the Tusculans, was a man of doubtful private character,l4
and that he was said to have owed his first tribuneship to a largess which he had given to the poorer citizens, in gratitude for having been acquitted by them when indicted by the eediles on a criminal charge. It appears also that he must have been elected tribune twice, at least, within four years;” which, in a man of such character, seems to argue that he continued to practise the arts of a demagogue. If this be so, his bill for the punishment of the Tusculans exactly resembled, both in himself and in the personal and political character of its author, the famous bill of Cleon for the execution of the Mytileneans: and we have here another instance that a low popular party has as little claim as that of the high aristocracy to the title of high-principled and liberal. The six years which followed the affair of Caudium are to us, as far as regards domestic affairs, a blank; but in the year 439 (Niebuhr, 434), the Intigues of the ridefeat of Lautulue and its consequences led to the second dictator-ati o..oe arty of the time of the revolt ot ship of C. Maenius, an event of which the notices preserved to us cpuao. c. M -niusldieare unusually full.

Capua had revolted,‘6 and as the consuls, M. tator Pcetelius and C.

Sulpicius, were fully engaged with the Samnites, a dictator with a third army was appointed to reduce the Campanians. The battle of Cinna, as we have seen, terrified the Campanians into submission; and the principal leaders of the revolt perished by their own hands. But the dictator, C.

Mmenius,“7 during his inquiry into the origin of the revolt at Capua, gained some startling information, which showed that it had received encouragement from a powerful party in Rome itself; the spirit‘8 of his commission, he argued, called upon him to follow -up this investigation; and when he returned to Rome he pursued it with vigor. No proof, it seems, could be obtained of any direct act of treason; but there existed what were in Greece the wellknown preparations for a revolution, a number of organized societies”9 for the purpose of influencing the elections; and procuring the appointment of particular candidates. These societies, it is implied, consisted partly of the highest members of the aristocracy, and partly of the lowest classes of citizens, both at present being combined in one common cause. The dictator, therefore, encountered a formidable opposition; the high patrician party recriminated upon him and upon his master of the horse, M. Foslius Flaccinator: “Men of the commons,2 such as they were, needed undue means to secure their way to public offices, rather than the patricians, who derived from 12 Livy, VIII. 38. 17 Livy, IX. 26. “3 Livy, IX. 21. 18 ” Versa Romam interpretando res, non no14

Livy, VIII. 22. minatim qui Capue, sed in universum qui us15 Compare Livy, VIII. 22, and 87. Huschke, quam coissent conjurassentve adversus rempubin his work on the Constitution of Ser. Tullius, licam quseri senatum jussisse.”-Livy, IX. 26. p. 7830, refers to this M. Flavius the anecdote re-19 i Coitiones honorum adipiscendorum causA lated by Valerius Maximus, VIII. 1, ~ 7. He factas.” Livy, IX. 26. These words are alingeniously observes, that the anecdote must most a translation of the description given by refer to a period when the number of the tribes Thucydides of the aristocratical clubs of Athens, was twenty-nine, which exactly tallies with the ralS wvvwpociaf, a‘7rEp Er6yXavov rp6repov ev r-7rr6E date of the story as given by Livy. According oioaau bri dctat K~a apxa-s. VIII.

54. to Valerius Maximus, the curule aodile by whom 20 4” Negare nobilium id crimen esse, quibus Flavius was impeached was C. Valerius. si nulla obstetur fraude, pateat via ad honorem, 1 Diodorus, XIX. 76. sed hominum novorum.” Livy, IX. 26.

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318 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXII their noble birth a sufficient and an honorable title to the votes of their country. men.” Immediately the dictator and his master of the horse courted and called for the fullest inquiry into their conduct; they resigned their offices, were p1ut upon their trial before the consuls, and, in spite of the efforts of the aristocratical party to prove them guilty, they were most honorably acquitted.21 Q. Publilius Philo, the most distinguished commoner of his time, was accused by the same party on the same charge, and was acquitted no less completely. But by thus dexterously assailing their assailants, the high nobility gained a considerable advantage; it seemed as if both parties were open to accusation, and that an inquiry into an offence so universal must needs be fruitless. Besides, the most serious danger had been removed by the favorable turn of the events of the war; and when men’s minds were no longer under the influence of alarm, the inquiry would cease to be supported by that strong public feeling which alone could enable it to proceed with effect. Accordingly, the societies triumphed; and the coalition between the high aristocracy and the populace, thus ineffectually attacked, began to manifest itself more freely and more decidedly. Accordingly, two years afterwards, Appius Claudius was elected censor, toCensorship of Appius gether with C. Plautius. The censorship, it should be rememClaudius. bered, was, in point of rank, the highest office in the commonwealth: its power was almost unbounded; its command over the public money, and the opportunities of distinction and of influence which it afforded as originating and conducting all public works, made it an especial object of ambition to a man like Appius, who was less fitted to signalize himself as a general. Besides, he probably had from the first formed the design of prolonging his term of office for the full period of five years, in defiance of the _Emilian law; and so vast a power, enjoyed during so long a period, might be made to serve the wildest purposes of ambition. One of his earliest acts as censor was to revise the list of the senators. It Hiia revision of the list was usual on these occasions to add to the list the names of such of senators. citizens as seemed best to deserve that honor; and the selection would commonly be made from those who, within the last five years, had been elected for the first time to any curule magistracy, and who, therefore, had not been in the senate at the last census. But, in addition to the deaths caused by the Samnite war (and the master of the horse could not have been the only senator who fell in the rout of Lautulve), the year immediately preceding Appius’

censorship had been marked by a visitation of pestilence, so that the names which he would have to add to the roll of the senate would be more than usually numerous. To the utter scandal of the old plebeians, no less than of the patricians, Appius passed over many names which other censors would have inserted, and filled up the vacancies with numbers of the low popular party, many of whom were the sons of freedmen,22 and therefore, according to Roman law, the grand. sons of nobody. The persons thus chosen were, probably, wealthy men, and many of them may have already filled the offices of tribune or plebeian fedile; but the time when the senate had been a purely patrician assembly was too recent to allow of its being thrown open not merely to commoners, but to men whose grandfathers had been slaves; and the attempt of Appius to fill the senate with those who would have been no better than his creatures, like some of his ancestor’s colleagues in the decemvirate, was too violent a measure to be endured.

Accordingly, the consuls of the next year, C. Junius Bubulcus and Q.

iEmilius Barbula, set his list aside without hesitation, and summoned those only as senators whose names had been on the roll of the last previous censors, L. Papirius Crassus and C. MIenius. Not discouraged, however, by this ill success, Appius acted on the same sys”’ Publilius etiam Philo multiplicatis sum-tas, ceterum invisus nobilitati causam dixit.”  mis honoribus post res tot domi belloque ges-Livy, IX. 26. 22

Diodorus, XX. 35, 36. Livy,. IX. 29, $9.

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CHAP. XXXII.] CALENDAR OF CN. FLAVIUS. 319 temrn when he proceeded to revise the rolls of the several tribes. His He admits manyfreedcolleague, C. Plautius, unable to bear the shame of seeing his list men into the tribes of the senate utterly disregarded, had resigned his office at the end of the year.21 If a censor died or resigned before the completion of the eighteen months fixed by the ~milian law as the term of his authority, it was accounted unlucky to elect another in his place; and his colleague, on such occasions, usually resigned immediately, rather than incur the odium of wielding such vast powers alone. Appius, however, had no such scruples, and continued to act as sole censor. In his revision of the tribes he admitted a great number24 of freedmen and citizens of low condition to the enjoyment of a full franchise; and he entered them purposely in all the tribes, that the influence of his party might extend to all. It will readily be understood that a large proportion of the members of the more remote tribes especially, would attend but seldom at the comitia; whilst the city populace and the tradesmen and artisans were always on the spot, and would be frequently the majority of voters in their respective tribes. Thus, the old agricultural commons saw themselves overwhelmed by their new tribesmen, and that share in the government which they had so hardly won was on the point of being wrested from them by men whom, according to the general feeling of the ancient world, they despised as little better than slaves. Thus far the conduct of Appius was not inconsistent with a mere desire to restore the old ascendency of the patricians; for the lowest classes, ie encourageCn.Flabeing as yet quite incapable of exercising dominion, might safely vida,,tro pblh l lcnlt be used as auxiliaries for humbling the classes next above them;.of the fosmt to be ohjust as the feudal kings occasionally courted the commons, and law. were enabled through their aid to weaken the power of the nobles, without any danger of seeing their own authority subjected to the control of a representative assembly. But if it be true that Appius encouraged Cn.

Flavius25 in the acts which gave such offence to the aristocracy, we cannot conceive his objects to have been other than personal; for it was against the old patrician influence, much more than against the new plebeian nobility, that the proceedings of Flavius -were directed. This man was the son of a freedman, a clerk or writer by his occupation, and at this time employed in the business of the censor’s office under Appius. It was by Appius’ instigation that he published his famous calendar or almanac; that is, he stuck up whited boards round the Forum, on which were marked down the days and parts of days in every month on which law business might lawfully be done; a knowledge which the people had hitherto been obliged to gain from the pontifices, or a few of the patricians who understood the pontifical law; and as the days did not recur regularly, and the principle which determined them was carefully kept a secret, the people were wholly at their instructors’ mercy.26 At the same time Flavius also published an account27 of the forms to be observed in the several ways of proceeding at law; a work which, in after times, must have been exceedingly curious; but which must have utterly failed in practice, if its object was to enable a common man-to conduct his own suit, without consulting some one learned in the law, Accordingly, it was to the publication of his calendar that Flavius owed his grt at popularity; he was elected soon after tribune;28 he was appointed to one or two other important public offices, and six years later, as we shall see presently, he obtained the rank of curule adile. Thus making it his pleasure to lessen all dignity and to diminish all influence but his own, offending in his pride the old aristocracy no less than the new, and the middle classes, Appius now, as sole censor, feel-i p 23 Livy, IX. 29. - a “Publicatis diebus fastis, quos populus a 24 Diodorus, XX. 35, 36. Livy, IX. 46. pacis principum quotidie petebat.” Pliny, 25 “Appii Cceci scriba, cujus hortatti exce-XXXIII. 6. perat eos dies consultando assidue sagaci inge-27 “Actiones composuit.” See Cicero, de nio promulgaveratque.”-Pliny, Hist. Natur. Orat. I. 41. Epp. ad Attic. VI. 1.

XXXIII. 6. Ed. Sillig. 20 Livy, IX. 46.

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820 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXII ing himself in possession of almost kingly power, resolved to distinguish his name by public works on a most magnificent scale, such as the greatest king might emulate. Without any authority from the senate,29 he applied the large sums of public money which were paid into his hands by that multitude of persons who farmed the state property in all its manifold kinds, to the execution of two great works: one, the construction of a military road from Rome to Capua; the other, the bringing a constant supply of good water into the city from a distance of about eight miles from the Esquiline gate, partly by pipes under ground, and partly by an aqueduct. The great road from Rome to Capua, which was afterwards continued to Brun-‘he Appian Road to disium, has, indeed, immortalized the name of its author; nor will capua. the mightiest works of modern engineers ever rival the fame of the Appian Way.

This has been owing to accidental causes; yet the road was a magnificent undertaking, and even without noticing the excellence of its pavement, which was added at a later period, we may justly admire the labor bestowed in order to keep its line generally on a level, the deep cuttings through hills, and the vast substructions of massy stones on which it was carried across valleys. The whole line from Rome to Capua was about 120 English miles; the road left the city at the Porta Capena, the gate of Capua; it passed in a straight line over the Campagna till it reached the foot of the Alban hills at Boville; there it ascended to the higher grounds, and, passing through Aricia, and leaving Velitrze and the modern road to Naples on the left, it descended again into the plain nearly in the same straight line, and ran on to the Pontine marshes. At this point, as Niebuhr thinks, the road stopped; and the communication through the Pontine marshes was carried on by a canal almost as far as Tarracina. But the very excavation of the canal would, of itself, supply materials, in part, for an embankment by the side of it; and it is more likely that both it and the road were carried through the marshes together. Afterwards the road ascended the mountains behind Tarracina, thus avoiding the ill-omened pass of Lautulhe, and soon after descended again into the plain of Fundi, crossed the Liris at Minturnse, and the Vulturnus at Casilinum, and three miles further it arrived at the termination of its course, the city of Capua.30 The other work of Appius was less remarkable in itself, than as being the The Appianaquedut. earliest of those famous aqueducts which still, amid their ruins, are such striking and characteristic monuments of Roman greatness. In fact, it can scarcely be called an aqueduct, for the water”3 was carried under ground throughout the whole of its course, with the exception of sixty Roman paces, or about a hundred yards, in the low ground by the Porta Capena, where it was conveyed partly on arches, and partly on a solid substruction of massy stones. Its termination was at the salt works by the river-side, close by the Porta Trigemina, and immediately under the northwest corner of the Aventine; and it seems to have been especially intended to supply water to the inhabitants of the low district about the Circus, who had hitherto been obliged to use the water of the river, or the rain-water collected in tanks or cisterns. When we remember that this part of Rome was particularly inhabited by the poorest citizens, we may suspect that Appius wished to repay the support which he had already received from them, or to purchase its continuance for the time to come; but we shall feel unmixed pleasure in observing that: the first Roman aqueduct was constructed for the benefit of the pQor, and of those who most needed it. “These two works exhausted,” says Diodorus, ”’ the whole revenue of Rome.” 29 Diodorus, XX. 85, 86. 31 The whole account of this queduct is takei so It is well known that the ancient Capua did from the work of Frontinus. He was superinnot stand on the Vulturnus, but about three tendent of the aqueducts in the reign of Nerva, miles to the south of it, on the site of the pres-and his account of them is exceedingly full and ent S. Maria di Capua. The modern Capua accurate. corresponds with the ancient Casilinum.

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CHAP XXXII.] APPIUS RETAINS HIIS CENSORSHIP. 321 But, considering the unavoidable expenses of the war, to which How money and labor. the tributum was wholly appropriated, the disposable revenue from refound forthese the vectigalia, or rents received by the commonwealth, must have works. been insufficient; and Niebuhr reasonably conjectures that Appius must have sold large portions of the state’s domain, in order to raise the money which he required. The workmen employed consisted, doubtless in great measure, of the prisoners taken from the Samnites, either in battle or in the repeated invasions of their territory; the rest were the public or government slaves, or those furnished by the several contractors for the work: for such labors were held to be degrading to free citizens, and Appius would have acquired no popularity amongst the poorest classes, by offering to provide them with employment in making his road, or digging his water-course. The regular term of the censor’s office, eighteen months, was far too short for the completion of these works; and had they been finished by an-ppios retains his..en other censor, the glory of them would have been lost to Appius. sorship beyond the le Setting, therefore, all law and all opposition at defiance, Appius per-g t” sisted in retaining his censorship when the eighteen months were expired; and although the tribune P. Sempronius Sophus,32 one of the most eminent commoners of this period, threatened to send him to prison if he persisted in disobeying the law, and although six of the other tribunes supported their colleague, yet the remaining three promised Appius their protection; and as their negative was all-powerful, Appius was secured from any molestation so long as they continued in office. He found some tribunes equally devoted to him in the next year, for he retained his censorship four years, and in the fifth he endeavored to add to it the power and dignity of consul, and whilst he still continued to be censor, he declared himself a candidate for the consulship. Here, however, that negative power of the tribunes which had hitherto been his support was employed against him: L. Furius33 forbade the business of the comitia to proceed, until Appius had resigned his censorship. Then, however, he was elected consul, and perhaps in this capacity finished and dedicated the two works of which he so greatly coveted the glory. The extreme moderation of the party opposed to Appius deserves in all these transactions the highest praise.

They composed probably the Wisemoderationof the majority in the senate, and if they had exerted their whole party opposedtohim strength they must have been also the majority in the comitia. Yet they suffered Appius to defy the laws for a period of two years and a half, and afterwards they allowed him to be elected consul without opposition, nor when he became a private citizen did they ever impeach him for the violence of his conduct.

We cannot, in our ignorance of the details of these times, appreciate fully the wisdom of this conduct; but as violence begets violence, so unquestionably does moderation in political contests lead to moderation in return. The personal ambition of Appius had been gratified even beyond the law; and this his political opponents had endured at the time, nor did they seek to punish it afterwards. Nothing was attempted against him which could either irritate his own passions, or invest him in the eyes of the multitude with the character of a martyr in their cause. If he had ever carried his views still higher than to a five years’ censorship, if the hope of regal dominion had ever floated before his eyes, the forbearance shown towards him deprived him not only of every pretext for further violence, but, appealing to the nobler part of his nature, restrained him for very shame from endeavoring to wrest more, where so much had been already yielded to him; it would not suffer him to assail that constitution which had shown itself towards him at once so confident and so placable. Ten years after his first consulship he was elected consul again in the midst of the third Samnite war, and he obtained the prmotorship in the year following. He bore his part not S Livy, IX. 33. “

Livy, IX. 42. 21

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32%2:HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIL without honor, amongst the greatest generals of his day, in that most arduous contest when the Gauls again fought against Rome with the Etruscans and the Samnites to aid them; and in his old age he had the glory of determining the senate, by the last effort of his eloquence, not to treat with the ambassador of Pyrrhus. The example which Appius had set in his public works was followed by the Other public works. succeeding censors, M. Valerius Maximus and C. Junius Bubulcus. The Valeian Way. They also made some roads34 through the country in the neighborhood of Rome; that is that is, they either improved the line of the existing local roads, or widened them, and constructed them of better materials. One of the roads, thus in a manner made anew, led from Rome to Tibur; and this being afterwards continued through the country of the zEquians by Carseoli and Alba, as far as Sulmo and Corfinium, and thus having become one of the greatest lines of communication in Italy, was known throughout its whole length by the name of the Valerian Way, because the first twenty miles of it from Rome to Tibur were made by the censor M.

Valerius. In the same year, 447-8 (Nieb. 441), we may place the trial of A. Atilius Trial ofA. Atilius Ca-Calatinus, on a charge of having betrayed the garrison of Sora to latinus. the Samnites. He had married a daughter of Q. Fabius, and had been left by his father-in-law in the command of the place, when he himself left his province of Samnium to return to Rome. Sora and Calatia were at this period35 both surprised by the Samnites, and the troops who garrisoned them were sold for slaves.

Atilius either made his escape, or was taken prisoner and allowed to be ransomed; but on his return to Rome he was accused of treason, a charge often made against unsuccessful officers, and listened to the more readily, because, while the soldiers had been led away into slavery, their commander had -met with a fate so different. Perhaps in this accusation we may trace the influence possessed at this time in the comitia by the city populace, who were not commonly enlisted in the legions, and who were apt to judge the conduct of military men unfairly and severely, in proportion to their own total ignorance of war. It might have fared hardly with Atilius, had his father-in-law been any less distinguished man than Q.

Fabius. But Fabius36 came forward and declared to the people that the charge was groundless: ” Had it been otherwise,” said he, “I should not have allowed my daughter to remain the wife of a traitor.““1 The people, suspicious because they were ignorant, but meaning honestly, listened at once to the testimony of so great a general and so upright a man, and Atilius was acquitted. His son, the grandson of Q. Fabius, became one of the most distinguished citizens in the first Punic war; he was twice consul, dictator, and censor.38 Two years afterwards the influence of the new popular party in the comitia dihip of C Fla reached its highest point, when Cn. Flavius, the clerk of Appius, vies, the clerk of Ap-and the man who had published the calendar and the forms of plus ClZudiua. actions at law, was elected curule aedile. When the first votes were given in his favor, the fedile who presided at the comitia refused to receive them, saying that a clerk was not fit to hold a curule magistracy. It so happened39 that Flavius himself was attending on the curule vedile at that very time in the way of his occupation; he had his tablets and his style in his hands, to record the votes. As soon as he heard the objection he stepped forwards; he laid‘4 Livy, IX. 43. Cassiodorus. sented herself from him for three nights in the‘6 Diodorus, XX. 80. Livy, IX. 43. year. See p.

100. oe Valerius Maximus, VIII. I. ~ 9. “s His epitaph said of him, in language re3 By which it appears, as Niebuhr well ob-sembling the epitaphs of the Scipios, serves, that the practice of marrying without “Plurimse consentiunt gentes conventio in manum was common even amongst Populi primarium fuisse virum.” distinguished families. Thus the daughter still See Cicero, de Senect. 17. remained in her father’s power, if, to bar her L9 L. Piso, Annal. III. quoted by Gelliu, husband’s right to her by prescription, she ab-VI. 9.

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CHaP. XXXII.] REFORMS OF Q FABIUS AND P. DECIUS. 323 down his tablets, and declared upon oath that from that day forwards he would follow the business of a clerk no more. The aedile then received the votes that were given for him, and Cn. Flavius was duly elected. His colleague was Q.

Anicius4~ of Preeneste, who had only within the last few years became a Roman citizen; while two commoners of consular families, C. Poetelius and Cn. Domitius, were unsuccessful candidates. The indignation of the patricians and of the old commons on this occasion was so great, that the senators laid aside their gold rings, and the young patricians, and wealthy commoners who formed the equestrian order, put off their chains of honor (phaleroe), as if so great a dishonor to the commonwealth required a general mourning. It should be remembered that the curule aedileship was at this time an office of high distinction, and that every curule magistracy was supposed to convey something of kingly and therefore of sacred dignity; so that it was a profanation if it were bestowed on a freedman’s son, although he might have held the tribuneship of the commons without offence. Flavius, however, was a man of spirit, and was not abashed by these signs of displeasure; nay, he even enjoyed the mortification of the nobility; and a story4l was told how on a time, when his colleague Q. Anicius was sick, Flavius went to visit him; and when he entered his room he found several noble youths who were sitting there with hlim. They, scorning the freedman’s son, remained in their places, and would not rise as they were bound to do to the curule redile. Upon which Flavius sent for’his curule chair, and placed it in the doorway so that no one could pass, and then taking his seat in it, dbliged them to see him in the enjoyment of his dignity. Yet, although he would not allow himself to be overborne by insolence, he could not bear to:be the occasion of divisions between his countrymen; and he vowed to build a temple to Concord,42 if he could succeed in effecting a reconciliation between the higher and lower classes of the commonwealth. We must suppose, therefore, that he witnessed without opposition the decree of the senate that two censors should be immediately appointed, Q. Frbius and P. Dealthough not a year had elapsed since the last censors had resigned ciu censors. their office. Still less could he find fault with the choice of the comitia, which fell upon two of the most popular men in Rome, Q. Fabius and P.

Decius. This censorship, according to Niebuhr, effected little less than a remodelling of the whole constitution; in particular, he supposes that the per-Mesu esupposed to plexing combination of tribes and centuries, which is known to hase been taken iitheir censorship. have existed in the later periods of the commonwealth, was the p work of Fabius and Decius; and that they adjusted, in a manner satisfactory to all parties, the ever-contending claims of nobility and wealth on the one hand and of numbers on the other. I cannot assert this,‘even on Niebuhr’s authority, not only from the total want of all direct evidence, but because I am inclined to think that the mixture of tribes and centuries in the later form of the comitia centuriata was the work of the fourth century of Rome rather than of the fifth. Nor do I quite believe the story43 that it was to his eminent services in this censorship that Q. Fabius owed his surname of Maximus. What is actually recorded of the censors of this year is sufficiently probable; 40 Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXXIII. 6. populus,1” that is, the patricians and the old ” Piso, apucl Gell. VI. 9. LivyIX. 46.

comlmons, as opposed to the ”’ forensis faetio.” 4 ” Flavils vovit aedem Concordike, si popl-43 The story is told by Livy, IX. 46, and by lo reeonciliasset ordines.” Niebuhr under-several other writers. But Polybius asserts stands by populus the old patricians, and by that the surname of Maximus was given to the ordines the plebs and the freedmen.

But surely dictator Q. Fabius in the second Punic warl, on the old sense of populus is inapplicable here; account of his great services at that period. III. and we must either understand ” ordines” of 87. This is undoubtedly a mistake, but I bethe senate and the equestrian order, which is lieve the other story is no less so; and that the undoubtedly the meaning, if the words are surname Maximus in the Fabian family, no less Pliny’s own; or if he copied them from an than in the Valerian and Carvilian, had referolder writer, ” ordines” may signify the clerks, ence originally to personal size rather than to selbse, and the other trades or inferior callings, greatness of mind or exploits; that it answered and populus means what Livy calls ” integer to the surname of Philip le Long, or of Edward

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324 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIL and that it should have been accomplished not only without a conWhat was ce’tainly effected waa wise and test, but as far as appears without exciting-any thing but satisfaction, is one of the most extraordinary proofs of the political wisdom and moderation of the Roman people. The lower classes of the city, and those whose blood was not yet clear from the taint of slavery, had gained a political power much more than in proportion to their social importance; and there is in this something so unnatural, that it shocks even those who may be supposed to benefit by it, unless they have been previously corrupted by intolerable distress, no less fatal to wisdom and goodness than excessive enjoyment, or have been exasperated by previous insolence and oppression. Had there now been such a state of misery amongst the poorer classes as that which followed the Gaulish invasion, or had the old law of debtor and creditor existed still and been rigorously exercised, the lower people would have eagerly retained the power which fortune had thrown into their hands; they would have valued it as ensuring them at once protection and vengeance. But when all was prospering, when the state was victorious abroad and daily growing in wealth and magnificence at home; when the citizens of highest rank were also the worthiest; and the commonwealth seemed to enjoy a real aristocracy, which is as natural and excellent as its counterfeits are hateful; above all, when there was prevailing a general spirit of moderation, which dispelled all fears of tyranny,-why should men endure such an unfitness as that the lower should take the place of the higher, and that those who were of least account in society should exercise politically the greatest power?

So Flavius, resigning all prospect of rising to higher honors, allowed that he had already risen too high for one of his class, and that more than one generation should elapse between the slave and the curule magistrate. Fabius and Decius removed all freedmen,4 all artisans, and all other citizens of the lowest class, into four tribes only out of the one-and-thirty which then existed; so that they could influence at most but a little more than an eighth part of the whole comitia; and these four tribes were the old tribes of the city, as distinguished from those of the country, the Palatine, the Colline, the Esquiline, and the Suburran. Then Flavius, seeing the conditions of his vow fulfilled, built his temple to Concord,45 a small chapel, of which the walls were plated with bronze, and which stood within the precinct of the temple of Vulcan, on the north side of the comitium. It was built with the money arising from the penalties paid by some wealthy men for having lent money at a rate of interest higher than was allowed by law; and Flavius, by virtue of his office of sedile, had prosecuted them before the comitia. When it was completed, the pontifex maximus, L. Cornelius Scipio,46 refused to dictate the solemn form of dedication, which Flavius, according to custom, was to repeat after him; but the comitia, indignant at the spirit which dictated this refusal, passed a resolution which obliged the pontifex to retract it.

Yet, afterwards, to complete the picture of moderation displayed by the people on this occasion, the comitia passed a bill proposed to them by the senate, enacting that for the time to come no man should be allowed to dedicate a temple without the sanction of the senate or of the majority of the tribunes of the commons. The aristocratical pride of the pontifex required to be restrained; yet it was not fit that he should be called to perform the solemnities of the national religion at the pleasure of an individual, or that a temple should be consecrated without the sanction of some public authority. Happy is that people which delivers itself from the evils of an aristotne -first, rather than to that of Alexander or nology of Tome; for it declares that the conCharlemagne. sulship of P. Sempronius and P. Sulpicius, the 44 Livy IX. 46. last year of the second Samnite war, was be45 Pliny, Hist. XXXIII. 6. In this notice lieved by those who were then living, and by of the founding of the temple by Cn. Flavius, one who had an access to all existing monuPliny adds, “inciditque in tabella e-re&
eam ments, to have been the 204th year from the wedem corv. annis post Capitolinam dedicatam.” beginning of the commonwealth. This is a very important passage for the chro-46 Livy, IX. 46.

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CHAP. XXXII.1 THE OGULNIAN BILL. 325 cratical or priestly dominion, not by running wild into individual licentiousness, but by submitting to the wholesome sovereignty of law! “The Carthaginians,” says Aristotle,47

“provide for the stability of their constitution, by continually sending out a portion of their commons Coloniefoundedat this to their settlements in the surrounding country.” This policy was time. no less familiar to the Romans, and as some of the poorer citizens must have been discontented with the recent proceedings of the censors, so we find that three colonies were founded in the next two years, and that no fewer than fourteen thousand citizens were sent out as colonists.48 The three places thus colonized were Sora, Alba, and Carseoli. Sora had been taken and retaken repeatedly in the late Samnite war, and its important position, just at the point where the Liris issues out from the mountains which confine its earlier course upon the high plain of Arpinum and Fibrenus, made it desirable to secure its permanent possession; Carseoli and Alba had been conquered in the late war with the ALEquians. Carseoli was in the upper valley of the Anio, about thirty-eight miles from Rome. Alba stood on an isolated hill at a little distance from the lake Fucinus; and the strength of its fortifications was even at this time remarkable, for the walls which still exist are built of enormous polygonal blocks of the limestone of the Apennines, and belong to a period much more ancient than the fifth century of Rome. Places so recently conquered, and so exposed to fresh attacks w[. enever a war should break out again, must have been colonized by men who Who ere sent an setunderstood war, and might be able to maintain their own ground, t”ers as a sort of frontier garrison. The settlers sent thither could not, therefore, have consisted wholly of the unwarlike populace of the city, but of the poorer citizens of the old commons, who had been accustomed to serve in the legions, and who had the skill and courage of veteran soldiers. It is very probable, however, that a certain portion of the freedmen and of the city populace may have been mixed up with them. In appointing and supporting the censorship of Fabius and Decius, the patricians and the nobility of the commons must have acted in con-The Ogulnian bill for throwing open all eacert with each other.

But three years afterwards, there was a tred offies, to the.comfeeble return of the old quarrel between the two orders, when two mon.S of the tribunes,49 Q. and Cn. Ogulnius, proposed a bill for increasing the number of the pontifices and augurs by the addition of new members to be chosen from the commons. In Rome, as elsewhere, the civil equality of the two great orders of the state had been established, whilst the old religious distinctions between them still subsisted; a commoner might be consul, dictator, or censor, but he could not as yet be pontifex or augur. But this exclusion, although it related to religious offices, was maintained for political purposes, and could not, indeed, be justified on religious grounds. For, according to the old principle, that the priests of the gods must be of a certain race or caste, carefully preserved from any profane mixture, the Roman patricians had long since forfeited the purity of their blood by their frequent intermarriages with the commons. But politically, their exclusive possession of the offices of pontifex and augur might secure them some advantages. Twice within twentyfive years we have seen the appointment of a plebeian dictator annulled by the augurs, on the ground of certain religious objections of which they were the sole judges.

All questions of augury depended on their decision; and this, in a state where nothing either political or military was done without consulting the auspices, conferred, necessarily, an immense power. The pontifices, in like manner, had the absolute control over every part of the ritual of religion, and as connected with it, over the calendar. What festivals were to be observed, and at what times; what public sacrifices 41 Politic. II.

11. sand to Sora, and as many to Carseoli. Livy, 48 Six thousand were sent to Alba, four thou-X. 1. 3. 49 Livy 6, et seqq.

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326 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXII should be performed, and with what ceremonies; and what was an interference on the part of any individual with sacred places, persons, or things, were all points of their jurisdiction, against which it is doubtful whether even the tribunes would have ventured to interpose. It seems but reasonable, therefore, that as the pa. tricians and commons were now become one people, and as both alike were admitted to those high and sacred dignities of consul and dictator, which involved the practice of augury, and the offering sacrifice to the peculiar gods of Rome, in the name of the Roman people, so the knowledge as well as the practice of the national religious system should be committed to both equally; that where no religious objection really existed, political ambition might no longer be able to shelter itself beneath its semblance. Still, however, a party amongst the patricians, headed, as we are told, by ApP. Decius supports it, pius Claudius,5~
vehemently opposed the Ogulnian bill. It was aundit becomes law. supported by P. Decius; and no man could have pleaded for it with greater effect, when he appealed to his father’s memorable death, and recalled him to the memory of some of his hearers, as they had seen him in the great battle with the Latins, with his toga-wrapped around his head, and his feet on a javelin, devoting himself to the powers of death in behalf of the Roman people. “If my father,” said he, “was no less fit than his patrician colleague to offer himself to the gods, as an accepted expiation for the whole people, how could he be unfit to direct their worship?” The question, in fact, could not be carried; some of the tribunes were at first engaged to interpose their negative, but the general feeling obliged them to forbear, and the Ogulnian bill became a law. The pontifices, who were then four in number, elected accordingly four commoners to complete their college to eight, or, including their head, the pontifex maximus, to nine. And the augurs, who were also four, elected five commoners to raise their college to the same number of nine, on the notion that each of the original tribes of Rome, the Ramnenses, the Titienses, and Luceres, was to be represented by an equal number of the public ministers of religion. It seems that the new appointments were fairly and wisely made; P. Decius himself,5’ and P. Sempronius Sophus, who had been both consuls and censors, were two of the new pontifices; and amongst the augurs, besides T. Publilius, C. Genucius, and C. Marcius, all of them members of the most eminent families of the commons, we find the name of P.,Elius Puetus, a man of no great political or military distinction, but who probably showed a remarkable fondness for the study of the pontifical and augural discipline, inasmuch as we find an unusual number of his descendants52
filling the offices of pontifex and augur, as if those sacred duties were almost the hereditary calling of their race and name. In the same year,53

M. Valerius, one of the consuls, re-enacted, for the third The Valerian lawr e-time, the famous law which bore the name of his family, and which enacted. was, in fact, the Roman law of trial by jury, as it permitted every citizen to appeal from toak sentence of a magistrate in capital cases to the judgment of his country. It is not certain whether the consul who brought forward this law was M. Valerius Maximus, or M. Valerius Corvus: it must have been the latter, however, if the common statement be true that he was six times elected consul; and we should be glad to ascribe the measure to a man so worthy of it. The law denounced the violation of its provisions as a crime, but named no fixed. penalty; leaving it open to the accuser to demand, and to the judges to award, a milder or a heavier sentence, according to the nature of the particular case, as was so generally the practice at Athens. But why this law should have been tO Livy, X. 7. ceeded by Q. Elius Peaets. Livy, XLI. 21. 61

Livy, X. 9. Nor must we forget that Elius whom Ennius a2 Q. Al-lius Paetus, who fell at Cannse, was honored with the title of “egregie cordatus pontifex, Livy, XXIII. 21. P. Elius P,-etus was homo.” appointed augur in the place of Marcellus, L3 Livy, X. 9. Livv. XXVII. 36: and on his death he was suc

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CHAP. XXXII.] THE VALERIAN LAW RE-ENACTED. 321 re-enacted at this particular time we know not. No -recent instances of arbitrary power are mentioned, nor do we hear of any consul of this period who is chalged with a disposition to cruelty. Perhaps the object of Valerius was simply to satisfy the humbler citizens that the government was not unmindful of their personal security, although it had diminished their political power; and that whilst the more distinguished commoners were completing their own equality with the patricians, they did not mean to allow the poorer members of their order to be oppressed with impunity. Thus, the re-enactment of the Valerian law, taken in conjunction with the passing of the Ogulnian, seems to form an Dera in the constitutional history of Rome; when the commons obtained a confirmation of their great charter of personal freedom for the mass of their order, and for those of their members who might rise to eminence, a perfectly equal share in all the honors of the commonwealth, religious no less than civil. In some of the transactions recorded in this chapter, we seem almost to have emerged into the light of day, and to be able to trace events and their actors with much of the clearness of real history. But even by oe very obscurely in those which are in themselves most vivid, we find a darkness n.ow. on either side, concealing from our view their causes and their consequences; as in dreams, single scenes and feelings present themselves with wonderful distinctness: but what brought us to them, or what is to follow after them, is left altogether a mystery. Some of the many difficult questions which belong to this period, I propose to lay before the reader in the appendix to this volume, as I feel that I can offer no explanation of them so satisfactory as to claim the name of history. In this number I would place especially the famous question as to the later constitution of the comitia of centuries, a problem which not even Niebuhr could fully solve, and which has equally baffled other writers who have more recently attempted it. But in the following period of about fourteen years, which elapsed between the passing of the Ogulnian law and the dictatorship of Q.

Hortensius, there is scarcely a single fact in the domestic history of Rome which can be discerned clearly, and we are left to ask what circumstances could have produced so great a change; and how, after a state of things so peaceable and so prosperous, and a settlement of the constitution apparently so final, we are brought back again so suddenly to the circumstances of a long past period, to a heavy burden of debt, to quarrels between the different orders in the state from this cause, and to a new secession of the commons to the Janiculum. In the mean time we must carry on for a while the foreign history of Rome, and describe that short but decisive war, in which the Romans triumphed over the triple coalition of the Etruscans, the Samnites, and the Gauls.

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CHAPTER XXXIII, FOREIGN HISTORY FROM 450 TO 464 (443 TO 456, NIEBUHR)-CONQUEST OF THEI EQUIANS-THIRD SAMNITE WAR-COALITION OF THE

ETRUSCANS, SAMNITAS, AND GAULS-GREAT BATTLE OF SENTINUM, AND DEATH OF P.

DECIUS-FINAL VICTORY OF Q. FABIUS OVER THE SAMNITES-C. PONTIUS IS LED IN

TRIUIMPIH AND PUT TO DEATH IN COLD BLOOD. “Ter totum fervidus irA Lustrat Aventini montem; ter saxea tentat Limina nequidquam; ter fessus valle resedit.” VIRG. AEn. VIII. 230. ” Thrice did the indignant nations league their might, Thrice the red darkness of the battle’s night Shrouded the recreant terror of their flight.” MILnnI, Judicium Regale. TiE peace with Samnium was immediately followed by a war with the 2EquiWar with the ~qui.

ans. Since the Gaulish invasion, the very name of this people has’ns-vanished out of our sight, except on one single occasion in the year immediately following the recovery of the city, when Camillus is said to have taken from them the town of Bola.’ As they took no part in the subsequent attacks made by the Volscians upon Rome, and did not even join their neighbors of Prmneste, when they, from the allies of the Romans, became their enemies, so we may conclude with Niebuhr, that the Gaulish invasion had been even more fatal to them thaca to the Romans; that they must have been so weakened by some great disaster sustained at that period, as to have fallen back altogether from their advanced position on the edge of the Campagna to their older country in the upper valleys of the Turano2 and the Salto, and near the western shore of the lake Fucinus.

From their towns on the edge of the Campagna they were, probably, expelled by the Latins; and acquisitions of territory from the IEquians may have been among the causes which raised Tibur and Praeneste after the Gaulish invasion to greatness far above the rest of their countrymen. Meanwhile, the AEquians were left unmolested in their remaining territory, and for nearly eighty years from the burning of Rome by the Gauls they seem to have remained perfectly neutral. But towards the end of the second Samnite war, when the Hernicans, in their jealousy of the growing power of Rome, took up arms against her, the AEquians also, probably from similar motives, were induced to join in the quarrel. iEquian soldiers3 were found, it was said, together with Hernicans, in that Samnite army which Q.

Fabius, when proconsul in the year 447, had defeated at Allifue; and after the Hernican war in the year following, the whole AEquian people joined the Samnites. Thus, when the Samnites, in the year 450, were obliged to sue for peace, the Equians were left in a position of no small danger.

Rome, it appears, was willing to forgive them on no other terms than those just imposed on the Hernicans; namely, that they should become citizens of Rome without the right of voting in the comitia; in other words, 1 Livy, VI. 2.,field of Scurgola, the scene of Conradin’s defeat The Turano is the stream which, rising at by Charles of Anjou, and when it reappears it the back of the hills which form the northern receives the name of Salto. It flows through boundary of the valley of the Anio, flows thence the pastoral country of the Cicolano, and falls in a northerly direction, and joins the Velino into the Velino above Rieti. See Bunsen’s arjust below Rieti. The Salto rises very near to tide, “Esame del sito dei piM antichi stabilithe lake Fucino, and, in its earlier course, is menti Italici,” &c.

in the Annals of the Archoecalled the Imele; but it sinks into a fissure in ological Society of Rome, Vol. VI. p. 110. the lin estone, a little below the famous battle-Livy, IX. 45.

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CIIAP. XXXIII.] CONQUEST OF THE BEQUIANS. 329 that they should submit to become Roman subjects. Hopeless as their condition was, their old spirit would not yet allow them to yield, and they resolved to abide a contest with the whole undivided power of the Roman commonwealth. Both consuls, P.

Sempronius and P. Sulpicius,4 with two consular armies, marched at once into the Equian territory. Such a force, amounting Their country is ove to about 40,000 men, confounded all plans of resistance. Few rein, and their towna./Aquians of that generation had ever seen war; their country had not taken. been exposed to the ravages of an enemy within the memory of any man then living. Abandoning all hope of maintaining the field against the invaders, they took refuge in their several towns, hoping there to baffle the first assault of the enemy, and trusting that time might bring some of the neighboring people to their aid. But their towns were small, and were thus each weak in the number of their defenders: the Romans well knew the effect of a first impression, and in the places which they first stormed, they probably, according to their usual practice, made a bloody execution, in order to strike terror into the rest. We have seen, under the influence of a general panic, some of the strongest fortresses and one of the most warlike nations of modern Europe taken and conquered in the space of two months; so that we cannot wonder that fifty days were sufficient to complete the ~Equian war, and that forty-one towns were taken within that period,5 the greater part of which were destroyed and burnt. The polygonal walls of many of them are still in existence, and are to be found scattered along the pastoral upland valley of the Himella or Salto, from Alba almost to the neighborhood of Reate. The Romans, however, did their work of destruction well; for although the style of the walls in these ruins denotes their high antiquity, yet no traces are to be found of the name, or race, or condition of their inhabitants: the actual remains will tell as little of the history of the _/Equian people as we call glean from the scanty reports of their conquerors. The fate which the _Aquians had vainly striven to avert now fell upon the remnant of their nation, after the greatest portion of the people had perished or been led away into slavery. The survivors, after see-ceive the Rmtan fran ing the greatest portion of their territory converted into Roman chie. domain land, were obliged to become Roman citizens without suffrage. But five years afterwards, when war with Etruria and with the Samnites was again threatening, the Romans admitted them to the full franchise,6 and they formed a considerable part of the citizens enrolled in the year 455 in the two tribes then created, the Aniensian and Terentine. When the Samnites had made peace with Rome, they were required to restore Lucania to its independence; that is, they were obliged to give The Roman partypro back the hostages whom they had kept as a pledge of the nation’s dominant in Luyrnia. 0I J  ~- ?-~ — - Z -Rome and Lucnania at fidelity, and to withdraw their garrisons from the Lucanian towns. war with TarentniL. The Tarentines call The Roman party in Lucania, upon this, regained its ascendency, cleonyT..ls, the Sprand the foreign relations of the country were so changed, that, tan, to theiraid. from having been in alliance with the Samnites and Tarentines against Rome, the 4 Livy, IX. 45. in the Cornelian tribe (Livy, XXXVIII. 86): ” Livy, IX. 45. Diodorus, XX. 101.

and we cannot alwrays conclude that a tribe con”Majores nostri,” says Cicero, “A Equos in tained only the people of one particular district.

civitatem acceperunt.” De Officiis, I. 11. That The origin of the name Terentina is quite unthey were admitted into the tribes Aniensis and known. We know of no town Terentum which Terentina is not expressly stated by any ancient could have given it its name, nor of any river writer; but the date of the creation of these Terens. What was the ancient name of the tribes connects them with the Equians, and the Turano, which, as it runs near to the site of tribe Aniensis must have included the upper Carseoli, must have flowed through the eEquian valley of the Anio, which was Aquian.

The territory? Bunsen has shown that it is a mere tribe Terentina contained at a later period, as mistake to suppose that the Tolenus or Telowe know, the people of the Volscian city of nius was the Turano.

(Annali dell’ Instituto, Atina (Cicero pro Plancio, 8, 16, 22); and Nie-

&c. tom. VI. p. 104.) Could the Turano have buhr thinks that they were included in it, be-been anciently called Terens, or Terentus, and cause it was in their neighborhood. But the could the tribe Terentina have been named from Arpinatians, who lived nearer to the.Equian this river, as the Aniensis was from the Anio I country than the people of Atina, were included

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330 HISTORY OF ROME. [0CAP. XXXIID Lucanians now took part with Rome against Tarentum. During the Samnite war, the Tarentines, covered as they were by the territory of their allies, had nothing to fear from the Roman armies; and by sea, as the Roman navy was very inconsiderable, they carried on the contest with advantage. But now a consular army,’ supported by their old enemies, the Lucanians, might, at any moment, appear under their very walls; and they looked out, therefore, for some foreign aid.

They sent to Greece, and to their own mother-city, Sparta, imploring that an army might be sent to help them, and that Cleonymus might be its general. Cleonymus was the younger son of Cleomenes,s king of Sparta, and the grandson of Cleombrotus, who fell at Leuctra. His nephew Areus, Cleomenes’ grandson by his elder son Acrotatus, had been now for about six years on the throne; and Cleonymus, like Dorieus of old, not liking to remain in Sparta as a private citizen, was eager for any opportunity of distinguishing himself abroad. Areus was no less ready to let him go; and accordingly he complied at once with the invitation of the Tarentines, and having levied at their expense about 5000 Greek mercenaries, he crossed over into Italy. There he raised 5000 mercenaries more, and the native forces of Tarentum are reckoned at 20,000 foot and 2000 horse.’ Most of the Italian Greeks, together with the Sallentines, who had already been engaged in hostilities with Rome, joined his standard; and had Cleonymus possessed the ability of Pyrrhus, he might have rallied around him the Samnites and Etruscans, and, after the exhaustion of a twenty years’ war, the Romans would have found it no easy matter to withstand him. As it was, the display of his force terrified the Lucanians, and they made heir Peace between.Re.e peace with Tarentum.15 It is remarkable that Diodorus, who states and Tarentum. this in express terms, and who had just before named the Romans as being also at war with the Tarentines, yet makes no mention of any peace between Tarentum and Rome. A treaty, however, must have been concluded, for the attack made by the Tarentines on a Roman fleet, eleven years afterwards, is said1 to have been occasioned by a violation of the conditions of the peace between the two nations; and had it not been made at this time, we cannot conceive that Cleonymus could so immediately have engaged in other enterprises. It seems probable that no other terms were required on either side than the renewal of a preceding treaty; and this treaty was originally concluded at a period when the only conceivable intercourse between Rome and Tarentum could have been by sea. It stipulated’ in the usual language that no Roman ships, meaning, probably, ships of’War, were to advance along the south coast of Italy nearer to Tarentun than the headland of Lacinium, which forms the southern extremity of the Tarentine gulf. There was, no doubt, a similar stipulation, restraining the Tarentines from advancing with their ships of war nearer to Rome than the headland of Circeii. Cleonymus, being thus no longer needed by the Tarentines, employed his arms with various success in plundering operations along the eastern coast of Italy, till at last he was beaten off by the inhabitants and obliged to return to Greece. He is not heard of again till he invited Pyrrhus to assist him in his attempt to seize the throne of Sparta. Two years after the end of the Samnite war, the Marsians, who had then, as Short war with the we have seen, made peace with Rome like the other allies of the Ianrsians. Samnites, were again engaged in hostilities. The Roman account”s )iodorus says expressly, TapavrLvot w6Xetov la A7vaywyO’S..ra~alv 7ois Tapavrtvovi XaovrrTES 7pi Asvcavois Kac’Ptopaiovu. XX. 104. aVElilvrnlaKE vrOVUspcKit, pr w7r\sv’Pwdpailov rp6ew s Pausanias, III. 6. Plutarch, Agis, 38, and AaKlviaS ai’pag.-Appian, Samnitic. VII. Pyrrhus, 26. Compare the article on the kings “s Livy, X. 3. At this point we lose the con. of Spartain the Appendix to the second volume nected history of Diodorus. The last consulof Mr. Fynes Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici. ship.noticed in his twentieth book is that of M. I Dioaorus, XX. 104. Livius and M. AEmilius, which was the second la Diodorus, XX. 104. year after the end of the Samnite war, and, ae1 Appian, Samnitic. VII. cording to Diodorus, the third year of the hun

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CHAP. XXXIII.] THE VESTINIANS AND PICENTIANS. 331 states that they resisted the settlement of a Roman colois at Carsecli, one of the.4quian towns lately conquered, and themselves maintained the place by force. This is scarcely credible, for they had made no opposition to the colonizing of Alba, a more important position, and one much nearer to their own country.

HIowever, the war, whatever was the cause, was short, and ended in the speedy submission of the Marsians, who were obliged to cede a portion of their domain. The same penalty had been paid in the preceding year by the Hernicans of Frusino, for an alleged attempt to excite their countrymen to revolt; and these acquisitions of land by the Romans are memorable, not so much as increasing their power against foreign enemies, but for their effect on their own state of society at home. We must remember that the land thus gained was mostly held in occupation by the Roman nobility, and often to a much larger extent than the Licinian law allowed; and that this great increase of their wealth, and accumulation of extensive domains, 1”Latifundia,” led gradually to a system of slave cultivation, and contributed, more than any other cause, to the great diminution of the free population throughout Italy. In the same year the Vestinians,‘4 of whom pwe have heard nothing since their unfortunate war with Rome in 429, are said to have sought the The Veetinians and - friendship of the Romans, and to have concluded with them a cetiansin alliance…. treaty of alliance. Since the conquest of the _~quians the Roman frontier had become contiguous to theirs; so that relations with Rome, either friendly or hostile, were become inevitable. Through this treaty, Rome completely separated the Samnites from the Etruscans; as her own territory or that of her allies reached now across the whole width of Italy from the mouth of the Tiber to that of the Aternus, on the Adriatic. Two or three years”5
afterwards the Picentians, whose country stretched along the coast of the Adriatic northward of the Vestinians, lapping, as it were, round Umbria on the east, and reaching as far as the settlements of the Senonian Gauls on the Metaurus and the AEsis, became also the allies of Rome. Their friendship was of importance; for not only were the Etruscars and Umbriag-s already a war with Rome, but it was known that the Gauls A.d been solicited to take pau; in the contest; and the situation of Picenum was most favorable for cat;ing the war into the Gauls’ own country, if they should attempt to stir, or for threatening the flank and rear of the Etruscans and Umbrians, if they should move either on Rome or towards Samnium. Meanwhile the Etruscan war, which was so soon to kindle a new war with the Samnites, broke out partially in the year 453. Its origin is ascribed to the internal factions of the Etruscan city of Arretium;6 the Siege nf Ne.qunum, ir powerful house of the Cilnians, of which Mecoenas was a descend-Umbia ant, was at variance with the people or commons of Arretium, and was suspected also, by some of the neighboring cities, as likely to endanger their independence. dred and nineteenth Olympiad.

Although we only by a dictatorship. Thus the chronology have numerous fragments of his later books, becomes more and more confused, for these yet these can ill supply the place of a regular dictatorships, if real, could not have lasted more narrative, which, with all its faults, has cer-than six months, and the next consuls would tainly preserved to us some very valuable and therefore come into office half a year after their probable accounts of many events in the Roman predecessors’ term was expired. In this manhistory. We miss also his notices of the several ner the beginning of the consular year was conwriters from whom his work was compiled, and tinually varying, and these portions of years his occasional mention of obscure nations and being reckoned as whole years, the reckoning cities, of which we have scarcely any other fell more and more in disorder. How con-. knowledge. Thus, for the third Samnite war stantly do the perplexities of the Roman Fasti Livy is almost our sole authority.

remind one of the truth of Thucydides’ remark, 1 Livy, X. 3. that the natural chronology of the seasons of 16 Livy, X. 10. Another year is inserted by the year was the only sure guide; the civil the chronologers between the consulship of M. chronology, he says, was a perIetual source of Livius and M. 2Emilius, and that of M. Valerius mistakes: or yacip KpLtfis eCr7v ots Kai’ &popivaos and Q. Appuleius. Like two or three other Kcat peJu-Ourf, Kaei graeg Cru%ev Tr, nreyEuvrT6 riyears in the fifth century of Rome, it is said to V. 20. have been a year without consuls, and marked is Livy, X. 3.

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332 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXI!~ The Cilnians applied fe aid to Rome, already known as the natural supporter of the high aristocratical party throughout Italy, and thus, we are told, a Roman army was sent into Etruria. The details, as is so often the case, are utterly conflicting; but it is said that the Cilnians were reconciled to the popular party, and hostilities ended for the present. In the next year, 454, we find one of the consuls besieging the Umbrian town of Nequinum,‘7 on the Nar, on what provocation we know not. The siege, however, was protracted till the year following; for the inhabitants well availed themselves of the strong site of their town, built on a narrow ledge in the mountain side, with an almost abrupt ascent above, and a descent no less steep down into the narrow gorge of the Nar below. At last the town was betrayed to the Romans; and they immediately sent a colony to occupy the spot,‘8 which from henceforth took the name of Narnia. It commands the defile which leads from the valley of the Tiber into the plain of Interamna o0 Terni, one of the richest tracts of central Italy. Some accounts‘9 related that the Samnites had supported the people of Neohe Samnites exert quinum in their obstinate resistance, and had sent troops to their themselves vrigorouoy to form a new coalto succor. It is manifest that the Samnite government was at this against Rome. period making the greatest exertions, in the hope, probably, that the Etruscans would create a diversion in their favor, by drawing off a part of the forces of Rome to her northern frontier. The Samnite plans were, moreover, unexpectedly furthered by a new inroad of the Gauls; new hordes had lately arrived from beyond the Alps,20 and their countrymen in the plains of the Po, having no room for them, were anxious to speed them on their way southwards; they encouraged them to cross the Apennines, and even joined themselves in the enterprise.

The Etruscans had already, perhaps, engaged their services against the Romans; so that the Gauls marched through Etruria still onwards, and with an Etruscan force cooperating with them, they poured into the Roman dominions.2’ It is probable that they followed their old line by the valley of the Clanis into Umbria, and that their ravages were carried on rather in the territory of the allies of Rome than in that of Rome itself.

But the invaders won a great spoil without any opposition, and the Gauls recrossed the Apennines to carry it home in safety. They would have been tempted, probably, by their success, to renew their inroad in the next year; but, fortunately for the Romans, they quarrelled with one another about the division of their plunder,22 and the greatest part of their multitude were destroyed by each other’s swords. Whilst the Gauls, however, were on the left bank of the Tiber, the whole force of Rome was watching their movements; and the Samnites seized the opportunity to march into Lucania.2 The appearance of a Samnite army revived the Samnite party in Lucania; the Roman party was everywhere overpowered; town after town was recovered to the Samnite alliance; and the partisans of Rome sent an embassy in all haste to the senate, praying for instant succor. But the Samnite government did not stop here; their ambassadors endeavored to rouse all the nations of Italy to arms, 1} Livy, X. 9. 2l hg pie ra cio’Pcopaaloov frapXtas pakaX1 s have).18 Livy, X. 10. 0ov. Polyb. II.

19. 1 “I M. Fulvius Cn: F. Cn. N. Pnatinus Cos. 22 Polybius, II. 19. De Samnitibus Nequinatibusque. Ann: CD 23 Livy, X. 11. Dionysius, XVI. 11.

For.. VII. K. Oct.” Fasti Capitol. these sudden revolutions in the condition of 2O Polybius, II. 19. This account is again Lucania, we may compare the conquest of Bceodifferent from that of Livy, who represents the tia by Myronides, and its loss a few years afterGauls as quarrelling with the Etruscans about wards through the event of the battle of Corothe terms of their service, and thus as not in-nea; and also the accession of Achaia to the vading the Roman dominion at all. There can Athenian alliance, a little before the thirtyyears’ be no doubt that Polybius has preserved the peace, and its loss again, through the stipulatruer version of these events. He fixes also this tions of that treaty. It is manifest that the RoGaulish invasion at about eighty-seven years man and Sarmnite parties in Lucania, or, in after the first invasion, when Rome was taken, other words, the aristocratical and popular parthat is, according to his reckoning, Olym. 120-1, ties, each as they gained the ascendency, took or B. c. 800. The common reckoning places it to themselves the name of the Lucanian nation, In 299, a difference not worth dwelling upon. and spoke of the foreign supporters of the opposite party as the national enemies.

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CHAr. XXXIIL] THIRD SAMNITE WAR. 332 and. to form one great coalition against Rome. They solicited the Picentians to join them;24 but there the influence of the Roman party was predominant; and the Picentian government made a merit of communicating instantly to the Romans the attempt of the Samnites to shake their faith. Old jealousies probably influenced the Marsians, Marrucinians, and Pelignians; they had often found the Samnites restless neighbors, and dreaded the restoration of their former power. But the Sabines25 seem to have listened to the Samnite overtures; there the ties of blood drew the two people towards one’another; and the new Roman tribes, lately created in the iEquian territory, brought the Romans into too close neighborhood to Reate and the valley of the Velinus. Etruria was already engaged in a quarrel of her own with Rome; so far as the endless party revolutions in the Etruscan cities might allow any dependence on the stability of her counsels. The weakness of Umbria might yield to fear, if Etruria on one side and the Sabines on the other, and the Gauls hanging on her northern frontier, should together call upon’her to join the confederacy. Nor were the Samnites neglectful of the nations of the south: they had already, as we have seen, recovered the greatest part of Lucania, and their arms, giving timely aid to their party within the country, must at this period have won also the majority of the Apulian nation to desert the Roman alliance, and to acknowledge once again the supremacy of Samnium.26 The indefatigable Samnite government, after all these efforts, might have well remonstrated, like the Homeric goddess, with that hard destiny which was to render them all fruitlesswTir E3AcLES aitorv sivat 4rdvo0v 7’ arXEarov, d6pw A’ &v iTpwaa jIqys;; icam’r;v’ iAoL 7rnroL Xaov ayscpoovr7, Ipictd icaKaKi roZi’ TSre raLv. The Romans, as might have been expected, readily listened to the prayer of their friends in Lucania. An alliance2 was concluded with the Beginning of the third Lucanian people, and hostages, taken probably from some of the Saite war. families of the Samnite party, were given to the Romans as a pledge of their allies’

fidelity. Ambassadors were sent into Samnium to require the Samnites to withdraw their troops from Lucania, and with a threat of instant war if the demand were not complied with. The Samnites ordered the ambassadors to leave Samnium without an audience; and the general council of the Samnite nation resolved that each separate state of their union should make its preparations for the support of the common cause. On the other side, the Romans made a formal declaration of war; and thus the desperate struggle began again with increased animosity. When we read of the Samnites, Etruscans, and Gauls, with the Lucanians and Apulians, some of the Sabines, and most of the Umbrian states, Speriortrength of the engaged in one great confederacy against Rome, we are first in-Roman confederacy.

dined to wonder how the Romans could have escaped destruction. But when we consider that under the name of Rome were included all those nations which were in her alliance, and of whose forces she had the supreme disposal, we find that it was but a weaker and far worse organized confederacy opposed to one stronger in itself, and-much more firmly united. From the Ciminian Hills to the bay of Naples, the territory of the Romans, Latins, and Campanians presented a compact mass of states and people, far superior in population, in resources, and in union, to the long and ill-organized line of its enemies; whilst, in the cen24 Livy, X. 11. his consulship, namely, in the year 458. See 25 Amiternum, a Sabine town in the upper Orelli, Inscript. Latin. Collectio, No. 539. valley of the Aternus, was taken from the Sam-26 Because in the year 457 we find an Apulian nites by the Romans in 461. Livy, X. 39. This army in the field in aid of the Samnites; and implies a previous occupation of it by the Sam-P. Decius is said to have defeated it at Malevennites, and an alliance therefore between the two tum, when on its march to join the Samnite countries. And an inscription relating to Ap-army. Livy, X. 15. pius Claudius the blind states, that he “de-27 Livy, X. 11, 12. Dionysius, XVI. 11, 12. feated an army of Sabines and Etruscans” in

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334 HISTORY OF ROME;. [CHAP. XXXIr tre of Italy, and reaching to the coast of the Adriatic, the Marsians, Pelignians, Marrucinians, Frentanians, Vestinians, and Picentians, formed a separate mass of Roman allies, who, by their position, might either obstruct the enemies’ communication, or threaten their rear. In fact, it was only the desperate resolution of the Samnite people, and the great energy and ability of their leaders, which could afford any chance of success, where the resources of the contending parties were so unequal. The Gauls were, like all barbarians, uncertain and unmanageable; and the repeated vacillations of the Etruscan counsels made the alliance of Etruria as unsafe a support as that of Egypt to the kings of Juda: to lean on the Etruscans was indeed to lean on a broken reed. No combined plan of operations on the part of the enemies of Rome can be First campaign of the traced in the first campaign of the war. The Gauls could not be War. prevailed on as yet to take the field; and the Roman party in Lucania was not entirely put down, so that the Samnites were still employed in that quarter, and could not send an army into Etruria. The Roman consuls of the year 456, the first year of the renewed Samnite war, were L. Cornelius Scipio and COn. Fulvius Centumalus.“8 L.

accounts of the Qar.g Scipio was the great-grandfather’of the conqueror of Hannibal; paign. he is the first Roman of whom a contemporary record has reached our times; the famous epitaph29 on his tomb, which declares him to have been “a brave man and a wise, whose form well matched his nobleness.”

Yet such are the perplexities of the uncertain history’of these times, that no one action recorded in Scipio’s epitaph is noticed by Livy, while no action which Livy ascribes to him is mentioned in his epitaph. The accounts of his colleague’s exploits are no less varied; some making him win a great battle in northern Samnium,30 and saying that he afterwards besieged and took Bovianum and Aufidena; while others placed the seat of his campaign on the Lucanian frontier, and extolled3” the ability with which he had conducted his operations against a superior enemy. A third account is followed by the Fasti Capitolini, that Fulvius triumphed over the Samnites and Etruscans; which seems to contradict the story followed by Livy, that Scipio invaded Etruria, advanced as far as Volaterrwe, and gained a hardly won victory under the walls of that city. It is only certain that this year was really marked by no great successes on the part of the Romans; on the contrary, they looked forward to the next campaign with great anxiety, and therefore32 they pressed Q. Fabius to accept the consulship, notwithstanding his advanced age, and although he was not legally eligible, as ten years had not elapsed since he was consul before.

It was in vain that he remonstrated; a dispensation,33 according to a practice afterwards so frequent, was passed in his favor; and the people proceeded to elect him. He then entreated of them that he 28 Livy, X. 11.

30 Livy, X. 12. 29 The sarcophagus which contained the bones 31 See the stories in Frontinus, Strategem, I. of L, Cornelius Scipio was discovered in 1780, 6, 1, 2, and I. 11, 2, already referred to by and is now in the Vatican Museum. The epi-Niebuhr. But the authority of the particular taph is as follows, written in the old Saturnian anecdotes contained in such collections as that verse: of Frontinus is but small, and it is not in itself to be set in comparison with that of any modPatre prognats Lucius foSripsBarbatus G d erately careful historian. In the present inPatre prognatus fortis vir sapiensque necdotes are curious, as s Quoius forms virtutei parisuena fuit, stance the I howing Consol censor aidilis quei fuit apud vos, how many different versions of the same events Taurasia Cisauna Samnio cepit were in circulation, as long as no real historian Subigit omno Loucana opsiadesque abdoucit.” existed to sift them all, and to choose the truest or the most probable; but they do not appear “Gnaivod” in the first line would, in modern to me to be entitled to any peculiar credit. Latin, be “. Cnreo,” and ” quoius” in the third 2 Livy, X. 13. line is ” cujus.” I have copied the inscription 33 “Tribuni plebis… aiebant, se ad popufrom Bunsen and Platner’s “Beschreibung lum laturos ut legibus solveretur.’”-Livy, X. Romsu,’ Vol. III. p 616. It may be found also 13. Legibus solvi is the regular expression in Orelli’s Collection of Inscriptions, No. 550, used when any one has a dispensation granted and an engraving of the sarcophagus, exhibiting him, to release him from complying with the also the epitaph, is given in the Gentleman’s enactments of some particular law. Magazine for April, 1787.

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Oan. XXXIII.] INVASION OF SAMNIUM. 335 might recommend to them P. Decius as his colleague: Decius an d himself, he said, had been censors together, and there was no man with whom he could act so well as consul.

Accordingly, Q. Fabius and P. Decius were elected together: L. Scipio, the consul of the preceding year, served34 under Fabius as his lieutenant, and a Fulvius35 and a Valerius are named amongst his military tribunes. At this moment, when the Romans expected to be assailed by the whole force of the enemies’ confederacy, they found it suddenly paralyzed. Second campaign. DeEtruria for some reason or other was not ready to act,36 and the Statni mby Q. Fabi.f Roman frontier on that side might be safely left without an army. and P. Decius. Accordingly, both consuls marched into Samnium,37 Fabius by Sora and the upper Liris, Decius by the country of the Sidicinians and the line of the Vulturnus. Fabius was met by the main Samnite army, which he defeated after a most obstinate battle; while Decius had encountered the Apulians near Beneventum on their march to join their allies, and defeated them also. The Samnites then acted on the defensive, and were obliged to suffer their country to be laid waste without opposition. Both of the Roman armies remained in Samnium, it is said, for five months,38 moving about from one part of it to another, and carrying on their ravages so systematically, that Decius was recorded to have en. camped his legions in fortyfive several places, and Fabius in as many as eightysix. But the Samnites must have driven their cattle to their mountain pastures, and many of these were so surrounded by forests, and so fenced round with precipitous cliffs, that a small force could have defended them with success against an army. The low country,39 however, was no doubt grievously wasted, and the Romans must have found plunder enough to encourage them to continue their invasion. Towards the end of the year Fabius returned to Rome to hold the comitia; after which he resumed his command, and both he and his colleague were ordered to remain in Samnium40 for six months longer, with the title and power of proconsul.

It was probably in this winter that the Sarmnite influence in Lucania and Apulia was completely overthrown, and both those countries returned to the Roman alliance. In both the aristocratical party was of Lveueni to tho Roalr.n itself eager to re-establish this connection; and the presence of alliance. two Roman armies, and the inability of the Samnites to keep the field against them, destroyed the ascendency of the popular party,41 and changed accordingly the foreign relations of the whole people. It was now too, it seems, that L. Scipio, as lieutenant of the proconsul, Q. Fabius, had so great a share in effecting the revolution in Lucania, as to be able to boast, in the words of his 34 Livy, X. 14. “Fabius… Scipionem ” Livy, X. 14. legatum hastatos primee legionis subtrahere… ” Livy, X. 15. The circumstantial statement jubet.” of the number of encampments in this campaign 35 Livy, X. 14. The reading in the modern deserves credit; and the account of Fabius’ editions of Livy is ” M. Fulvium et M. Vale-victory is moderate and probable. rium,” but most of the MSS. read “

Maximum 39 In the former war the consuls of the year Fulvium,” and Niebuhr observes that Maximus 448 had ravaged Samnium during five months, was a surname of the Fulvian family, as appears burning all the scattered houses, and destroyfrom the Fasti Capitolini. It is probable that ing the fruit-trees. Diodorus, XX. 80. But no the military tribunes here spoken of were the enemy could have penetrated within the rocky sons respectively of Cu. Fulvius and of M. Va-walls of the Matese, and many other spots must lerius, who had been consuls in 454 and 456. have been equally secure. “6

“Ab Sutrio et Nepete et Faleriis legati, 40 Livy, X. 16. auctores concilia Etrurine populorum de petendS 41 ” Lucanorum seditiones a plebeiis et agenpace haberi.” Livy, X. 14. This perpetual tibus ducibus ortas summa optimatium volunvacillation in the Etruscan counsels arose no tate per Q.

Fabium proconsulem, missum eo doubt from the balanced state of their domestic cum vetere exercitu, compresserat.”-Livy, X. parties. If any difficulty arose in obtaining the 18. Nothing is mentioned of the Apulians expected aid from the Gau]s, the Cilnii of Arre-after their defeat at Beneventum; but as they tium, and other friends of the Roman connec-do not appear again as the allies of the Samnites, tion, would urge the danger of opposing Rome it is probable that they followed the example of single-handed, and would advise delay; and the Lucanians, and returned in this winter to fear and weakness, counterfeiting prudence, their old connection with Rome. would easily be tempted to listen to them.

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336 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIII epitaph, that he had ” subdued all Lucania and carried off hostages.” The hostages would be demanded from the principal families of the popular or Samnite party, as a security that they should not again excite their countrymen to revolt from Rome. Thus having recovered Lucania and Apulia, having overrun Samnium without Revival of the war in resistance during several months, and having succeeded apparentEtruria. ly, through the influence of their party in the Etruscan cities, in separating Etruria from the coalition, the Romans thought that their work was done; the two proconsular armies marched home and were disbanded, and the consuls of the year, L. Volumnius and App.

Claudius, after having hitherto remained quiet at Rome, were ordered to march with their newly raised legions4” into Samnium, as if to receive the final submission of their exhausted enemy. But scarcely had the consuls left the city, when tidings came that the cities of Etruria were in arms,43 that several of the Umbrian states had joined them, that they were engaging the services of a large force of Gaulish auxiliaries; and that a Samnite general, with a Samnite army, was in the midst of this mass of enemies, to cement their union, and to breathe into their counsels a new spirit of decision and energy. There is no finer scene in history than the embassy of Demosthenes to Thebes, Marchof Gellius Egn-when Philip had occupied Elatea. Triumphing alike over all old tfrnS, tS omrganize the prejudices and all present fears, the great orator, almost in war against Reme. the very presence of the Macedonian army, and in spite of the influence of a strong Macedonian party in Thebes itself, prevailed upon the Thebans to throw themselves into the arms of Athens, and to share her fortune for life or for death in her contest against the common enemy of independent Greece. Most unlike to this action of Demosthenes in glory, yet not inferior to it in vig orous resolution, was the march of the Samnite general, Gellius Egnatius, into Etruria, in order by his presence to determine the wavering counsels of the Etruscans to a zealous cooperation against Rome. Seizing the moment when the proconsuls had left Samnium, and the new consuls had not yet taken the field, he fearlessly abandoned his own country to the attacks of the enemy, and with a select army, marched through the land of the Sabines into Umbria, and fron’

thence crossing the Tiber, arrived in the heart of Etruria. His sudden appearance raised the spirits of the friends of the Samnite alliance, and struck terror into the Cilnii and the party attached to Rome. The Etruscans resolved to renew the war, and, as we have seen, many of the Umbrian states and an army of Gauls were expected to join them. On the first tidings of this march of the Samnite general, the senate sent Third campaign. Both orders to Appius Claudius to follow him without delay.

Appius, Sarn.ites invade Cer-T with the first and fourth Roman legions and 12,000 allies, was pania. probably on his march towards the northern parts of Samnium, by the Latin road and the upper valley of the Liris, anid thus could be sent into Etruria more readily than his colleague, who, we may suppose, had marched by the Appian Road to attack the southern frontier of Samnium from Campania. Appius hastened into Etruria,44 and the appearance of a Roman army at first revived the hopes of the partisans of Rome: but one consul was unequal to the combined forces of the enemy, and L.

Volumnius was obliged to evacuate Samnium also, and hasten to join his colleague. No sooner was the whole force of 42 The accounts which Livy followed repre-ported that Appius Claudius and Volumnius sent the proconsuls as being still in Samnium both carried on war in Samnium (Livy, X. 17, ad when the new consuls took the field, X. 18. finem); and it is not likely, as Niebuhr remarks But Niebuhr observes that his narrative con-that four armies should have been employed tradicts itself, for the legions raised by the con-before the war broke out in lEtruria, and that suls are expressly said to have been the 1st, two of them should then have been disbanded, 2d, 3d, and 4th as usual; whereas, had two just when their services were most needful. consular armies been under arms at that time, 4 Livy, X. 18. the new legions must have been the 5th 6th, 44 Livy, X. 18.

7th, and 8th. Besides, some of the annals re

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CHAP. XXXIII.] DISPOSITION OF THE ROMAN ARMIES. 337 Roeme thus employed in Etruria, than the Samnites took the field with the forces which had been left to defend their own county, and burst into Campania.45 There they laid waste not only the lands of the allies of Rome, but of all those Roman citizens who had obtained settlements in the Falernian district, and composed the Falerian tribe. The march of Gellius Egnatius had thus completely attained its object; Samnium was wholly relieved, and the war was carried into the actual Alarm at Rome. The territory of Rome. Even the mere suddenness of this change was ch&esback from “Etru, a enough to increase its terrors; the Roman government ordered to deliver Campania.

all legal business to be suspended,46 and troops to be raised for the defence of the city; nor were the levies confined to the military age, or to free-born commons of the country tribes, but citizens above five-and-forty, and even freedmen of the four city tribes, were enrolled in the legions raised to meet the emergency. All these measures were directed in the absence of the consuls by P. Sempronius Sophus, the proctor. Meanwhile L. Volumnius had received:intelligence of the invasion of Campania, and was hastening back from Etruria to his own province. It is apparent from the stories which have been preserved of the meeting of the two consuls in Etruria, that there was no harmony between them; and thus the public service was likely to suffer the less from the division of their forces. We may believe also, that their junction for a time had revived the Roman interest in the Etruscan cities; and we may admit, not indeed the account given by Livy of a complete victory won over the Etruscan and Samnite armies, but that some advantages were gained47 which saved Appius from his perilous situation, and enabled his colleague to leave him when a still more pressing danger called him into Campania.

Volumnius marched with the utmost rapidity, and on his reaching the scene of action, he obliged the Samnites instantly to retreat into their own country, and overtaking a party of them on their way, he defeated them with considerable loss,48 and recovered a great portion of the spoil which they were carrying with them. This gleam of success was most welcome to the Romans; the usual course of business was resumed, after having been suspended for eighteen days, and a thanksgiving was ordered in the name of the consul for the favor which the gods had shown to the commonwealth under his auspices. Still, however, the aspect of affairs was most critical. In order to protect the Falernian district from the ravages of the Samnites, it was re-Great peparations for solved that two Roman colonies should be planted there one (at the ensuing r..renaign. Q. Fabius and P. DeMinturne49 at the mouth of the Liris, and the other at Sinuessa, cius again chosen can. uls. on the hills which divide the’ waters running to the Liris from 6 those that feed the Sayone. But settlements in this quarter were considered so insecure, and so exposed to perpetual ravages from the Samnites, that few were willing to accept a grant of land on such terms. As the consular elections drew near, L. Volumnius was recalled from Campania to hold the comitia; and the unanimous voice of the people again called upon Q. Fabius to accept the office of consul. He again yielded to the general wish, but begged, as before, that P. Decius might be his colleague; and Decius was accordingly elected consul with him.“5 Appius Claudius, who was still with his army in Etruria, was appointed prietor, and L. Volumnius had his command prolonged for another year as proconsul.

L. Cornelius Scipio, who had served under Fabius in his last colnsulship, Cn. Fulvius, who had been consul in the year 456, and had conducted the first campaign of this war in Samnium, together with L. Postumius Megel40

Livy, X. 20. that Appius repulsed the enemy and saved his Il Livy, X. 21.

own army, but it by no means proves that he 47 In the midst of the battle, Appius vowed won a decided victory. We have only to reto build a temple to Bellona, if the goddess member Coruiia and Albuhera. would grant him victory; and this temple was 4” Livy, X. 20, 21. afterwards built. See Orelli, Inscript. Latinar. 49 Livy, X. 21. Collect. No. 539. This may be taken as evidence 50 Livy, X. 22-26. 22

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338 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXII, lus, were appointed also to commands in this great campaign, with the title of proprietors. The anxiety occasioned by the impending contest may be measured by the A. u. c. 459. B.c.

particular accounts of prodigies and their expiations which were 295.

Reported omens to be found, in the annals of this year. From the altar5’

of the of the fate of the war. temple of the Capitoline Jupiter there flowed for three successive days, so said the annals, first blood, then honey, and on-the third day milk. The blood was interpreted as a sign that the blood of thankofferings for victory should soon stream on the altar of Jupiter, but the favors of the gods would not be unmixed; for honey was the medicine of the sick, and foreshowed a heavy visitation of sickness: milk was the food of those whose corn had failed them, and was the sign of a coming famine. To avert the threatened anger of the gods, and to confirm them in their promised favor, solemn prayers52 were ordered to be offered during two whole days; and frankincense and wine were furnished to every one at the public expense, that the prayers might be universal and unceasing. The consuls at this time came into office about the beginning of the year; and as the snow was still thick on the Apennines, the Gauls could ri. Winter march intnot Etruri take the eld to march into Etru and campaign Fabius to relieve him. would not be opened till the spring. But the position of Appius Claudius in the enemy’s country was exceedingly perilous; and he himself, in the opinion of Fabius, was scarcely equal to the difficulties of his situation.

Accordingly, Fabius himself, having. raised53 a small force of 4000 foot and 600 horse, out of a great multitude who were eager to serve under so renowned a general, set out at once for Etruria. He found Appius Claudius busily employed in strengthening the fortifications of his camp, and the soldiers from thus acting solely on the defensive were dispirited, and mistrusted both themselves and their general. Fabius ordered them to level their fortifications; and having sent Appins home, he took the command of the army in person, and kept it continually in movement, marching rapidly from place to place, and restoring to the men their accustomed feeling of confidence. He then stationed one division54 in the country of the Camertian Umbrians, the allies of the Romans,’ to observe, the pass by which the Gauls were likely to cross the Apennines, apparently that of La Scheggia’ on the Flaminian road, descending on Nocera and Foligno. This was placed underi the command of L. Scipio; while Fabius himself returned to Rome to concert measures with his colleague for the operations of the approaching spring. Two consular armies55 were destined to take the field, consisting each of two Fo.ee. of the Rom.ns Roman legions, and an unusually large force of Roman cavalry; ald their alliesemploy-together with 500 Campanian cavalry, and a force of allies still larger than that of the Romans themselves. Amongst the allies were undoubtedly the Lucanians66 and Campanians, and in all probability the Marsians, Pelignians, Marrucinians, and Vestinians, as well as the contingents of the colonies founded in the late war, and those of the still independent cities of the Latins. All the forces of the Picentians which could be spared from the defence of their own country, as well as those of the Camertians, were employed, we may suppose, with the army of L. Scipio, watching the movements of the enemy in Umbria. Whilst this large force, consisting at least of between fifty and sixty thousand heir armiesof reserve. men, was to take the field in the north, two more Roman legions, with a proportionate number of allies, were to invade Samnium57 b1

Zonaras, VIII. 1. 66 The Lucanians are mentioned as among’” Livy, X. 23.

the regular allies of the Romans, and quartered s Livy, X. 25. within the consuls’ camp, in the year immeq L” Livy, X. 25. diately following,-See Livy, X. 33. 5 jivy, X. 26. 57 Livy, X. 27.

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CHAP. XXXIII.] THE TWO ARMIES MEET AT SENTINUM. 339 under L. Volumnius as proconsul. A third army, under Cn. Fulvius as proprwetor,58 was to be stationed as a reserve in the Faliscan territory, at once to defend the passage of the Tiber, and preserve the communications of the main army with Rome; and also to create a diversion, if opportunity should offer, by acting on the offensive against Etruria. And lastly, a fourth army, commanded by L. Postumius Megellus,59 also proprmitor, was to be encamped in the Vatican district, on the right bank of the Tiber, to cover Rome itself. This account of the dispositions of the Romans is clear and perfectly credible; but, unfortunately, we are left in total ignorance as to the numhers, movements, and position of the enemy. Why the Etruscans defeated by the Gauls and Samnites did not crush Scipio’s army, even before the arrival of the Gauls, we can scarcely understand, unless we suppose that party struggles again paralyzed the force of the Etruscans, and kept it in inactivity under a show of caution, till the whole army of the alliance should be assembled. At last the Gauls commenced their movement before the consuls had left Rome; they hastened to force the passage of the Apennines, and no sooner had they arrived on the scene of war than they began to act in earnest. L. Scipio’s army60 was attacked by the Gauls and Samnites, and completely defeated; one legion, it is said, was cut to pieces; the rest of his division took shelter, probably, within some of the neighboring towns, and the Gaulish horsemen overrunning the country, fell in suddenly with the two consular armies, which had now taken the field, and first acquainted them with the defeat of their countrymen, by exhibiting the heads of the slain Romans affixed to their long lances, or hanging round the necks of their horses. Exactly at this critical point of the campaign, Livy’s narrative fails us, and all that passed between the destruction of the legion and the final T The Etruttcana and Urmbattle at Sentinum is a total blank; it is as much loss to us as a brians leave their allies. The Gauls and Samcountry travelled over during the night; we were in one sort of nits retreat behind the scenery yesterday, and we find ourselves in another this morning; pen.ne.

each is distinct in itself, but we know not the connection between them.

Earnestly must Gellius Egnatius have labored to bring on a decisive battle in the plains of Umbria; the allies had begun the campaign with happy omens, their whole force was united, the ground was favorable; nothing could be gained, and every thing would be hazarded by delay. But whether the fault rested once agair with the Etruscans, or whether the Picentians caused a timely diversion, by threatening to invade the country of the Gauls, or whether the consuls fell back upon Spoletum, and were able to avoid an action for the moment, we know not. But they sent orders to the proprietors, Cn. Fulvius and L. Postumius, to advance into the heart of Etruria, and no sooner did the tidings of this movement reach the enemy’s army, than the Etruscans and Umbrians insisted on marching to the defence of the Etruscan territory, and the Gauls and Samnites, indignant at their desertion, and refusing to follow them, had no choice thems’elves but to fall back behind the Apennines, and to resign their hopes of a victorious march upon Rome. The Romans pursued them instantly, with two consular armies certainly, and with the wreck of L. Scipio’s division; perhaps also with the Thle R.omnns follow them. The two armies two legions of L.

Volumnius, which may have been recalled from nteet atSet n.min. Samnium.

They found the enemy in the country of Sentinumr, an Umbrian town on the north side of the Apennines,6’ just under the central chain, in a nB Livy.

X. 27. from Ancona to Rome crosses the Apennines 69 Livy, X. 27. to descend upon Foligno. 60 Livy, X. 26. Polybius, II. 19. We learn 61 The ancient Sentinum stood on or near the from Polybius, that the Samnites were engaged site of the modern town of Sassoferrato, as is in this action as well as the Gauls, and that it known by inscriptions which have been diswas not a surprise, but a regular battle, 7rapradf-covered there. See Orelli, Nos. 3861 and 4949. avre’PosaoLs;. It was fought in the country of But I have no good information as to the dethe Camnertians, or people of Camerinum, per-tails of the topography. haps near the point where the modern road

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340 HISTORY OF ROME. [0nIAr. XXXIIL small valley which runs down into the larger valley of the AEsis or Esino, and not far on the right hand of the Flaminian road, at the point where it crosses the watershed of the mountains. It was of the utmost importance to the Roman generals to bring the contest to an issue whilst they had only the Gauls and Samnites to encounter, and in this they easily succeeded, for the Gauls had never yet fought the Romans without conquering them, and Gellius Egnatius knew enough of the inconstant humor of barbarians to be aware that they would soon be tired of a protracted war, and that if the Gauls too deserted him, his heroic march from Samnium would have been made in vain. So the two armies met by common consent in fair field; Q. Fabius was on the Roman right, opposed to Gellius Egnatius and his Samnites;2 P. Decius was on the left over against the Gauls. If L. Volumnius was present with the legions from Samnium, he probably, like Cn. Servilius at Cannse, who had also.been consul in the year before the battle, had his place in the centre. The Samnites could not alone have contended with Q. Fabius, whose right wing was equal to a regular consular army; and the Gauls must have been more than enough to overpower P. Decius. It is probable, therefore, that the Gauls composed the greater part of the enemy’s line of battle, and that only the extreme left was held by Gellius Egnatius and his Samnites. While the two armies fronted each other, and were on the very eve of battle, A favorale omen en. a hind,63 said the Roman story, came running down from the courngethe Romann. mountains between the two opposing lines, with a wolf in chase of her. She ran in amongst the Gaulish ranks, and the Gauls transfixed her with their long javelins. The wolf ran towards the Romans, and they instantly gave free passage to the beast which had given suck to the founder of their city; and whose image they had only in the preceding year64 set up beneath that very sacred figtree in the comitium, which tradition pointed out as the scene of the miracle. “See,” cried out one of the soldiers, “Diana’s sacred hind has been slain by the barbarians, and will bring down her wrath upon them; while the Roman wolf, unhurt by sword or spear, gives us a fair omen of victory, and bids us think on Mars and on Quirinus, our divine founder.” So the Roman soldiers, as encouraged by a sign from the gods, rushed cheerfully to the onset. This story, with some other circumstances related of the battle itself, are Battle of Sentinum. blended strangely with the perfectly historical substance of the general narrative. When the armies closed,65 the Roman left. wing struggled vigorously against the numbers, and strength, and courage of the Gauls. Twice, it is said, did the Roman and Campanian cavalry charge with effect the Gaulish horsemen; but in their second charge they were encountered by a force wholly strange to them, the war chariots of the enemy, which broke in upon them at full speed, and with the rattling of their wheels, and their unwonted appearance, so startled the horses of the Romans, that they could not be brought to face them, and horses and men fled in confusion. Uncouth and almost ridiculous as these chariots may seem to our notions, yet a force which terrified C(esar’s veterans, and which that great master of war speaks of as formidable, could not have been ridiculous in reality; and the undoubted effect of the British chariots against the legions of Caesar, may well convince us that the Gaulish chariots at Sentinum must have struck terror into the soldiers of Decius. The Roman cavalry were driven back upon their infantry; the first line of the. Decius devotes lm. legions was broken, and the Gauls, following their advantage, pelfto death. pressed on with the masses of their infantry. Decius strove in vain to stop the flight of his soldiers; one way alone was left by which he might yet serve his country; he bethought him of his father at the battle by Vesuvius, and calling to M.

Livius, one of the pontifices who attended him in the field, he Jesired him to dictate to him the fit words for selfdevotion. Then, in the same 62 Livy X 2. ” Livy, X. 23. es Livy, X. 27. X Livy, X. 27, 28.

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CHaP. XXXIII.] DEFEAT OF THE SAMNITES. 341 dress, and with all the same ceremonies, he pronounced also the same formn of words which had been uttered by his father, and devoting himself and the host of the enemy with him to the grave and to the powers of the dead, he rode into the midst of the Gaulish ranks and was slain. His last act as consul had been to invest the pontifex M. Livius5 with the command of his legions as propraetor, and to order his lictors to The a,,s resist obfollow the new general. Fabius also, learning the danger of his stinately. colleague, had sent two of his own lieutenants, L. Scipio and C. Marcius, to his aid, with reinforcements drawn from his own reserve; and thus the flight of the Romans was stayed, while the manner of Decius’ death encouraged rather than dismayed his soldiers, as they believed that it was the price paid for their victory.

But the Gauls, though checked, were yet neither beaten nor disheartened; they gathered into thick masses, with their huge shields covering almost their whole bodies, and wielding their heavy broadswords, they stood unbroken and unassailed; till the Romans picked up from the field of battle the javelins which had been discharged earlier in the action, and with these missiles endeavored to wear down the mass of their enemies. The pila pierced through the wooden shields of the Gauls, encumbering them, even when they inflicted no wound; but the Gauls stood as firm as the “Scottish circle deep” under the hail of the English arrows at Flodden; and no efforts of the left wing of the Romans could secure the victory.

Meanwhile, Fabius,67 on the right, after a long and arduous contest with the Samnites, and finding that his infantry could not break them, at Fabius defets t last succeeded in charging their flank with his cavalry, and at the SabiDte,ane d sat ia st same moment bringing all his reserves of infantry into action, he wafs Csomplet evictory assailed their line in front, and decided the victory. The Samnites of e Rns fled to their camp, and thus left exposed the flank of the Gauls, who were still maintaining their ground. Fabius saw his opportunity, and detached the Campanian cavalry, with the principes of the third legion, to attack the Gauls in the rear; while he himself closely pursued the Samnites, and vowed aloud that if he won the day, he would build a temple and offer all the spoils of the enemy to Jupiter the victorious. The Samnites rallied under the ramparts of their camp, and still disputed the victory; but the Gauls, assailed on all sides, were now hopelessly broken, and the last hope of the Samnites vanished, when their commander, Gellius Egnatius, fell.

Still, when the day was utterly lost, these brave men would neither surrender nor disperse; they left the field in a body, and immediately began their retreat to their own country. The Roman accounts of this bloody battle68 state the loss of their enemies at 25,000 killed, and 8000
prisoners: their own they mnake to have Lossonbothides. amounted to 8200
killed; but they give no report of the number of wounded. Of the total loss, only 1200 are said to have fallen in the right wing, while in the army of Decius there were killed 7000. The great slaughter in ancient warfare always took place when the line of battle was broken; and the disparity of loss on the two wings of the Roman army is therefore such as Wight have been expected. Meanwhile, Cn. Fulvius6” had, according to his instructions, penetrated into Etruria; and had not only laid waste a large tract of country, Operations in Etruria. but had defeated in the field an army sent out by the two cities of Perusia and Clusium to check his ravages. M0 Livy, X. 29. Diodorus, XXI. Frag. hoeschel. p. 490. Duris 67

Livy, X. 29. supposed that the Etruscans were engaged in “I Livy X. 29.

Duris of Samos, a contenm-the battle; andsome ofthe Roman writers gave porary writer, but whose information of these the same account, and made the allied army to events could come only from common report, consist of a million of men.-See Niebulhr, VoL and who delighted to exaggerate the disasters III., note 647. of the Gauls, related that in the Gaulish and 69

Livy, X. 30. Samnite army 100,000 men had fallen.-See

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342 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIII It is quite plain that the Etruscans were at this time suffering the full evil ot distracted counsels, and that they were neither unanimous for peace nor for war. What was become of the forces of Arretium, of Volaterrm, of Russellae, of Cortona, and of Yulsinii, when Clusium and Perusia were left to resist the Roman invasion alone? The body of Decius70 was found under a heap of slaughtered Gauls, and honorFuneral of recs. ably buried. Fabius celebrated his funeral, and pronounced his funeral oration; a fit tribute from one who had been twice his colleague in the consulship and once in the censorship; nor had any man enjoyed better opportunities of knowinghis excellence. He had proved his skill and courage in war, and his wisdom and moderation in peace; and he had experienced also the noble frankness of his nature, which never allowed any selfish jealousy to stand in the way of his private friendship, and much less of his devotion to his country’s service. Such was the great battle of Sentinum, the Austerlitz of the third Samnite The auls cannot be war. But as more than eighteen months elapsed between the batinduced to serve again tle of Austerlitz and the peace of Tilsit, so neither was the coaliagainst Rome. tion against Rome dissolved at once by the victory of Sentinum. The Gauls, indeed, remained quiet after their defeat, for their interest in the war was only that of mercenary soldiers, and they were not tempted to a service which seemed likely to bring with it more loss than profit. But even Etruria would not yet submit to Rome, and the Samnites, hoping still to keep the war at a distance from their own country, were eager to renew the contest. Yet the Romans could not but feel great relief from their victory. The armies of the propruetors, Cn.

Fulvius and L. Postumius, were recalled Timh of aius. to Rome71 and disbanded; and Fabius marched into Etruria with his consular army,- and was strong enough to obtain fresh advantages over the Perusians, who alone of -all the Etruscan people ventured, it seems, to meet the Romans in the field. He then -returned to Rome, and triumphed on the 4th of September over the three principal powers of the late coalition, the Etruscans, the Gauls, and the Samnites; and the soldiers who followed his chariot, in the rude verses which they were accustomed to utter on such occasions, commemorated the death of Decius as fully equal in glory to their own general’s safe and victorious return. It is mentioned”7 that each soldier received out of the spoil taken in the late battle, eighty-two ases, and a coat, and military cloak; “rewards,” says Livy, Fadly feeling how whole districts of Italy had in his days been portioned out amongst the legions of Augustus, “which the soldiers of those times did not think despicable.”

The wreck of the Samnite army,73 still, it is said, amounting to 5000 men, made its way unhurt or unopposed through the countries of the PicenThe Samnite army forces.itsway bnak to tians and Vestinians, and from thence proceeded towards SamSamnium. nium through the country of the Pelignians, by Sulmo and the Five-mile plain to the valley of the Sagrus or Sangro.

The Pelignians, more zealous in the quarrel, because theyr were nearer neighbors to the Samnites, and their lands, no doubt, had often suffered from Samnite incursions, endeavored to cut off the retreating army. But the Samnites, with some loss, beat off this new enemy, and entered their own country in safety. L” Livy, X. 29. triumph, whereas Livy makes him march bach 7 This appears from the circumstance that to Etruria after his triumph. But, as Niebuhr Fabius marched into Etruria and engaged the says, his army would be disbanded as a matter Perusians; which shows that Cu.

Fulvius must of course after his triumph, and the Fasti Cahave already been recalled, and also because pitolini say that he triumphed over the EtrusApp. Claudius, the prator, was ordered to sup-cans, as well as the Samnites and Gauls; which port L. Volumnius in Samnium with the re-he could not have done had he only triumphed mains of the army bf Decius: had the proprse-for his victory at Sentinum, as no Etruscans tor’s armies been still embodied, one of them were engaged there. would probably have been employed on that 72 Livy, X. 30. service. I have followed Niebuhr in placing 7s Livy, X. 30. Fabius’ victories over the Perusians before his

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CHAP. XXXIII.] INDECISIVE CAMPAIGN. 343 It is manifest that during this year Samnium enjoyed a complete respite from invasion; and that L.

Volumnius, even if we suppose that he was Operation, in Sani. not called away to the great seat of war in Umbria, was not a,gm and Cainpnia durmatch for the Sanmnite forces opposed to him. His defeat of a Samnite army which had taken refuge in the Matese is entitled to no credit whatever; on the contrary, we find that the Samnites again invaded the Roman territory in two different directions;14 that one army descended into the districts of Formire and Vescia, and another laid waste the banks of the Vulturnus apparently where it first issues out on the plain of Campania. After the battle of Sentinum, the legions of Decius were recalled from Etruria, and put under the command of Appius Claudius, the praetor, and he and L. Volumnius, acting together with their two armies, obliged the Samnites to retreat within their frontier. But as the Etruscans had not yet made peace with Rome, the Samnites were not discouraged, and trusted that another year might enable them to retrieve their defeat at Sentinum. The events of the next year, however, are involved in such confusion that it is impossible to disentangle them. L.

Postumius Megellus, one A. U. c. 460. A. C of the proprewtors of the year before, was now consul, and M. 2TheRos ifthnag ain an Atilius Regulus was his colleague. The seat of war was again trans-advantages in it. ferred to Apulia,75 where the Samnites, well understanding the importance of acting on the offensive, laid siege to Luceria. Here there was fought a bloody and indecisive battle, in which the Romans were in such danger that the consul vowed to build a temple to Jove, the stayer of flight, if his army were saved from total rout. At the end of the campaign the Roman army wintered at Interamna,6 in the valley of the Liris, to save that country from the ravages of the enemy; and the consul returned to Rome to hold the comitia. His colleague had been recalled from Samnium earlier in the season to carry on the war in Etruria; and this he did, according to the Roman accounts, with such success,7 that Vulsinii, Perusia, and Arretium sued for peace, and obtained a truce for forty years. But which consul it was who fought at Luceria, and which had marched into Etruria, the annalists did not know, and therefore guessed variously.“8 Some accounts went so far as to say that both consuls triumphed;“9 but most said that only one obtained that honor, and again they did not agree in determining which consul it was. It is probable that neither of the consuls triumphed; nor does it seem likely that the Romans obtained any advantages in this year, except, perhaps, over the ever-restless but ever-vacillating and divided Etruscans. The Samnites, therefore, resolved to try their fortune once again. The next year was undoubtedly marked by great successes on the side of the Romans; but its history is still uncertain in the details, and much A. U. C. 461. A. C of the geography of the campaign is wholly inexplicable. The 293A Sixth clmpaigni II-) - Consulship of L.

Papirconsuls were L. Papirius Cursor, son of that Papirius who had is and sp. carvilius. 74 Livy, X. 31. He describes the scene of the narrative of this war seems to have depended Sarmnite inroadin these words, ” in fEserninum chiefly on the memoirs of the Fabian family, quaeque Vulturnoacdjacent flumini.” The word and to have become uncertain where they failed which, in the modern editions of Livy, is printed him, did not venture to say which it was.-See as ” Eserninum” varies, however, in the MSS. Livy, X. 37. greatly. /1Esernia, in Samnium, seems out of 79 Fasti Capitolini.-Livy says that Atilins the question, for i was only in the beginning did not triumph, but that Postumius did, by his of the first Punic war that the Rornans planted own authority, without the sanction of the sena colony there; unless we suppose that portions ate. But this story is referred by Dionysius to of its domain had already been ceded to the Ro-Postumius’ third consulship three years aftermans in the second Samnite war, which, how-wards; and Claudius said that Postumius never ever, considering how deep the city lies in the triumphed at all. It does not appear that the heart of Samnium, seems improbable. narrative of Fabius gave a triumph to either of 75 Livy, X. 35. them.-Livy, X. 37. 7”

Livy, X. 36. Orosius’ description of the events of this 77 Livy, X. 3?.

year is far nearer the truth, I think, than the 78 Livy says that Atilius fought at Luceria, account of Livy. “Sequitur annus quo Roand Postumius marched into Etruria. Clau-mani instaurato a Samnitibus bello victi sunt, dius Quadrigarius, as quoted by Livy, main-atque in castra fugerunt.”’

III. 22. tained exactly the contrary; and Fabius, whose

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344 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIII been so famous in the second Samnite war, and Sp. Carvilius Maximus. Carvilius took the command80 of the army which had wintered near Interarmna, on the Liris; Papirius commanded two new legions, and both consuls were ordered to invade Samnium. The Samnites, on their part, are said to have raised an army with unusual Desperate resolution of care, and to have bound their soldiers by the most solemn oaths, the Semnites. taken amidst the most mysterious and horrid ceremonies, that they would either conquer -or die. The men thus pledged were arrayed in a peculiar manner, with waving plumes on their helmets, and with coats of white linen, exactly as had been done fifteen years before, when the old Papirius, the father of the present consul, was appointed dictator to encounter them; and the repetition of these same ceremonies by the Samnites now made the Romans, for the omen’s sake, appoint another Papirius Cursor to be consul; as if the Papirian family8’

was chosen by the gods to meet and to overcome the most desperate efforts of their Samnite enemies. It was no doubt the failure of all cooperation in Etruria, and the knowledge, They rein their hold therefore, that they would have to withstand the whole force of on the outry of the Romnie, which led the Samnites to apply these extraordinary excitemes. ents to the courage of their soldiers. Yet it seems as if they had not abandoned all hopes of Etruscan aid, and that they had learned froim their enemies the wisdom of acting on the offensive; for the first operations of the Roman armies were the capture of Amiternum,82 and the ravaging of the country of Atina. This seat of war implies that the Samnites still obstinately retained their line of communication with Etruria amidst all the invasions of their own country, and with this view still held fast to their alliance those Sabine and Volscian cities which, at the beginning of the coalition, had been forced or persuaded to espouse their cause. A Samnite army was also sent into Campania to ravage the territory83 of the. Romans and their allies on the Liris and Vulturnus, whilst another was kept in Samnium for home defence; and it was, perhaps, to the soldiers of this last army, consisting of the oldest and youngest men capable of bearing arms, that the excitements of enthusiasm were applied, to make up for their inferiority in strength and in experience. The Roman consuls84 having jointly laid waste the territory of Atina, proceeded Both the Roman conto enter Samnium. The seat of war lay apparently in the country,uls invade Samnium. of the Pentrian Samnites on the north of the Matese: Carvilius Operations on the north ofthe Matere. laid siege to Cominium: Papirius, after having taken Duronia, marched against Aquilonia, where the Samnite army was stationed; all these three places are quite unknown to us, and we can only conclude that they lay on the north side of the Matese, because two of them are described as being near to Bovianum, the site of which is known. The Samnites, attacked at once by two consular armies, were compelled to divide their forces; and eight thousand men were detached from the army before Aquilonia to relieve Cominium. A deserter acquainted Papirius with this movement, and he instantly sent off a messenger to warn his colleague, while he himself attacked the enemy at the moment when he knew their force to be thus untimely weakened. The auspices had been reported to be most favorable; “the fowls ate so eagerly,” so said their keeper to the consul, “that some of the corn dropped from their mouths on the ground.“85 This was the best possible omen; but just as the consul was on the point of giving the signal for action, his nephew, Sp. Papirius, came to tell him that the 0 Livy, X. 39. pascuntur (aves) necesse est a.iqumd ex ore oa*’ Livy, X. 38, 39. dere et terram pavire, terripavium primo, post 182 Livy, X. 39. terripudium dictum est: hoc quidem jam tri63

Zonaras, VIII. 1. pudium dicitur. Quum igitur offa cecidit ex ~ Livy, X.

39. ore pulli, turnm auspicanti tripudium solistimunm i’ Pullarius auspicium mentiri ausus tripu-nuntiant.” Cicero, de Divinat. II. 34.

diumn solistimum.” Livy, X. 40.’ Quia quum

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Cmnr. XXXIII.] VICTORIES OF THE ROMANS. 5~5 keeper had made a false report. “Some of his comrades have declared the truth,” said the young man: “and far from eating eagerly, the fowls would not touch their food at all.” ” Thou hast done thy duty, nephew, in telling me this,” replied his uncle, “but let the keeper see to it if he has belied the gods. His report to me is, that the omens are most favorable, and therefore I forthwith give the signal for battle. But do you see,” he added to some centurions who stood by, ” that this keeper and his comrades be set in the front ranks of the legions.” Ere the battlecry was raised on either side, a chance javelin struck the guilty keeper, and he fell dead. His fate was instantly reported to the consul. “The gods,” he exclaimed, “c are amongst us; their vengeance has fallen on the guilty.” While he spoke, a crow was heard just in front of him to utter a full and loud cry. ” Never did the gods more manifestly declare their presence and favor,” exclaimed the consul, and forthwith the signal was given, and the Roman battlecry arose loud and joyful. The Samnites met their enemies bravely;86 but the awful rites under which they had been pledged gave them a gloomy rather than a cheer-Victoy gained by L ful courage; they were more in the mood to die than to conquer. Popirus. On the Roman side, the consul’s blunt humor, which he had inherited from his father, spread confidence all around him.

In the heat of the battle, when other generals would have earnestly vowed to build a temple to the god whose aid they sought, if he would grant them victory, Papirius called aloud to Jupiter the victorious, “Ah, Jupiter,8s if the enemy are beaten, I vow to offer to thee a cup of honeyed wine before I taste myself a drop of wine plain.” Such irreverent jests do not necessarily imply a scoffing spirit; they mark superstition or fanaticism quite as much as unbelief; nor would the consul’s language shock those who heard it, but rather assure them that he spoke in the full confidence of being heard with favor by the gods, as a man in hours of festivity would smile at the familiarity of an indulged servant. Besides, Papirius performed well the part of a general; he is said to have practised the trick which was so successful at Bannockburn;88 the camp servants were mounted on the baggage mules, and appeared in the midst of the action on the flank and rear of the Samnites; the news ran through both armies, that Sp. Carvilius was come up to aid his colleague, and a general charge of the Roman cavalry and infantry at this moment broke the Samnite lines, and turned them to flight. The mass of the routed army fled either to their camp, or within the walls of Aquilonia; but the cavalry, containing all the chiefs and the nobility of the nation, got clear from the press of the fugitives, and escaped to Bovianum. The Romans89 followed up their victory, and stormed the Samnite camp, and scaled the walls of Aquilonia, which was abandoned by the enemy Successes….. of Sp. Car. during the night. Carvilius meanwhile had taken Cominium, vilius. while the detachment sent to relieve it had been recalled to the main army when Papirius began his attack, and thus had wasted the day in marching backwards and forwards, without being present at either scene of action.

These soldiers, however, having halted during the night in the neighborhood of Aquilonia, pursued their march the next day, and with a very trifling loss effected their retreat to Bovianum, which was now the common rallying point. Both Aquiloniall and Cominium were given up to be plundered by the conquerors, and were then set on fire. It was late in the season, (a The co nuttakthe circumstance which shows how imperfect are our accounts of these Smnite towns on the wars,) but the consuls having now no enemy in the field, wished etofthe teae. 18 Li vy, 2X. 41. the older Latin, was merely ” wine.” See Pliny, e ” Voverat Jovi Victori, si legiones hostium Hist. Natur. XIV. 18, ~ 90, Ed. Sillig. fudisset, pocillum mulsi priusquam temetum 68 Livy, X. 40, 41. biberet sese facturum.” Livy, X. 42. Mul-89 Livy, X. 41-43. sum was ” honeyed wine,” a favorite beverage 9o Livy, X. 44, 45. sf the Romans in the early times; temetum, in

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346 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIII to follow up their blow, and to attack the several Samnite cities; a service most welcome to the soldiers, as it offered to them the prospect of plunder. Bovianum, however, was too strong to be attacked as yet; so the consuls moved on furthei into the heart of the country, and fixed the seat of war on the eastern side of the Matese.

Here Papirius laid siege to Saepinum, a place not far from the sources of the Tamarus, near the modern road from Benevento to Campobasso, the capital of Molise. Carvilius attacked a town, called variously in the MSS.

of Livy, Vella, Velia, or Volana, but the position of which is altogether unknown. The tidings of these successes91 were received at Rome with the greatest joy Sp. Carviliuis recalled and thanksgivings were offered for four days; the longest period and sent into Etruria. of public rejoicings for victory which has been hitherto mentioned in the Roman annals. Just at this time, as we are told, there came complaints from the Roman allies on the Etruscan frontier, that is, we must suppose from the people of Sutrium, that the Etruscans were again in arms, and that the Faliscans, hitherto the allies of Rome, had now taken part with the enemy. It is vain to attempt to explain all these movements in Etruria; or to decide whether the Etruscans were tempted to renew the contest by the employment of both consuls in Samnium, or whether the Romans were encouraged by their victories there to take vengeance for past offences on the Etruscans. At any rate, the consuls were ordered to determine by lot which of them should march into Etruria; and the lot fell upon Carvilius. His soldiers were glad to go, it is said, because the cold of Samnium was becoming intolerable; but they had other reasons besides the cold, for wishing to change their seat of war; for, whatever might be the plunder of the Samnite towns, it was not always to be easily won; and. though Carvilius had taken three of them, yet it had been at the cost of two actions in the field, in which his own loss had exceeded that of the enemy. Papirius, on his side, was detained for a long time before Saepinum; the Samnites made repeated sallies, and would not allow him even to form the siege of the place; and their resistance was so protracted, that when at last they were overpowered, and the town was taken, the winter was so far advanced, that any further operations were impracticable, and Papirius having, as we may suppose, burnt Saepinum, evacuated Samnium. The operations of Sp.

Carvilius in Etruria”9 were short and successful; TroilTriumpho of both con-ium and some small mountain fortresses were taken, and the Fasuls.

liscans purchased a truce for a year by the payment of 100,000 ases, and a year’s pay to the soldiers of the Roman army. Both consuls enjoyed a splendid triumph;93 and a very large treasure of copper and of silver was brought home by Papirius, and paid by him, into the treasury, his victorious soldiers receiving nothing. Carvilius brought home also a large treasure; but he divided a part of it amongst his troops, and their pay had already been provided to them out of the contribution paid by the Faliscans; so -that the ungracious conduct of Papirius was doubly odious,-for his soldiers received nothing fiom the plunder, and the war tax, or tributum, was made to furnish them with their pay; and thus his victories brought to the poorer citizens no relief from the burdens of war. The captured arms94 were so numerous, that the allies and colonies of Rome received a large share to ornament their own cities; and Sp.

Carvilius95 made out of those which fell to his portion a colossal statue of Jupiter, of such magnitude, that when it was set up on the Capitoline Hill at Rome, it could be seen from the temple of the Latin Jupiter on the summit of the mountain of Alba; a distance in a straight line of not less than twelve English miles. ”’ Livy, X. 45. amounted to 1330 lbs.; the copper money which i Livy, X. 46. had been obtained by the ransom or sale of the 93 Carvilius triumphed on the 13th of Janu-prisoners, amounted to 2,033,000 ases of full ary, and Papirius on the 13th of February. weight, that is, to so many pounds’ weight ol Fasti Capitolini. The weight of silver taken co per. from the temples and houses of the several [Livy, X.

46. cities of Samnium which had been captured U Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXXIV. ~

43, Ed. Sillig.

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.rHAP. XXXIII] Q. FABIUS GURGES. 34, After such an issue of this campaign, we read with astonishment that Papirius led back his army to winter in the neighborhood of Vescia,~~ be-Pntis again c cause that country was still infested by: the incursions of the Sam-.ends the Sanenite ar. nites. And in the next year we find, after a long interval, C. ms. Pontius of Telesia once more at the head of the Samnite armies; we find him carrying on war in Campania, and again victorious. Austria lost five armies in the campaign of 1796, before she would consent to treat for peace; and when the French were besieging Cadiz, and had won almost all the fortresses of the kingdom, Spain still continued to resist, and the Guerillas often inflicted defeat upon their triumphant enemy. But the Samnite victory obtained over Fabius Gurges in Campania in the year immediately following the triumphs of Papirius and Carvilius, is more extraordinary than the fortitude either of Austria or Spain; and so far as the circumstances are known to us, it can only be paralleled by the triumphant career of the Vendeans in Bretagne, when, after repeated defeats in their own country, they effected their desperate expedition beyond the Loire. We may ask why the Roman government, little apt to hold its hands till the work was fully done, and having nothing to fear on the side of Etruria, contented itself with sending a single consular army into 292. Q. Fabieus Gurthe field in the year following the great victories of Papirius and ist et alone to invade Carvilius, instead of employing its whole force, and thus again S
overrunning the enemy’s country. The reason, probably, is to be found in the severe visitation of pestilence which at this time fell upon Rome;”

and this may further explain why the legions of Papirius wintered in Campania; for as such disorders are generally more or less local, an army might be in perfect health on the hills by Vescia, while, had it remained in or near Rome, it would have been losing men daily. However, the new consul, Q. Fabius Gurges,98 son of the great Fabius, took the command of the army in Campania, and proceeded towards the frontiers of Samnium. C.

Pontius Herennius, of whom nothing is known since the affair of the pass of Caudium, again commanded the Samnite army; whether it was that he was.now called upon in the extreme danger of his country, as the only man capable of saving it, or whether the southern Samnites, or Caudinians, had in fact taken no part in the war for many years, and only now, when the Pentrians were nearly exhausted, came forward to uphold their cause. The ravages which the pestilence was at this time making in Rome encouraged the enemy;99 and C. Pontius boldly invaded Campania. Q. Fa-Seventh cmpign. T bius, forgetting how formidable is the last struggle of the hunted seoman ace defeated by lion, thought that to meet the Samnites was to conquer them; and when he fell in with some of their lookout parties, and they retired before him, he believed the whole Samnite army to be retreating, and leaving his bag96 Livy, X. 46. paving of part of the Appian road, and of the 97 Livy, X. 47. Zonaras, VIII. 1. building of several temples. But we might 98 Livy, X. 47. In the last chapter of his cheerfully resign, not the second decade only, tenth book, Livy names the consuls who were but the first, third, and fourth, in short, every elected for the year 462, Q. Fabius Gurges, and line of Livy’s history which we at present posD. Junius Brutus. And here the first decade sess, if we could so purchase the recovery of of Livy’s history ends, and as the second dethe eighth and ninth decades, which contained cade is lost, we shall now be without his assist-the history of the Italian war, and of the civil ance for the remainder of this volume. We war of Marius and Sylla which followed it. For should be glad to possess the eleventh book, this period, of which we know, as it is, so little, which contained the account of the secession to Livy’s history would have been invaluable. Hoe the Janiculum and of the Hortensian laws: yet, would have been writing of times and events on the whole, a careful study of the ninth and sufficiently near to his own to have been pertenth books will dispose us to be more patient fectly understood by him; his sources of inforof the loss of those which followed them. Ho.w mation would have been more numerous and little does the tenth book tell us of the internal less doubtful, and then his fair and upright state of Rome, how uncertain are its accounts mind, and the beauty of his narrative, would of the several wars! Its most valuable infor-have given us a picture at once faithful, lively, mation consists in’ the miscellaneous notices and noble. with which Livy generally concludes his ac-D9 Zonaras, VIII. 2. count of every year; such as his notice of the

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348 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIIL gage behind him, he pushed on as to a certain victory. His men were already tired and disordered by the haste of their march, when they found the Samnite army in perfect order ready to receive them. They were presently defeated; 3000 men were killed on the place,‘00~~ many were wounded, and night alone saved the army from destruction. But they could not retreat to their baggage,10’ and passed a miserable night in the open country, without any means of relieving their wounded, whose sufferings filled the whole army with horror and dismay.

Day dawned, and the Romans expected to be attacked by the conquerors: but Pontius, it is said, heard that the old Fabius was close at hand, coming up with a second army to support his son, and therefore he allowed the beaten Romans to retreat unmolested. This is improbable,‘02 but the truth is lost beyond recovery, and it is vain to attempt to restore the details of this most important campaign. The defeat of Fabius excited great indignation at Rome; and the political adThe old Q. Fabiud versaries of his father, such as Appius Claudius and L. Papirius, serves under his son a the latter of whom was now prsetor, would not fail to exaggerate his misconduct. It was moved in the senate that he should be recalled from the army, in other words, that his imperium or consular power should be taken from him; a measure without example in Roman history, except in the case of L. Cinna. The simple course would have been to order the consul to name a dictator; and’ he would in that case have named his father, who, by universal consent, was the man best fitted to meet the need. But the more violent course was preferred by the party opposed to Fabius, and would have been carried, had not the old Fabius‘03 moved the senate by offering to go himself to the army, not in the majesty of the dictator’s office, as most befitted his age and glory, but merely as lieutenant to his son. This could not be refused, and the old man followed his son to the field, leading with him, we may be sure, sufficient reinforcements; for every Roman loved the old Q. Fabius, and felt confident that in marching under his command he was marching to victory. A second battle followed; where fought, or how brought about, we know not. C. Pontius is defeated The old Fabius was the Talbot of the fifth century of Rome; and nd taken poner.

his personal prowess, even in age, was no less celebrated than his skill as a general. When the consul was surrounded by the enemy in the heat of the battle,‘04 his aged father led the charge to his rescue; and the Romans, animated by such an example, could not be resisted, and won a complete victory. C. Pontius was taken prisoner, and 4000 Samnites shared his fate, while 20,000 were slain on the field. 1oo Eutropius, II. Suidas, in abrlos; Madftos. Rome before his father, and was anxious to We should like to know from whom Suidas fight the Samnites, before he joined him that borrowed this article; but who, except Nie-the glory of the action might be his own. Livy, buhr, has a sufficient power of divination to (Epitom. XI.) Eutropius, and the writer from discover it? whom Suidas copied his article, “Fabius MaxiI owe my knowledge of the passage in Suidas mus,” say that the old man was only made his to Freinsheim’s supplement of the eleventh son’s lieutenant after his defeat, and upon his book of Livy; and as he has consulted almost own request, in order to save him from being every passage in the ancient writers which re-deprived of his command. But if this be true, lates to these times, I have in other instances and it seems the more probable account, how been indebted to him in like manner. But it could Pontius expect the arrival of the old Fais right’to state, that I have always consulted bius on the instant after his son’s defeat. the passages to which he refers, and have my-Perhaps the consul fought with only a part of self verified them: and of this the reader may his army, and his lieutenant brought up the be assured, that no quotation has been made in other part to his rescue from the camp which these notes which I have not myself verified; he had left so rashly; and something of this if it has ever happened that I have not had the sort is probable, for if Q. Fabius had been qlebook within my reach, the circumstance has feated by the enemy in a fair battle without any been and will be especially noticed. fault of his own, the senate, according to its 101 Zonaras, VIII. 2. usual practice, would not have treated his de12

Zonaras, who copies Dion Cassius, repre-feat so severely. sents the old Fabius as having been appointed 103 Livv, Epit. XI. Dion Cass. Fragm.

Peirese, lieutenant to his son at the beginning of the XXXVI. campaign; and he’says that the consul left 104 Orosius, III. 22.

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CHAP. XXXIII.] DEFEAT OF C. PONTIUS. 349 What resources of hope or of despair could still be left to the Samnites after a disaster so irreparable? Yet they resisted for another year, A. U. C. 463. A. C.

during which the war was carried on by two consular armies‘05 in m9l,.uimagaimnpi.aged the heart of their country: many of their towns were taken; and by two consular armies. amongst the rest, Venusia, a place on the frontiers of Lucania and Apulia, and important both from its strength and its position. So completely, indeed, was the power of Samnium broken, that now, for the first time, the Romans resolved to establish a colony in its territory. Venusia was the spot chosen for this purpose; but it marks the sense still entertained of the Samnite spirit of resistance, that no fewer than 20,000 colonists were sent out to occupy and maintain the new settlement. After his victory, Q. Fabius, the consul, was continued in his command for some time as proconsul. It was not, therefore, till the summer ofTriumph of Q. robios the year 463 that he returned to Rome, and triumphed. While he Gurges. c. Pontius is was borne along in his chariot, according to custom, his old father ce.ssionaned put to rode on horseback behind him as one of his lieutenants,t0 delight-death ing himself with the honors of his son. But at the moment when the consul and his father having arrived at the end of the Sacred Way turned to the left to ascend the hill of the Capitol, C. Pontius, the Samnite general, who, with the other prisoners of rank, had thus far followed the procession, was led aside to the right hand to the prison”’ beneath the Capitoline Hill, and there was thrust down into the underground dungeon of the prison, and beheaded. One year had passed since his last battle; nearly thirty since he had spared the lives and liberty of two Roman armies, and, unprovoked by the treachery of his enemies, had afterwards set at liberty the generals who were given up into his power as a pretended expiation of their country’s perfidy. Such a murder, committed or sanctioned by such a man as Q. Fabius, is peculiarly a national crime, and proves but too clearly that in their dealings with foreigners the Romans had neither magnanimity, nor humanity, nor justice. In the year 464, P. Cornelius Rufinus and M’. Curius Dentatus were chosen consuls. Both entered Samnium with their armies,‘08 but it was A. U. C. 464. A. C. rather to entitle themselves to the honor of a triumph, than to 00. oNinth campaign.

overbear any real opposition. Every resource of the Sarmnites their aris and ubmi was exhausted, and they again submitted. They were again re-to e. ceived as dependent allies of Rome; what territory was taken from them besides that of Venusia, we are not told#or what other sacrifices were required of them. Such was the end of the third Samnite war. 105 By L.

Postumius, the consul, with his 107 So the wellknown passage in Cicero, Ver-. own army, and by Q. Fabius, the consul of the res, Act. II. v. 30, where he describes and even former year, as proconsul.-Dionysius, XVI.

approves of this atrocious practice.’ “Supplicia 16. qua debentu~r hostibus victis.7” M’ Plutarch in Fab. Maxim. c. 24. 108 Eutropius, II.

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CHAPTER XXXIV. INTERNAL HISTORY, FROM THE PASSING OF THE OGULNIAN LAW TO

TIIHE LANDING OF PYRRHUS IN ITALY-SECESSION TO THE JANICULUM-DICTATORSHIP

OF Q. HORTENSIUS-HORTENSIAN AND MENIAN LAWS.-FROM A. U. C. 454 TO 474.

“Clearly a difficult point for government, that of dealing with these masses;-if indeed it be not rather the sole point and problem of government, and all other points mere accidental crotchets, superficialities, and beatings of the wind.” CARLYLE, Hist. of French Revolution, Vol. I. p. 48. THERE is often in well-contrived works of fiction a point in the middle of the Changes far te woe story, at which all its circumstances seem tending towards a happy in the internal state of catastrophe; and it is only because the reader knows that there is Rome. much of the story yet to come, and that something therefore must occur to spoil the fair prospect, that he doubts the stability of the hero’s or heroine’s good fortune. So promising was the domestic state of Rome in the year 454, when the censorship of Fabius and Decius on the one hand, followed by the Ogulnian and Valerian laws on the other, seemed to announce that society had arrived at its perfect settlement; in which every member of it had found his proper place, and the artificial institutions of man seemed to correspond faithfully to the model, existing in truth, though not in fact, which our reason declares to be the will of God. But it should ever be borne in mind, that history looks generally at the political state of a nation; its social state, which is infinitely more imThese changes were soial rather than portant, and in which lie the seeds of all the greatest revolutions, is too commonly neglected or unknown. What is called the constitution of Rome, as far as regards the relations of patricians and plebeians to each other, was, in fact, perfected by the Ogulnian law, and remained for centuries without undergoing any material change. By that law the commons were placed in all respects on a level with the patricians; and the contests between these two orders were brought to an end forever. The comitia, too, had assumed that form, whatever it was, which they retained to the end of. the commonwealth; the powers of the magistrate as affecting the liberty of the citizen underwent but little subsequent alteration. But however stationary political institutions may remain, the social state of a nation is forever changing; peace affects this no less than war, and many times even more: nay, seasons of profound political quiet may be working far more extensive alteration than periods of faction, or even of civil war. And so it was with the years which followed the passing of the Ogulnian law. Politically they are almost a blank; they present no new law, nothing that deserves the name of a contest between orders in commonwealth, scarcely between indivdiuals; the public attention seems to have been fixed exclusively on the events of the war with Etruria and Samnium. Yet we know that they must have wrought great social changes; for so violent a measure as a secession could never have been so much as contemplated, had it not been preceded by long and general distress, producing social irritation first, and then political. In the seven years which followed immediately after the passing of the OgulOcasionearty y nian law, we find mention made of a season of great scarcity’ (A. seaseos of scarcity and U. C. 454), and of two years’

of pestilence (459 and 461). We pesitilelce. also read of prosecutions by the aediles in three several years for 1 iLivy, &. 11i. 11. 2 Livy, X. 81, 47.

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CItP. XXXIV.] ENCROACHMENTS OF THE RICH. 351 violations of the Licinian law3 (456, 458, 461); and also of prosecutions by the same magistrates for a breach of the law which forbade the taking of interest upon a debt4

(358). Now, although there may be some caprice in Livy’s notice or omission of such particulars, yet it is at least remarkable that he has recorded so many of them at this period; while in the twenty-three years previous to the Ogulnian law, a term which includes the whole of the second Samnite war, we have no mention of any one of them, with the exception of an uncertain report of a pestilence in the year 441.5 And the argument is the stronger, because we do find notices before the second Samnite war of prosecutions both for the breach of the Licinian law, and for taking illegal interest6 (398 and 411); so that we may fairly conclude that the second Samnite war itself was a period comparatively exempt, at any rate, from offences of this nature, as also from the visitations of pestilence and famine. The causes of these last evils belong, indeed, to a law of God’s providence which is to us unknown; but the occurrence of particular crimes at particular periods may in general be explained, if we are fully acquainted with the history of the time; and even in the fifth century of Rome, meagre as our knowledge of it is, we may in some measure account for the facts presented to us. The close of the second Samnite war in 450, the conquest of the iXquians in the same year, that of the Hernican state of Frusino in the year following, and of the Marsians in 452, must have added greatly Pmnt ofytl.le rch on tho to the domain land of the Romans. It was but a small proportion coan.n pasture lands. of this which was assigned to the 14,000 colonists of Alba, Carseoli, and Sora; the remainder would be either let to the old inhabitants on payment of a rent or vectigal to Rome, or would be occupied or beneficially enjoyed by individual citizens of Rome or of her allies. Now, as slaves were not yet numerous, there would be a difficulty in procuring laborers to cultivate tracts of lands lying mostly at a distance from Rome, and, in many instances, liable to the incursions of an enemy in time of war. It would be more convenient, therefore, to the occupiers to throw their land into pasture wherever it was practicable; and large tracts of domain would be fit for nothing but pasture, such as the higher valleys, and the sides and summits of the mountains; and these would not be occupied by any one particular person, but would be common land, on which any one would have a right to turn out a certain number of sheep and oxen, limited by the Licinian law. Now, the acts of violence which were practised, even under the emperors, by powerful men against the property of their weaker neighbors, and the allusion to forcible ejectment, as to a thing of no unusual occurrence, in the language of the prmtor’s interdict, may warrant our believing that the cattle of a small proprietor, when turned ou’ on the mountain pastures at a distance from Rome, would be liable to continual injuries, and that the common land would be exclusively enjoyed by wealthy men, who would little scruple to exceed the legal number of sheep and oxen which they were permitted to feed. These were the pecuarii whom Livy twice notices as impeached by the aediles and heavily fined; but the temptation to violate the law was perpetually recurring; and the chances of a prosecution must have been very uncertain; nor was it always impossible for a powerful man1 of fair military reputation to escape from his prosecutors, by getting the consul to name him as one of his lieutenants. Thus, on the one hand, the years which immediately followed the second Samnite war, furnished the rich with many opportunities of becoming Partlybythecontinuea richer. On the other hand, there were many causes at work which wat. made the poor yet poorer. A season of extreme scarcity, such as that of the year 455, must have obliged many of the small tradesmen and artificers of the 9 Livy, X. 13, 23, 47. Iivy, VII.

16, 28. 4 Livy, X. 23. * As in the case of L. Postumius, which will’ Livy, IX. 28. be noticed hereafter.-See Livy, X. 46.

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352 iISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIV city to incur debts. Two or three years of pestilence following closely upon one another, as in 459, 461, and 462, must have created great distress not only amongst the town population, but also amongst the agricultural commons: where the father was carried off by the disorder, his wife and family, who were solely dependent on his labor, would be at once reduced to poverty, or again would be forced to relieve their immediate necessity by borrowing. If the pestilence was local, and raged most in Rome and its immediate neighborhood, yet the more distant tribes suffered from evils of another sort. The tribes on the Etruscan frontier suffered perhaps something in 455 from an inroad of the Gauls, which no doubt aggravated the scarcity of that year; the Falerian tribe in Campania was repeatedly, as we have seen, exposed to the invasions of the Samnites. The extraordinary military exertions of the Romans in the third Samnite war must have rendered necessary a heavy amount of taxation. In the great campaign of 459, six legions were raised, besides two armies of reserve; and in the preceding year there had been a levy8 of the whole population of the city, which had been kept under arms for nearly three weeks, whilst the two consular armies were at the same time employed in the field. Nor were the services of the soldier required only for a few weeks in the summer or autumn; the legions were more than once’ kept abroad during the whole winter; which in itself must have been a great hardship to the small landed proprietor, whose land could ill spare his presence and his labor. Besides, even in the unfair accounts which remain to us of the events of the war, it is confessed that the Roman loss in battle was often very severe; and although theirswriters do not acknowledge it, the Romans must have lost also many prisoners, whose ransom, if they were not left in hopeless captivity, was an additional burden upon their families. And when, after all this, the most valuable part of the spoil won in a successful campaign was wholly put into the treasury, as was done by L. Papirius in 461,‘0 and the soldier received nothing but what he might have gained for himself in sacking one or more of the Samnite cities, the mass of the population would feel, that while the burdens of war were mostly borne by them, they had scarcely ahy share of its occasional advantage. Thus it is conceivable that, within three or four years after the end of the Obscurity of the histoy third Samnite war, a large portion of the Roman people should ofis peits of thends have been again involved in debt, and thus should have been irripopular cause. tated against their richer countrymen, and ready to catch fire on the smallest provocation. But the deepest obscurity involves this part of the Roman history: for Livy’s tenth book ends with the consulship of L. Papirius and Sp. Carvilius, and from that time to the war with Pyrrhus, we have no other record of events than the meagre epitomes of Zonaras, Orosius, and Eutropius, and a few fragments and incidental notices from other writers.

Even the Fasti Capitolini are wanting for this period; so that the very lists of consuls can only be made out from recent authorities.” Thus, we neither know the immediate causes, nor the leaders, nor the principal opponents, nor even the exact date of the great popular movement which was finally appeased by Q. Hortensius as dictator. We may conjecture that Appius Claudius, so far as his infirmities might Iivy, X. 21.

“Senatus-delectum omnis edition ofEusebius; from the anonymous Fasti, generis hominum haberi jussit, nec ingenui mo-first published by Cardinal Noris from a manudo aut juniores sacramento adacti, sed seniorum script in the imperial library at Vienna, and rectiam cohortes factae, libertinique centuriati.”’ printed by Grievius in his great collection of 9 App.

Claudius’ army was kept in Etruria Roman antiquities, Vol. XI. p. 355, and, lastly, during the winter of 458. Livy, X. 25. The from the Fasti, which go by the name of the army of M. Atilius wintered near Interamna, on Fasti of Idatius, published also by Grevius in the Liris, in 460, and that of L. Papirius was the same volume, p. 247. The two last Fasti kept out in the country of Vescia through the give only the cognomina of the consuls, and this winter of 461.-Livy, X. 39, 46. is too often the case with the Sicilian Fasti also;‘0 Livy, X. 46. they are also often corrupt, but such as they ” From Cassiodorus, from what are called are, they are almost our sole authority for the the Fasti Siculi, published by Scaliger in his consuls of this dark period.

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CHAP. XXXIV.] M’. C’URIUS DENTATUS. 353 permit him, was most zealous in his opposition to the demands of the people; and that L. Papirius Cursor took the same side. On the other hand, the claims of the popular party were supported, as is most probable, by one of the most eminent Romans of this period, M’. Curius Dentatus. This is a name familiar to every ear, and associated with our highest ideas of ancient Roman virtue. Yet there is not a single great man within M’. Curius Dentutua the historical period of Rome of whose. life less is known to us. opposes Appius ClruLike the Fulvii, and like Ti. Coruncanius, and C. Fabricius, he dis was not of Roman extraction; he came from one of the Latin towns which had received the full Roman franchise,“2 and he was a man of no inherited fortune. His merit as a soldier must have first brought him into notie; and the plain resoluteness of his character, not unlike that of Marius, and perhaps combined, as in his case, with a marked abhorrence of the wealthy aristocracy, caused him to be elected tribune of the commons. In his tribuneship”3 he resisted the most eloquent and overbearing of the patricians, Appius Claudius, who, when holding the comitia as interrex, refused to allow the election of a plebeian consul. Curius compelled the curiae to ratify the choice of the centuries beforehand, on whomsoever it might fall; and thus the candidate, when elected by the comitia, needed no further confirmation of his title.; he was at once consul. Such is the anecdote as related by Cicero; but we cannot with certainty fix the date of it.‘4 It must, however, have occurred before the year 464, when Curius was consul, and, as we have seen, put an end to the Samnite war. His consulship was rendered further memorable by the beginning and end of another war,“5 that with the Sabines. Some aid given by them to His conquest of the Satheir kinsmen, the Samnites, afforded the Romans a pretext for bines. attacking them, after the peace between the two nations had Ilasted since the year after the expulsion of the decemvirs; that is, during a period of a century and a half. The Sabines dwelt in the heart of Italy, in the valley of the Velinus, on the south of the central Apennines, and along the upper part of the course of the Aternus, which runs into the Adriatic. It was an extensive and populous country, for it came down to the left bank of the Tiber at Cures, only nineteen miles from Rome, and it stretched beyond the Apennines as far as the confines of the Vestinians and Picentians. It was rich in oil‘6 and wine, and the acorns of its forests fattened innumerable herds of swine. But the long peace which had increased its wealth, had also made its people unwarlike; they fell almost without a struggle; and their conquest, according to the old historian, Fabius Pictor,l7 first made the Romans acquainted with riches.

For his double victory over the Samnites and Sabines, Curius triumphed twice in the same year; and he declared of himself in the assembly of the people, on his return to Rome: ” I‘2 This appears from the speech of Cicero, pro 15 Livy, Epitom. XI. Auctor, de Viris Illustr. Sulla, 7, 23; but we have no information, I be-in AM’. Cur. Dentat. lieve, as to the particular town from which he “i Strabo, V. 3, 1, p. 228. came. 17

Strabo, V. 3, 1, p. 228. This contrasts 13 Cicero Brutus, 14, 55.

strangely with our notions of Sabine simplicity 14 We find from Livy, X.

11, that Appius and frugality: “hanc vitain veteres olim tetAaudius was interrex in the year 455, at the nubre Sabini,” &c. But, possibly, Strabo (lid breaking out of the third Samnite war. But, not give Fabius’ meaning correctly; aLd the as Niebuhr observes, Appius Claudius was in-old historian may have spoken not of the Saterrex three several times, as appears from the bines only, but of.them and the Samnites toinscription recording the principal dignities and gether, calling them both, perhaps, by the comactions of his life, Orelli, No. 529, so that we mon name of “Sabellians,” a term by which cannot tell in which of his three interregna the the Samnites are called in Livy, X. 19. Fabius circumstance noticed by Cicero took place. meant, probably, to’ speak of the period of CuWhen he was a candidate for his second con-rius’. consulship, when he conquered both the sulship in 457, he earnestly endeavored to get Samnites and Sabines, and made the speech Q. Fabius elected with himself, in order to ex-reported in the text. But that speech is espeelude a plebeian, Livy, X. 15; but this must not cially referred by the author of the work a de be confounded with Cicero’s story; it only Viris Ilustribus” to the Samnite conquests of shows the habitual temper of the man, and that Curius, and not to his successes against the. Ac he never lost sight of his object, of restoring bines. the old ascendency of the patricians. 23

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354 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIV have conquered such an extent of country that it must have been left a wilder. ness, had the men whom I have made our subjects been fewer: I have subjected such a multitude of men, that they must have starved if the territory conquered with them had been smaller.” The Sabines were obliged”8 to become subjects of Rome; that is, to receive the citizenship without the right of voting. For his double victory over the Samnites and Sabines, Curius, it is recorded,”’ He brings forward a triumphed twice in the course of the year of his consulship. But agrrian law, a far harder contest, and one in which no triumphs could be gained, awaited him at Rome. He saw on the one hand the extreme distress of the poorer citizens, whom war and pestilence together had overwhelmed with misery; on the other hand, he had conquered large tracts of lands, which, if granted out under an agrarian law, might go far towards the relief of their sufferings; and, further, the grasping and insolent spirit of some of the nobility disgusted him with the system of the occupation of the domain lands by individuals. It was only in the preceding year that L.

Postumius had employed a Roman army as his slaves,20 and -had made his soldiers clear a wide extent of public land won from the enemy, which he had been allowed to occupy for himself. The actual colleague of Curius in the consulship was P. Cornelius Rufinus,2’ a man already notorious for his rapacity and corruption, and who, doubtless, was turning his Samnite conquests to his own account, and appropriating to himself, at this very moment, the spoil won by the valor of his soldiers. So Curius thought that justice and the public good required that the conquests of the nation should be made available for the relief of the national distress; and he proposed an agrarian law which should allot to every citizen a portion of seven jugera.22 He arrayed at once against him, not the patricians only, but many families, no Who were his prinripal doubt, of the new nobility, who, having attained to wealth and opponents. honors, felt entirely as the older members of the aristocracy. The ancestors of Lucullus, and of the Metelli, and of the orator Hortensius, already, we may believe, had joined that party which their descendants so constantly upheld. They made common cause with Appius Claudius, the uncompromising enemy of their whole order, who despised the richest of the Licinii as heartily as the poorest citizen of one of the city tribes. L. Scipio was likely to entertain the same spirit of resistance to the agrarian law of Curius, which Scipio Masica, nearly two hundred years afterwards, displayed so fiercely against the measures of Ti. Gracchus; and L. Papirius Cursor, with all his father’s inflexible temper and unyielding courage, would be slow to comply with the demands of a plebeian multitude. The old Q. Fabius was respected and loved by all orders of his countrymen, and he had been opposed to the party of the high aristocracy; but perhaps his civil courage was not equal to his courage in the field; he had ls Paterculus, I. 14. ” Sabinis sine suffragio from destruction, which is the meaning of Fadata civitas.”

bricius’ words; and therefore Niebuhr thinks 1 Livy, Epitom. XI. that the story may refer to the time of Rufinus’ 25 A more detailed account of the mad con-dictatorship just after the defeat of Levinus by duct of Postumius in his consulship is given in Pyrrhus. a subsequent part of this chapter. His trial 22 “, Quaterna dena igri jugera viritim populo and fine took place, probably, in the very year divisit.” Auctor de Viris Illustribus.-M’. when Curinus and P. Cornelius Rufinus were CuriLs. But these fourteen jugera must be unconsuls. derstood of two separate agrarian laws, the one 21 Dion Cassius seems to have placed the passed or proposed in the first consulship of wellknown story of Fabricius voting for Rufi-Curins, the other in his second consulship, afnus at the consular comitia, because “he would ter the final defeat of Pyrrhus. It is not cxrather be robbed than sold as a slave,” in the pressly stated that this first allotment was vefirst consulship of Rufinus, that is, in the year hemently opposed; but the fragment from ApA4. See the mutilated fragment in Mai’s Scrip-pian, preserved by Suidas, and quoted below, tor. Veter. Collect.

Dion. XLI., which, when proves that Curius was in a state of violent opcompared with the entire story as given by position to the senate, and this is likely to have Cicero, de Oratore,, II. 66, clearly relates to the been on account of his agrarianrlaw. It maybe, same circumstance. Yet it is difficult to under-however, that lie also brought forward some ot stand how, in either of Rufinus’ consulships, those measures which were afterwards conceded the republic was in such perilous circumstances by the aristocracy, and which were contained that great military skill was needed to save her in the Hortensian laws.

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CHAP. XXXIV.] THE AGRARIAN LAW IS PASSED. 355 shown on a former occasion”3
that he might be moved by the reproaches of his order, and if he took no part against Curius, yet we cannot believe that he supported him. I have tried to recall the individual actors in these troubles, in order to give to them something more of reality than can belong to a mere account Tumults and violent of actions apart from the men who performed them. And the ntate of parties. The. contest, no doubt, was violent; as it is said that Curius was fol-agrarian law i passed. lowed by a band of eight hundred picked young men,24 the soldiers, we may suppose, who had so lately conquered under his auspices, and who were ready to decide the quarrel, if needful, by the sword. They saved Curius from the fate of Ti.

Gracchus, but it does not appear that they committed any acts of outrage themselves. But an impenetrable veil conceals from our view the particulars of all these disturbances; the law of Curius was finally passed, but we know not at what time, nor whether it was obtained by any other than peaceful and legal means. Between the consulship of Curius and Cornelius Rufinus, and that of P. Dolabella and Cn. Domitius, when the Gaulish war broke out, there Lawsproposedforother intervened a period of seven years, all the records of which have sion pof the peope to the so utterly perished that not a single event can be fixed with cer-Janiclum tainty id any one particular year. But with all the chronology of these years we have lost also the history; we cannot ascertain the real character of the events which followed, nor the relations of parties to each other, nor the conduct of particular persons.25 Some of the tribunes26 proposed a law for the abolition of all debts; whether before or after the passing of Curius’ agrarian law we know not. Nor can we tell whether Curius held on with the popular party till the end of the contest; or whether, as often happens with the leaders of the beginnings of civil dissensions, he thought that the popular cause was advancing too far, and either left it, or even joined the party of its opponents. We only know that the demands of the people2” rose with the continuance of the struggle; that political questions were added to those of debtor and creditor; that points which, if yielded in time, would have satisfied all the wishes of the popular party, were contested inch by inch, till, when gained, they were only regarded as a step to something further; and that at last the mass of the people left Rome, and established themselves on the Janiculum.2s Even then, if Zonaras may be trusted, the 23 When he only refused to violate the Li-fers the speech to Curius’ second consulship, cinian law, and to return two patrician consuls, and makes it accompany his refusal of an unoecausehehimselfwouldhave beenoneofthem. usually large portion of land which the senOtherwise he is represented as saying that he ate proposed to allot to himself-IV. 3, ~ 5. would have complied with the wishes of the Frontints also makes it accompany his refusal patricians, and have broken the law.-Livy, X. of an offer made to himself; but he places it in 15. his first consulship, after the Sabine war. Stra24

Aevrarw Kara I; XOV Jper; E7R7rro vwv Xoya’Jv tegemat. IV. 3, ~ 12. It might also have been,rXi0og decraKoaiO-v, hrri 7rdvra r7 Epya`rotelto. Kat spoken against the occupiers of large tracts of apep’s i rTj p7oute 3 apti rtg EK5cXstaf. domain land, who would not be contented with This is a quotation made from Appian by Sui-an allotment of seven jugera as property, but das, and is to be found in Suidas’ lexicon, in qiiXog, wished to occupy whole districts. So impossior in Schweighauser’s Appian, Samnitic. Ex-ble is it to see our way in the history of a petract. V.

riod where the accounts are not only so lmea25 For example, a speech of Curius has been gre, but also at variance with one another. recorded, in which he said, ” that the man must 20 tJ77pdp)v rtvw2v %pewv ar0tKcosTV

Eitz7eyt7ajiv&ev. be a’mischievous citizen who was not contented -Zonaras, VIII. 2. The words Eia[yoUvpvcol with seven jugera of land.”-Pliny, Hist.

Na-rTiv 6pdp;aXwv are legible in a mutilated fragment tur. XVIII. ~ 18.

Ed. Sillig. But the applica-of Dion Cassius relating to these times, which tion of this speech is most uncertain. Accord-1Mai has printed in such a state as to be in many ing to Plutarch, it was spoken to reprove some parts absolutely unintelligible.-Fragm. XLII. violent supporters of the popular party, who 27 This appears from the legible part of the thought thatt Curius’ agrarian law did not go fragment of Dion Cassius just noticed: rEXevrrv. far enough, and that the whole of the state’s res orv oWc’ OAEX6vrov r7tv 6vvaTrev roXXA nXeir domains ought to be,allotted to separate pro-rTOv Kar’ epX$e XsTrtuOhvrwv n~(io[v &tdval, a rvVrXprietors, without allowing any portion to be Xdyreaay. occupied in great masses as at present.-Apo-Livy, Epitom. XI. thegm. p. 194. E. But Valerius Maximus trans

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356 IHISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXI’V aristocracy would not yield, and it was only the alarm of a foreign enemy,29 per. haps some gathering of the forces of Etruria, which at this time was meditating on a real and decisive trial of strength with Rome, which induced the senate to put an end at any price to the existing dissensions. Accordingly, Q. Hortensius3~
was appointed dictator. He was a man of an old They are brought back plebeian family, for we find an Hortensius amongst the tribunes of by Q.

tortens whe the year 332;o3 but, individually, he is unknown to us, and we.l.w.. cannot tell wheat recommended him to the choice of the consuls on this occasion. He assembled the people, including under that name the whole nation, those who had stayed in Rome no less than those who had withdrawn to the Janiculum, in a place called “the Oak Grove,“32 probably without the walls of the city; and in that sacred grove were passed, and ratified probably by solemn oaths, the famous Hortensian laws. These contained, in the first place, an abolition,33 or, at least, a great reduction Their provisions. of debts; 2d, an agrarian law on an extensive scale, allotting seven Jugera of the domain land to every citizen; and 3d, one or more laws affecting the constitution; of which the most important was that which deprived the senate of its veto, and declared the people assembled34 in their tribes to be a supreme legislative power. Accidental mention has been preserved to us of another law, or possibly of a particular clause in the former law, by which the nundinie35 or weekly market days which had hitherto been days of business for the commons only, and sacred or holy days for the patricians, were now made days of business for the whole nation alike. Was the object of this merely to abolish a marked distinction between the two orders; or was it to enable the patricians to take part in the meeting of the tribes in the Forum, which were held on the nundinie, and had they hitherto belonged only to the tribes in that other, but to us undiscoverable form, in which they voted at the comitia of centuries on the field of Mars? Thus the sovereign legislative power of the assembly of the tribes in the Forum The logislltievopower of was fully established; and consequently, when C.

Flaminius the tribes established. brought forward another agrarian bill, about fifty years afterwards, for a division of the recently conquered country of the Senones, the senate, how29 Zonaras, VIII. 2.’ The statement in the text follows Niebuhr, 30 Livy, Epitom. XI. Pliny, Histor. Natur.

who, as is well known, supposed that the HorXVI. ~ 37. Ed. Sillig. tensian laws differed from the Publilian, inas31 Livy, IV. 42. much as the Publilian abolished the veto of the 32 (4 Q. Hortensius, dictator, cunm plebs seces-curieo, and the Hortensian did away the veto ol sisset in Janiculum, legema in esculeto tulit, ut the senate. The tribes in the Forum and the quod ea jussisset omnes Quirites teneret.”  senate were thus placed on a footing of equality; Pliny, Hist. Nat. XVI. ~ 37. Ed.

Sillig. neither had a veto on the enactments of the 33. This is not stated in direct terms in the other; and the tribunes had a veto upon both scanty notices of these events, which alone have alike. Both also were considered as equal to been preserved to us. But as the abolition of laws; for “
senatus consultum legis vicem obdebts was the main thing required by the peo-tinet” (Gaius, Institut. I. 4); and by the Horple, and as the fragment of Dion Cassius, above tensian law, plebiscitalegibusexeequatasunt.” referred to, speaks of the people having their (Gaius, Instit. I. 3.) It may be doubted first demands granted, and then going on to in-whether the limits of these two powers were sist upon others, and as we have seen an abo-ever very definitely settled; although one point lition of debts carried once before in the dis-is mentioned as lying exclusively in the power rurbances of 413, it does not seem too much to of the tribes, namlely, the right of admitting any conclude that a similar measure was carried on strangers to the franchise of Roman citizens.on the present occasion also. i With regard to Livy, XXXVIII. 36. the agrarian law, it may have been passed two 35 Macrobius, Saturnal. I. 16. The reason asor three years earlier; but from the statement signed by Macrobius for this enactment of the already quoted (Auctor de Viris Illustribus, in Hortensian law may also be admitted; that it M’. Curio), ” that Curius granted fourteen juge-was made to suit the convenience of the citizens ra to each citizen,” it is clear that an agrarian law from the country, who, coming up to Rome on proposed by him must havebeen carried at some the market days, wished to be able to settle time or other in the period between his consul-their legal business at the same time; but this ship and the dictatorship of Hortensius. It may could not be done, at leastin the prator’s court, thusbe numbered amongst the Hortensian laws, as there, according to the patrician usage, the as belonging to the measures which the people market days were holydays, and consequently at this period forced the aristocracy to concede the court did not sit. to them.

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CHAP. XXXIV.] THE MIIJENIAN LAW. 357 ever strongly averse to it, could not prevent it from becoming a law. The only check, therefore, which now remained on the absolute legislative power of the tribes, consisted in the veto of their own tribunes; and to secure the negative of a tribune became accordingly the ordinary resource of the aristocracy in the contests of the seventh century. Another important law is supposed to have been passed at the same period with the law of Hortensius, though our knowledge of all particu-The Mmnianlaw. lars respecting it is still more scanty. A law bearing the name of Mmnian,36 and proposed, therefore, either by the good dictator C. Mvenius himself, or, as is more probable, by one of his family, took away the veto which the curia had hitherto enjoyed in the election of curule magistrates. They were now to sanction beforehand the choice of the centuries, on whomsoever it might happen to fall. And thus their share in the elections being reduced to an empty form, they soon ceased to be assembled at all; and in later times of the commonwealth they were represented merely by thirty lictors, who were accustomed for form’s sake to confirm the suffrages of the centuries, and to confer the imperium on the magistrates whom the centuries had elected. But although supreme legislative power was now bestowed on the assembly of the tribes, and although the elections were freed from all direct These law did not legal control on the part of the aristocracy, yet we know full well make the constitution that the Roman constitution was very far from becoming hence-of dmocrac. forward a democracy. To us, indeed, who are accustomed to enact more than five hundred new laws every year, and who see the minutest concerns of common life regulated by act of parliament, the possession of an independent legislative power by a, popular assembly must seem equivalent to absolute sovereignty.‘But our own early history may teach us not to apply our present notions to other times and other countries. The legislative power, even in the days of the Tudors and Stuarts, was of small importance when compared with the executive and judicial. Now, the Hortensian law enabled the Roman people to carry any point on which they considered their welfare to depend; it removed all impediments, which after all do but irritate rather than hinder, out of the way of the strongly declared expression of the public will. But the public will was in the ordinary state of things quiescent, and allowed itself to be represented by the senate and the.magistrates. It resigned to these even the power of taxation, and except in some rare or comparatively trifling cases, the whole judical power also: those judges who were appointed by the printor to try questions of fact, in all the most important civil and criminal cases, were taken exclusively from the order of senators. All the ordinary administration was conducted by the senate; and its decrees on all particular points, like the,Nqlfc.iarco of the Athenian popular assembly, had undoubtedly the force of laws. According to Theophilus,31
this was a concession made by the people to the S6 What we know of the MAenian law comes ceased to be exclusively a patrician assembly. chiefly from a passage of Cicero (Brutus, c. This view would coincide with Niebuhr’s dis14, ~ 55), in which he says of M’. Curius, tinction between the Publilian and Hortensian that he “patres ante auctores fieri coegerit, laws. When the former were passed, the curia quod fuit permagnum, nondum lege MaeniA were still an efficient body, and the term “palata.” Livy must allude also to this law, when tres” therefore applied to them much more than he says, “hodie-priusquam populus suffra-to the senate. But in the fifty years that folglum ineat, in incertum comitiorum eventum lowed, the curiae had dwindled away so much patres auctores fiunt.” I. 1?. It must be ob-that the senate was become the principal assemserved that the power taken away by the Ma-bly of the patres; and therefore the Hortensian nian law from the “patres” was taken away law extended to the senate what had before from the senate no less than from the curiae; been enacted by the Publilian law with respect for the senate in its original form was only a se-to the curiae. lect assembly of the patres, whose great assern-S’ See Hugo, Geschichte des Rom. Rechts, p. bly was the comitia curiata. And gradually the 339. (9th Edit.) The passage in Theophilus is senate drew to itself both the name and the one which I have not verified, as I have not had power of the greater patrician assembly, so that an opportunity of consulting the book. But what is said of the patres or patricians is com-Hugo professes to quote it fully, and I have no meanly to be understood of the senate, and not of doubt of his correctness. the curiae, even although the senate had long

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358 IHISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIV Their effect were last-aristocracy, and embodied in the laws of Hortensius, that the de. ng and beneficial.

crees of the senate should be binding on the people, as the decrees or resolutions of the tribes were to be binding on the senate. At any rate, it is certain that the senate retained high and independent powers of its own, which were no less sovereign than those possessed by the assembly of the tribes; and in practice each of these two bodies kept up for a hundred and fifty years a healthy and vigorous life in itself, without interfering with the functions of the other. Mutual good sense and good feeling, and the continual moderating influence of the college of tribunes, whose peculiar position as having a veto on the proceedings both of the senate and people disposed them to regulate the action of each, prevented any serious collision, and gave to the Roman constitution that mixed character, partly aristocratic and partly popular, which Polybius recognized and so greatly admired. And thus the event seems to have given the highest sanction to the wisdom of the Hortensian laws: nor can we regard them as mischievous or revolutionary, when we find that from the time of their enactment the internal dissensions of the Romans were at an end for a hundred and fifty years, and that during this period the several parts of the constitution were all active; it was a calm not produced by the extinction of either of the contending forces, but by their perfect union. It may be conjectured that the sickness which had visited Rome during three Prospectofanew oali-or four successive years at the close of the Samnite war returned, tion aganint Rome. partially at least, in the concluding year of these domestic troubles, for Q. Hortensius died before the expiration of his dictatorship: an event hitherto unexampled in the Roman annals, and regarded as of evil omen; so that Augustine33 makes it a reproach to the impotence of the god JEsculapius, that although he had been so lately brought from Greece with the utmost solemnity, and had been received at Rome with due honors, that his presence might stay the pestilence, he yet suffered the very dictator of the Roman people to fall its victim. Nearly about the same time also, if we can judge from the place and apparent drift of one of the fragments of Dionysius,39 Rome suffered from an earthquake. And scarcely were the Hortensian laws passed, when the prospect of foreign war on a most extensive scale presented itself. Tarentum, it is said, was busily organizing a new coalition, in which the Lucanians, Samnites, and Bruttians in the south were to unite with the Etruscans, Umbrians, and Gauls in the north, and were again to try their combined strength against Rome. In the mean time, before we trace the events of this great contest, we Miscellnneouanoticenof may bring together some few scattered notices of domestic afomestic events.

fairs relating to the state of Rome in the middle of the fifth century. A new magistracy had its origin40 somewhere between the years 461 and 466; Institution of the tri-that of the triumviri capitales, or commissioners of police. These umviri capitales. officers were elected by the people, the comitia being held by the praetor. Their business was to enforce the payment of fines due to the state;4’,8 De Civitate Dei, III. 17.

Augustine’s no-41 Festus, in “Sacramentum.” The appointtice of the secession to the Janiculum is proba-ment of the ” triumviri capitales”

was proposed, bly taken from Livy, and may be given here, as according to Festus, by L. Papirius, whom he it contains one or two particulars not mentioned calls ” tribune of the commons.” One cannot in any other existing record. ” Post graves et but suspect with Niebuhr, that the person meant longas Romse seditiones ad ultimum plebs in was L. Papirius Cursor, who was prwotor in the Janiculum hostile diremnptione secesserat: cu-jus year 462 (Livy, X. 47); and then the appointmali tam dira calamitas erat, lt ejus rei cansa ment would coincide with the year when the quod in extremis periculis fieri solebat, dictator plague was at its height, and when the deputacrearetur Hortensius: qui plebe revocata in tion was sent to Epidaurus to invite 2Esculapius eodem magistratu expiravit, quod nulli dictato Rome. Varro, de. L. V. 81. Ed. Muller. tori ante conltigerat.”

Pomponius, de Origine Juris, Digest I. Tit. 39 Ch. 39. iragm. Dionys. apud Maium. II. ~ 39. Livy, XXV. 1. XXXII. 26. Valerius Scriptor. Veter.

Vatcian. Collect. Vol. II. p. Maximus, V. 4. ~ 7. 501. Etymologicon Magn.

in ZvelKoa. See Herman, 40 Livy Epitome, XI. Pol. Antiq. of Greece, ~ 137.

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CHAP. XXXIV.] STORY OF L. POSTUMIUS MEGELLUS. 359 to try by summary process all offenders against the public peace who might be taken in the fact; to have the care of the state prison, and to carry into effect the sentence of the law upon criminals. They resembled exactly in all these points the wellknown magistracy of the eleven at Athens. The creation of this office seems to mark an increase of ordinary crimes against person and property; and such an increase was the natural conse-The probable occansion quence of the distress which prevailed about this time, and partic-of itsistitution. ularly of the severe visitations of pestilence which occurred at this period. It is well known that such seasons are marked by the greatest outbreaks of all sorts of crime; and that never is a strong police more needed than when the prospect of impending death makes men reckless, and eager only to indulge their passions while they may. The census of the year 461 gave a return of 262,322 Roman citizens;42
that of the year 466, notwithstanding the havoc caused in the interval by Returns of the cesu., the double scourge of pestilence and war, exhibited an increase of atthis period. 10,00043 upon the preceding return. This was owing to the conquest of the Sabines, and their consequent admission to the Roman franchise in the year 464 for the census included, as is well known, not only those cit,`ens winc were enrolled in the tribes, but those also who enjoyed the private rights of citizenship without as yet partaking in the right of suffrage. Amongst other traits of resemblance between the Spartan and the Roman aristocracies, we may notice the extreme moderation shown by Story of L. Postumi each of them towards the faults of their distinguished citizens. It Mgellus. was not till after repeated proofs of his treasonable designs that the Spartan government would take any serious steps against Pausanias; and the forbearance of the Romans towards Appius Claudius was no less remarkable. Another memorable example of the same spirit occurred in the case of L. Postumius Megellus. He belonged to a family whose pride and hatred of the commons had been notorious in the political contests of the beginning of the fourth century;44 and as Niebuhr has truly observed, the peculiar character of a Roman family was preserved from generation to generation, and it was rarely found that any of its members departed from it. He had been consul in 449, and again in 460, and had acquired in each of his commands the reputation of a brave and skilful soldier. But his conduct as a citizen was far less meritorious; and it was probably for some overbearing or oppressive behavior in his second consulship that he was threatened with impeachment by one of the tribunes as soon as he went out of office. In the crisis of the Samnite war, however, military merit atoned for all other defects; the consul Sp. Carvilius named him one of his lieutenants,45 and the trial was delayed till the campaign should be over; but when it had ended triumphantly, the popularity and brilliant victories of Sp. Carvilius pleaded strongly in favor of his lieutenant, and the trial never was brought forward. Two years afterwards, in 463, Postumius was again chosen consul, when the great victory obtained in the preceding year by Q. Fabius made it probable that the war might soon be brought to a triumphant issue. His proud and bad nature was more irritated by having been threatened at first with impeachment, than softened by the favor shown to him afterwards; so that his conduct in his third consulship was that colleague in his third of a mischievous madman. His first act4” was to insist on having Samnium assigned to him as his province, without referring the decision as usual to lot; and though his colleague, C.

Junius Bubulcus, remonstrated against this arrogance, yet the nobility and powerful interest of Postumius prevailed, and C. Junius forbore to dispute what he perceived he could not resist with success. Then followed, as usual, the levying of the legions for the service of the year; 42 Livy, X.

47. 45 Livy, X. 46. 40 Livy, Epitom. XI. 46 Dionysius, XVI. 15.,” See Chap. XIII. of his history, note 48.

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360 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. xxxrv He employs hi but the Samnites were so humbled that nothing more was to be dierm in clearing Bis feared from them, and Q. Fabius Gurges still commanded an army own land, in Samnium as proconsul. It was not necessary, therefore, for the consul to begin active operations immediately; but he, notwithstanding, took the field with his army, and advanced towards the enemy’s frontier. In the course of the late campaigns, he had become the occupier of a large tract of the territory conquered from the Samnites; but much of it was uncleared land, and as slaves at Rome were yet but few, laborers were not easily to be procured in these remote possessions in sufficient numbers. Postumius did not scruple to employ his soldiers as though they had been his slaves: he set two thousand47 men to work in felling his woods, and in this manner he engaged for a considerable time a large portion of a Roman army. When, at last, he was ready to commence active operations against the eneHis behavior towards my, his pride displayed itself in a new form. Q. Fabius Gurges Q. Fabius Gurges. was still, as we have seen, commanding an army in Samnium as proconsul; and he was now laying siege to Cominium, which, though taken and burnt by the Romans two years before, appears to have been again occupied by the Samanites as a fortress; for the massy walls of their towns could not easily be destroyed, and these exist in many instances to this day, encircling nothing but desolation within them. The consul wrote to Fabius,48 ordering him to withdraw from Samnium: Fabius pleaded the authority of the senate, by which he had been continued in his command; and the senate itself sent a deputation to Postumius, requiring him not to oppose their decree. But he replied to the deputies, that so long as he was consul it was for him to command the senate, not for the senate to dictate to him; and he marched directly towards Cominium, to compel Fabius to obedience by actual force. Fabius did not attempt to resist him; and the consul, having taken the command of both armies, immediately sent Fabius home. In actual war Postumius again proved himself an able soldier: he took Cominium,49 and several other places, and he conquered the important Ho triumphs in spite of n.. the prohibition of the post of Venusia, and, well appreciating the advantages of its situation, he recommended that it should be made a Roman colony. The senate followed his advice, but would not appoint him one of the commissioners~0 for assigning the lands to the colonists, and superintending the foundation of the new settlement. He in his turn distributed all the plunder of the campaign amongst his soldiers, that he might not enrich the treasury; and he marched home and gave his soldiers leave of absence from their standards, without waiting for the arrival of his successor. Finally, when the senate refused to allow him to triumph,6’ he, having secured the protection of three of the tribunes, celebrated his triumph in defiance of the prohibition of the other seven, and in contempt of the senate’s refusal. For such a course of outrageous conduct, he was prosecuted as soon as he e is tried and hlleaviy went out of office, by two of the tribunes, and was condemned by fined. all the three-and-thirty tribes unanimously. But his accusers did not prosecute him capitally, they only sued him for a fine; and although the fine was the heaviest to which any Roman had been hitherto sentenced, for it amounted to 500,000 ases,52 yet it was but small in comparison of the penalties imposed with far less provocation by the governments of -Greece. It amounted, in Greek money, to no more than fifty thousand drachmm, whereas Agis, the king of Sparta, had been condemned, even by the Spartans, to pay a fine of one hundred thousands3 for a mere want of judgment in his military operations. Postu47

Dionysius, XVI. 15. Livy, Epitome. of Postumius’ second consulship, X. 87.

But 48 Dionysius, XVI. 16. it agrees on every account better with his third 49 Dionysius, XVI. 17. consulship, of which it is related by Dionysius, 50 Dionysius, XVI. 17. 52 Dionysils, XVI. 18. cl Dionys. XVI.

18. Livy relates this story 53 Thucydides, V. 63.

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CHAP. XXXIV.] AESCULAPIUS INVITED TO ROME. 361 Milus, in addition to his own large possessions, would probably have many wealthy clients, who were bound to pay their patron’s fine. His family, at any rate, was not ruined or disgraced by his sentence, for his son was elected consul a few years afterwards, in the third year of the first Punic war. Of the miscellaneous particulars recorded of this period one of the most remarkable is the embassy sent to Greece in the year 462, to invite Embassy sen, to Epi the-god.Esculapius to Rome, in order that he might put a stop to aBru9te invite the god the plague which had then Veen raging for three years. The head suliuB to Rome. of the embassy was Q. Ogulnius,4 the proposer of the law by which the commons had been admitted to the sacred offices of pontifex and augur, and who more recently, as curule aedile, had caused the famous group of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus to be placed by the sacred figtree in the comitium. The deputation arrived at Epidaurus, the peculiar seat of.AEsculapius, and entreated permission to invite the god to Rome, and that they might be instructed how to offer him acceptable worship. This was no unusual request; for many cities had, in like manner, received his worship from Epidaurus; Sicyon,55 Athens, Pergamus, and Cyrene. Accordingly, one of the snakes which were sacred to the god crawled from his temple to the city of Epidaurus, and from thence made its way to the sea-shore, and climbed up into the trireme of the Roman ambassadors, which was as usual drawn up on the beach. It was under the form of a snake that.Esculapius was said to have gone to Sicyon,56
when his worship was introduced there; and the Romans, instructed by the Epidaurians, considered that he was now going to visit Rome in the same form, and they immediately sailed away with the sacred snake to Italy. But when they stopped at Antium, on their way home, the snake, so said the story,57 left the ship, and crawled out into the precinct of the temple of./Esculapius, for the god it seems was worshipped at Antium also, and coiled himself round a tall palmtree, where he remained for three days.

The Romans anxiously waited for his return to the ship; and at last he went back, and did not move again till the ship entered the Tiber. Then when she came to Rome, he again crawled forth, but instead of landing with the ambassadors, he swam to the island in the middle of the Tiber, and there went on shore and remained quiet. A temple was built, therefore, to the god in the spot which he had himself chosen; and the island to this day preserves the memory of the story, for the travertino, which was brought there to form the foundation of the temple of the god, has been cut into a rude resemblance of a trireme, because it was on shipboard that t3sculapius had first visited the Romans, and received their worship.

There is no reason to doubt that the Romans did bring back with them a snake from Epidaurus, for there was a breed of snakes there, said The story not impos. to be peculiar to that country,58 and perfectly harmless, which were.~bte. accounted sacred to _Esculapius. And so complete is the ascendency which man’s art has obtained over the brute creation, that it is very possible that they may have been trained to perform various feats at the bidding of their keepers; and if one of these, as is likely, went with the sacred snake to Rome, wonders may have really been exhibited to the Roman people, which they would have certainly supposed to be supernatural. This, if we except the doubtful story of the embassy to Athens immediately before the decemvirate, and one or two deputations to consult the Mutual nowledge of oracle of Delphi, is the earliest instance recorded by the Roman thisthoobythe P.G.reek annalists of any direct communication between their country and and Ror… Greece since the beginning of the commonwealth. Greek writers, as we have seen, mentioned an embassy sent to Alexander at Babylon, and a remonstrance ” Valerius Maximus, I. 8. Auctor ” de Viris 57 As given by Valerius Maximus, I. 8, by the Illustribus,” in ” Esculap. Rom. advect.” author ” de Viris Illustribus,” and above all by 66 Pausanias, II. 10, 26. Ovid, Metamorphos. XV. 622, &c. ” Pausanias, II. 10. 8 Pausanias, II. 28.

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362 HISTORY OF ROME.’ [CHAP. XXXV: made by Demetrius Poliorcetes against the piracies of the Antiatians, at a time when they were subject to the Romans. We may be sure, at any rate, that in the middle of the fifth century the two people were no strangers to each other; and whether it be true or not that Demetrius acknowledged the Romans to be the kinsmen of the Greeks, yet when the Epidaurians gave them their god A]Esculapius, they would feel that they were not giving him to a people utterly barbarian, but to one which had for centuries paid divine honors to Greek heroes, which worshipped Hercules, and the twin gods Castor and Pollux; and which, within the memory of the existing generation, had erected statues in the comitium to the wisest and bravest of the men of Greece,59

Pythagoras and Alcibiades. Nor can we doubt that Q. Ogulnius was sufficiently acquainted with the Greek language to address the Epidaurians, as L. Postumius a few years later addressed the Tarentines, without the help of an interpreter. We are now arrived, however, at the period when the histories of Greece and Rome unavoidably intermix with one another; when the greatest It becomes here necesftry to describe the prince and general of the Greek nation crossed over into Italy, state of the east and the internal condition of and became the head of the last coalition of the Italian states Rome. against Rome. We must here then pause, and before we enter upon the new Samnite and Tarentine war, in which Pyrrhus so soon interfered, and before we notice those renewed hostilities with the Gauls, which owed their origin, in part at least, to the intrigues of the Tarentines, we must once more cross the sea, after an interval of more than a hundred years, and observe what was’ now the state of Greece and of the eastern world; what new powers had succeeded to Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and the great king who had inherited the fragments of the empire of Alexander, and what was the condition of the various states of the Grecian name in Greece itself and in Sicily. We must endeavor, too, to obtain some more livelv notion of Rome and the Roman people at this same period, than could be gained from the imperfect record of political and military events; to conceive what that city was which Cineas likened to a temple; what was the real character of that people whose senate he described as ar assembly of kings. CHAPTER XXXV. STATE OF

THE EAST-KINGDOMS OF ALEXANDER’S SUCCESSORS-SICILY  GREECE-KINGDOM OF

EPIRUS, AND EARLY FORTUNES OF PYRRHUS. “When he was strong the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones towards the four winds of heaven.”-DANIEL VIII. 8. THE hundred and twenty-fourth Olympiad witnessed, says Polybius,’ the first revival of the Achman league, and the deaths of Ptolemy, the son The 124th Olympiad is a remarkable period in of Lagus, of Lysimachus, of Seleucus Nicator, and of Ptolemy Grecian history. Ceraunus.

The same period was also marked by the Italian expedition of Pyrrhus, and immediately afterwards followed the great inroad of s Pliny, Histor.

Natural. XXXIV. ~ 26. Ed. bly consulted after their disaster at the pass of Sillig. These statues were set up “bello Sam-Caudium, as they did afterwards after the deniti,” probably in the second war; and were feat at Cannse. Livy, XXII. 57. erected in consequence of the command of the 1

Polybius, II. 41. Some explanation may Delpluen cracle, which the Romans had proba-perhaps be required of the length of this chap

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CHAP. XXXV.] ALEXANDER’S SUCCESSORS.-SELEUCUS. 362 the Gauls into Greece and Asia, their celebrated attack upon Delphi, and their establishment in the heart of Asia Minor, in the country which afterwards was called from them Galatia. This coincidence of remarkable events is enough of itself to attract attention; and the names which I have just mentioned contain, in a manner, the germ of the whole history of the eastern world; all its interests and all its most striking points may be fully comprehended, when these names have been rendered significant, and we have formed a distinct notion of the persons and people which they designate. Forty years” had elapsed since the death of Alexander, when Seleucus Nicator, the last survivor of his generals, was assassinated at Lysima-Selencusis nssnssinated chia3 by Ptolemy Ceraunus. The old man, for Seleucus was more Pwo seieem the throne than seventy-five years old, had just before destroyed the king-of Macedonia. dom of Lysimachus, the last survivor except himself of the immediate successors and former generals of Alexander; and after fifty years’ absence, was returning as the sovereign of Asia to that country which he had left as an unknown officer in Alexander’s army. But an oracle, it is said, had bidden him beware of Europe;4 for that the appointed seat of his fortunes was Asia. And scarcely had he landed on the Thracian Chersonesus, when he was assassinated by one of his own followers, by Ptolemy Ceraunus,5 the half brother of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the reigning king of Egypt, who had first been a refugee at the court of Lysimachus, and, after his death, had been taken into the service of Seleucus, and had been treated by him with the greatest kindness and confidence. Seleucus’ vast kingdom, which reached fiom the Hellespont to the Indus, was inherited by his son Antiochus;9 but his murderer seized upon the throne of Macedonia, which having been in rapid succession filled by various competitors, and having lastly been occupied by Lysimachus, now, in consequence of his overthrow and death, and of the murder of his conqueror, seemed to lie open to the first pretender. Seleucus outlived by about two years’ his old ally and his protector in his utmost need, Ptolemy the son of Lagus, king of Egypt.

With more unbroken good fortune than any other of his contemporaries, Ptolges reigne in Egypt, emy had remained master of Egypt, first as satrap and afterwards Cyrene, and cyprus. as king, from the first division of Alexander’s empire down to the period of his own death. The distinct and almost unassailable position of Egypt saved it from the sudden conquests which often changed the fortune of other countries; the deserts of the Nile formed a barrier not easily to be overcome. To Egypt, Ptolemy had added thi old commonwealth of Cyrene,5 where the domestic factions, according to the frequent fate of the Greek cities, had at last sacrificed their common independence to a foreign enemy. He was also master of the rich island of Cyprus,’ and, after the defeat of Antigonus at Ipsus, he had extended his ter, devoted as it is to matters not directly con-and immortal names, on which we can scarcely nected with the Roman history of the fifth cen-dwell too long or too often. tury of Rome. But it is impossible to forget 3 Alexander died Olymp. 114-1-2, B. c. 323. that all the countries here spoken of will suc-Seleucus was murdered Olymp. 124-4, B. c. 280. cessively become parts of the Roman empire; See Fynes Clinton, Fasti Hellenici. the wars in which they were engaged with 2 Appian, Syriac. 62. Porphyry, apud EuseRome will hereafter claim our attention, and bium, Chronic. p. 63. Ed. Scaliger. therefore their condition immediately before’ Appian, Syriac. 63. those wars cannot be considered foreign to my 5 Ptolemy Ceraunus was the son of Ptolemy subject. Besides, the distinctness of the east-Soter, by Eurydice, the daughter of Antipater; ern empire from the western was productive of Ptolemy Philadelphus was his son by Berenice. the most important consequences; and this dis-Porphyry, apud Euseb. p. 63. Pausanias, I. 6. tinctness arose from the spread of the Greek 6 Memnon apud Photium, p. 226, Ed.

Beklanguage and manners over Asia Minor, Syria, ker. and Egypt, by Alexander’s conquests, and the 7 Ptolemy Soter, the son of Lagus, died just establishment of his successive kingdoms. As forty years after the death of Alexander, of for the notices of Greece itself, of Sparta, of whose actions he and Aristobulus were the Thebes, and of Athens, they cannot plead quite earliest and most authentic historians. His the same justification; but I trust that they death took place Olymp. 124-2, B. c.

283. may be forgiven, as an almost involuntary trib-a Diodorus, XVIII.

21. ate of respect and affection to old associations 9 Ptolemy reduced the several petty kings ot

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364 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. XXXV dominion in Syria, as far as the valley of the Orontes, the country known by the name of Ccele-Syria,‘o or the vale of Syria. His dominion, next to that of Seleucus, was by far the most extensive, as it was, without any exception, the most compact and secure of all the kingdoms formed out of Alexander’s empire. When Alexander died at Babylon, only seven years had elapsed since his conThe Greek dominion quest of Persia, and not more than four since his victory over was not shaken by Porus and his campaign in India. That his conquests could not Alexader’s death. have been completely consolidated within so short a period is evident; but it affords a wonderful proof of the ascendency of the Greek race over the Asiatics, that the sudden death of the great conqueror did not destroy his unfinished work; that not a single native chief ventured to assert the independence of his country, but every province continued in the unity of the Macedonian empire, and obeyed without dispute a Macedonian satrap.l” Nor did the subsequent wars between the Macedonian generals destroy the spell of their superiority. Eumenes and Antigonus carried on their contest in Susiana and Media, and disposed at their will of all the resources of those countries; and, after the murder of the last of Alexander’s children, fourteen years after his own death, when obedience was no longer claimed even nominally for the blood and name of the great conqueror, still the Greek dominion was unshaken; and Seleucus, by birth a simple Macedonian subject, sat undisturbed in Babylon, on the throne of Nebuchadnezzar, and held the country of Cyrus as one amongst his numerous provinces. This continuance of the Macedonian power was owing, no doubt, in no small measure, to Alexander’s comprehensive wisdom. He made a to his conciliatorypolicy Macedonian soldier of his guard, Peucestes,‘2 satrap of Persia; th but the simple soldier, unfettered by any literary or philosophical pride, did not scruple to adopt the Persian dress, and to learn the Persian language; confirming his own and his nation’s dominion by those very compliances which many of his more cultivated’but less wise countrymen regarded as an unworthy condescension to the barbarians.‘3 The youth of the Asiatic provinces‘4 were enlisted in the Macedonian army, were taught the discipline of the phalanx, and the use of the Greek shield and pike; the bravest of them were admitted into the more distinguished bodies of cavalry and infantry known by the name of the king’s companions; and the highest of the Persian nobility were made, together with the noblest of the Macedonians, officers of the king’s body-guard. Thus, where the insulting display of superiority was avoided, its reality was felt and acknowledged without murmuring; and when the king’s officers became independent satraps, the Asiatics saw their Macedonian comrades preferred, almost without a single exception, to these dignities, and they themselves remained the subjects of men whom they had so lately seen nominally their equals. Thus there was spread over Asia, from the shores of the.Egean to the Indus, Spread of the Greek and over the whole of Egypt also, an outer covering at the least Folangugendmanne of Greek of Greek civilization, however thinly it might have been laid on oeundation o Greek c tinl mia b cities in Asia. here and there, on the solid and heterogeneous mass below.

The native languages were not extirpated, they were not even driven, as afterwards in the western provinces of the Roman empire, to a few mountainous or remote districts; they remained probably in general use for all the common purposes of life: but Greek was everywhere the medium of communication between the the island, and made himself master of it, pointed to be satraps over each, in Justin, XIII. Olymp. 117-1, B. c. 312.

[Diodorus, XIX. 4, and Diodorus, XVIII. 3, 39. There is scarcel‘9.] He afterwards lost it, in consequence of ly a single Asiatic name on the list; only Oxhis great naval defeat by Demetrius near Sala-yartes, the father of Roxana, Alexander’s queen, mis, Olymp. 118-2 [Diodorus, XX. 53], and had the country of Paropamisad’e; and Porls finally recovered it after the victory of Ipsus. and Taxilas retained for a time their govern[Plutarch, Demetr. 35.] ments on the Hydaspes and the Indtls. 15

Diodorus, Fragm. Vatican. XXI. 1. 12 Arrian, de Expedit. Alexand. VI. S.

1a See the account of the division of the 3 Arrian, VII. 6. provinces, and of the Macedonian generals ap-14 Arrian, VII. 6, 11.

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CHAP. XXXV.] RESTORATION OF NATIVE PRINCES IN ASIA. 365 natives of different countries; it was the language of the court, of the government, and of literature. Many new cities were also founded, where the predominant element of the population was Greek from the beginning: such as Antioch, Laodicea, Apamea, Seleucia in Syria,” Seleucia on the Tigris, and many other places built also by the same founder, Seleucus, in the several provinces of his empire. From these an influence was communicated to other cities in their neighborhood, which were older than the Greek conquest; and the Greek character was revived in places which, like Tarsus, claimed to be originally Grecian settlements,‘6 but in the lapse of years had become barbarized. In this manner Asia Minor and Syria were pervaded in every part by the language and institutions of Graive, and retained the impression Upper Asia was soon through many centuries down to the period of the Saracen and lost ieto the Greek dominion, and was again Turkish conquerors. Upper Asia, from the Euphrates to the In-gO…..erned by native dus, was effected much more slightly; and the connection of these r ce. countries with Greece was finally broken about thirty years after the period at which we are now arrived, by the restoration of a native monarchy, in the line of the Arsacide.e7 Seleucia on the Tigris then became the capital of a barbarian sovereign; and although it, with some of the other Greek cities founded by Seleucus15 in Media and Parthia, had not lost their national character even in the time of Strabo, yet it was enough if they could retain it themselves; there was no possibility of communicating it in any degree to the nations around them. We may be excused, however, from extending our view beyond the Euphrates, and may return to a more minute examination of those countries Kingdoms half Greek of western Asia and Africa, which were all destined to become half barbarianl exiting hi Asia Miner. successively provinces of Rome. And here, although we at first sight see nothing but the two great monarchies of Syria and Egypt, yet a nearer view shows us some smaller kingdoms which had been overlooked by the strength of the first Macedonian kings, and established themselves boldly against the weakness of their successors: kingdoms ruled by a race of princes, partly or chiefly of barbarian descent, but where the Greek character notwithstanding gave the predominant color to their people, and even to themselves. Such were the kingdoms of Bithynia and Pontus on the northern side of Asia Minor.

Another distinct state, if so it may be called, was formed in the 125th Olympiad by the settlement of the Gauls to the south of Bithynia, and to the northwest of Cappadocia: and the kingdom of Pergamus grew up not long afterwards on the coasts of the zEgean and the Propontis; but as yet it had not come into existence. In the 124th Olympiad Zipretes‘9 or Zibmetes was still, at the age of more than A5 Appian, Syriac. 57. ici, Vol. III.

under the year B. c. 250, A. U. c. ~e Kricra r7v pera TptLrroXeov 7rXav0eivrzv’Ap-404. y6ssv Kara irqeratv’IoVS. Strabo, XIV. p. 673. One 18 iELoLgeTrah (4 Mtsai),r6XSeav’EX)fsXvthr Krait should not pay much regard to such a story, TOV 5V041ysnnv Vr0’AX9esvepou, u:XasK EVEKGs’ nsV
were there not other grounds for believing that svyscivsov anrn papdv.

Polybius, X. 27. the Greeks at a very early period had settled on‘1 He reigned from 336 B. c. to 278, and was the coasts of Cilicia. See the remarkable state-born in 354. His father Bas was born in 397 ment preserved in the Armenian translation of B. c. Memnon apud Photium, p.

227, 228. Ed. Eusebius, and copied by Eusebius from Alex-Bekker. andler Polyhistor or Abydenus, that Senna-This reference may perhaps require explanacherib was called down from Nineveh by the tion for some readers.

Photius, who was patnews of a Greek descent on Cilicia, which he riarch of Constantinople in the latter half of the repelled after a very hard-fought battle. Com-ninth century, has left; a sort of catalogue pare Niebuhr’s Kleine Schriften, p. 203. Might raisonn6, or rather an abstract of the various not the sons of Javan, to whom the Phcenicians books which he was in’the habit of reading. sold Israelitislh captives at a much earlier period In this work, which he called his library, there (Joel iii. 6), be the Greek settlers on the Cilician are preserved abridgments of many books which coast as well as the more remote inhabitants of would otherwise have been altogether lost to Greece itself? us; and amongst’ the rest there is an abstract‘7 In Olymp. 132-3, B. c. 250. This was in the of a history of Heraclea on the Exuine sea, writreign of Antiochus Theos.’. See Justin.

XLI. 4, ten by one Memnon, who flourished at a period who makes a mistake, however, as to the reign, not certainly known, but which cannot bu and Arrian, Parthic. atpud Photium. p. 17. Ed. placed earlier than the times of the early Ro3ekker. See also Fynes Clinton, Fasti Hellen-man emperors.

In speaking of Heraclea, Mem

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366 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP,. XXXV. ingdom of ityni. seventy, reigning over the Bithynians. His father had seen the torrent of Alexander’s invasion pass by him without touching his dominions; and whilst the conqueror was engaged in Upper Asia, the Bithynian prince had repelled with success the attack of one of his generals, who was left behind to complete the conquest of the countries which Alexander had merely overrun. After Alexander’s death, European Thrace and the southern coast of the Euxine were assigned in the general partition of the empire to Lysimachus; but the Bithynian princes held their ground against him, and still continued to reign over a territory more or less extensive, till Lysimachus and his dominions were conquered by Seleucus in the battle on the plain of Corus in Phrygia. Zipretes then was as jealous of Seleucus as he had been before of Lysimachus; and after Seleucus’ death, he cherished the same feelings towards his son Antiochus, and continued to resist him with success till the end of his life. In the geography of Herodotus2~ the name of Cappadocia is applied to the nppndocia and itf di-whole breadth of Asia Mlinor eastward of the Halys, from the visions.. Northiern Cap-chain of Taurus to the shores of the Euxine. The government of all this country had been bestowed by Darius,2’ the son of Hystaspes, on one of the Persian chiefs who had taken part with him in the conspiracy against Smerdis, and it had remained from that time forward with his posterity. But in the time of Xenophon,2” the tribes along the Euxine were practically independent of any Persian satrap, and the name of Cappadocia was then, as afterwards, restricted to the southern and more inland part of the country. The same state of things prevailed in the early part of the reign of Philip of Macedon; Scylax, in his Periplus, notices a number of barbarian tribes between Colchis and Paphlagonia: yet immediately to the eastward of Paphlagonia he placed what he calls Assyria; and Syria, as we know, was the name anciently given by the Greeks to that country which they afterwards learnt to call by its Persian name Cappadocia.23 But while the southern part of their old satrapy passed into other hands, the descendants of Darius’ fellow-conspirator strengthened their hold on the northern part of their original dominion; and in the reign of Alexander, Mithridates, son of Ariobarzanes, is called‘4 by Diodorus, “king,” and his kingdom extended along the coast of the Euxine from the confines of Bithynia to those of Colchis. Though a king, however, he was regarded as a vassal by Alexander’s general, Antigonus, when he, after the death of Eumenes, became master of all Asia firom the Euphrates to the _AEgean; and Antigonus suspecting his fidelity when he was on the eve of his decisive struggle against Cassander, Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Lysimachus, caused him to be put to death.25 His son, Mithridates, notwithstanding, succeeded to his father’s dominions, retained them during the lifetime of Seleucus, and for a period of nearly eighteen years afterwards, and having lived to witness the irruption6 of the Gauls and their settlements on the very borders of his kingdom, died, after a reign of thirty-six years, immediately before the beginning of the first Punic war, and was succeeded in his turn by his son Ariobarzanes. non was often led to notice the neighboring pian, Mithridat. 9, 112, makes Mithridates to kings of Bithynia, and thus we are enabled to have been descended from Darius himself. We give the succession and the dates of the reigns find no Mithridates or Ariobarzanes in either of of those obscure princes. So capricious is the the lists of the conspirators against Smerdis chanoe which has preserved some portions of given by Herodotus and Ctesias.

ancient history from oblivion, while it has ut-22 Anabas. VII. 8. In his time Mithridates terly destroyed all record of others. But Pho-was satrap of Cappadocia and Lycaonia. tins’ library, compiled in the ninth century, 2s Herodot. I. 72. And in the Periplus of shows what treasures of Greek literature were the Euxine ascribed to Marcianus of Heraclea then existing at Constantinople, which in the (Hudson, Geogr. Min. p. 73), it is said that the course of the six following centuries perished Cappadocians were called by some White Syrirnrc~verably. In this respect the French and ians, and that the old geographers made CapVenetian conquest in the thirteenth century padocia extend as far as the coast of the Euxine, was far more destructive than the Turkish con-24 Diodorus, XVI. 90. quest in the fifteenth. 25 Diodorus, XX. 111. 20 Hterodot. I. 72, 76, compared with V. 49. 26 Memnon, apud Photium, p. 220. Ed. lBek il Polybius, V. 43.

Diodorus, XIX. 40. Ap-ker. Diodorus, XX. 111.

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CHAP. XXXV.] THE GREEK CITIES OF ASIA. 367 Southern Cappadocia meanwhile had passed before the conquest of Alexander into the hands of a satrap named Ariarathes,27 to whom Diodorus gives the title of king. Like every other prince and state in Asia, Southern he had been unable to resist the power of thle Macedonian invasion, but Alexander’s death broke, as he supposed, the spell of the Greek dominion, and Ariarathes ventured to dispute the decision of the council of generals which had assigned Cappadocia to Eumenes, and to retain the possession of it himself. Such an example of resistance, if successful, might have at once dissolved the Macedonian empire, and Perdiccas hastened to put it down. He encountered Ariarathes,28 defeated him, made him prisoner, and crucified him; and then, according to the arrangement of the council, bestowed the government of Cappadocia on Eumenes. The nephew and heir of Ariarathes, who also bore his name, took refuge”2 in Armenia, and there waited for better times. He saw the Macedonian power divided against itself; Perdiccas, his uncle’s conqueror, had been killed by his own soldiers; Eumenes, who had been made satrap of Cappadocia, had been put to death by Antigonus; and Antigonus, who had become sovereign of all Asia Minor, was engaged in war with Seleucus the ruler of Mesopotamia and the eastern provinces. Amidst their quarrels Ariarathes, with the help of the prince of Armenia, made his way back to his country, drove out the Macedonian garrisons by which it was occupied, and made himself king of Cappadocia. The sovereignty of a native prince gratified the national feelings of the people, while from a Greek ruler they may have derived some improve-AUthe Asiatic govern. ments in art and civilization. But from neither were they like to ortrbai, ~wtherealiko receive the blessings of just and good government; and in this re-oppressive andcorrupt. spect, probably, the Greek and barbarian rulers were perfectly on a level with each other. From time immemorial, indeed, in Asia, government had seemed to have no other object than to exact from the people the largest possible amount of revenue, and the system of finance consisted merely in the unscrupulous practice of oppression and fraud. Never was there a more disgraceful monument of an unprincipled spirit in such matters, than that strange collection of cases of open robbery or fraudulent dealing, which was so long ascribed to Aristotle, and which still is to be found amongst his works, under the title of the second book of the Economics. Its real date and author are unknown;30 but it must have been written for the instruction of some prince or state in Asia, and it gives a curious picture of the ordinary ways and means of a satrap or dynast, as well as of the expedients by which they might supply their ordinary occasions. “A satrap’s revenue,”

says the writer,3’ “arises from six sources: from his tithes of the produce of all the land in his satrapy; from his domains; from his customs; from his duties levied on goods within the country, and his market duties; from his pastures; and, sixthly, from his sundries,”

amongst which last are reckoned a poll-tax,32 and a tax on manufacturing labor. And amongst a king’s ways and means is expressly mentioned, a tampering with the currency, and a raising or lowering the value of the coin33 as it might suit his purposes. But far above the kingdoms of Asia, whether Greek or semi-barbarian, were those free Greek cities which lined the whole coast of Asia Minor, ree Greek cities from Trapezus, at the southeastern corner of the Euxine, to Soli the coasts of Aaia.Iiand Tarsus, with their Greek or half Greek population, at the mouth of the Gulf of Issus, and almost on the frontier of Syria. Of these Greek cities, Sinope and Heraclea were the most famous on the north coast; the shore 27

Diodorus, XXXI. Excerpt. Photii. 31 crre lEI c’{ I6f r’pouo‘6v ~ aro yS, aTrT rcv 8s Diodorus, XXXI. apud Photium, and Iv, r Xpra diwv ysroErwv, v iro’ eropfov,, aoa reXVIII. 16. v a rv, ciad sKd-c r, clrb rwv ea’XX2ov.

CEconomic. 29 Diodorus, XXXI. apud Phot. II. 1 Yo See the article on this subject in Niebuhr’s 32 Krrt,, 7 iron rgV daXXOsv, ExrLtOdXat6v or Kac Kleine Schriften, p. 412, and another by Mr. XEcpwrvdfov rpooayopvou#vti.

Lewis, in the first volume of the Philological 3 ptrE ri v6Ytila X’yW, 7roto Kai r6rS TL/ALOV y Museum. rooruov VrorINorIV.

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368 tHISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. AX V of the AEgean was covered with towns whose names had been famous from remote ages; but the noblest state, not of Asia Minor only, but almost of the whole world, was the great and free and high-minded commonwealth of Rhodes. The island of Rhodes, till nearly the end of the Peloponnesian war, was divided Rhodes. Its wise and between the three Dorian cities, Lindus,34 Ialysus, and Camirus. good gaoverndmeronit spird But in the 93d Olympiad, about three years before the battle of of itscitizens. _JEgospotami, the three states agreed to found a common capital,35 to which they gave the name of the island, and from that time forwards the city of Rhodes became eminent amongst the cities of the Greek name. It was built on the northern, side of the island, after a plan given by Hippodamus of Miletus,36 the most famous architect of his age, and it stood partly on the low ground nearly at the level of the sea, and partly, like Genoa, on the side of the hill, which formed a semicircle round the lower part of the town. Rhodes was famous alike in war and peace; the great painter, Protogenes, enriched it with pictures of the highest excellence, and which were universally admired; the famous colossal figure of the sun, more than a hundred feet in height, which bestrode the harbor’s mouth, was reputed one of the wonders of the world; and the heroic resistance of the Rhodians against Demetrius Poliorcetes was no less glorious than the defence of the same city against the Turks in later times by the knights of St. John. But Rhodes could yet boast of a better and far rarer glory, in the justice and mutual kindness which distinguished her political institutions, and the social relations of her citizens;37 and, above all, in that virtue so rare in every age, and almost unknown to the nations of antiquity, a spirit of general benevolence, and of forbearance even towards enemies. The naval power of Rhodes was great, but it was employed, not for purposes of ambition, but to put down piracy.3” And in the heat of the great siege of their city, when Demetrius did not scruple to employ against them the pirates39 whose crimes they had repressed, and when a thousand ships, belonging to merchants of various nations, had come to the siege, like eagles to the carcass, to make their profit out of the expected plunder of the town, and out of the sale of its citizens as slaves, this noble people rejected with indignation the proposal of some ill-judging orators, to pull down the statues of Antigonus and Demetrius,40 and resolved that their present hostility to those princes should not tempt them to destroy the memorials of their former friendship. The Rhodians, in the midst of a struggle for life and death, allowed the statues of their enemies to stand uninjured in the heart of their city. The Romans, after all danger to themselves was over, could murder in cold blood the Samnite general, C. Pontius, to whom they owed not only the respect due to a brave enemy, but gratitude for the generosity with which he had treated them in his day of victory. I have thus attempted to give a sketch of the state of Asia in the 125th OlymThe litent f thi piad; but it should be remembered, that although the Greek litThe literaturre of this “,a period hasalnlostwhol-erature of this period was very voluminous, yet it has so entirely ly perished. perished, that hardly a single writer has escaped the wreck. Thus we know scarcely more of Greece and Asia in the middle of the fifth century of Rome, than we know of Rome itself; that is, we have in both cases the skeleton of political and military events, but we have no contemporary pictures of the real state of either nation. Almost the sole remains of the Greek literature of this period are, perhaps, that treatise on public economy or finance, which has been’falsely ascribed to Aristotle,41 and the corrupt fragments of Dicmearm4 Thucydides, VIII. 44. 44 Diodorus, XX. 82, 83. ~5

Diodorus, XIII. 75. 40 Diodorus, XX. 93.‘6 Compare Strabo, XIV. p. 843, and Aristot. 41 That it is not Aristotle’s work seems to me Politic. II.

6, and Diodorus, XIX. 45. certain; but I do not think that it can be much 3 Strabo, XIV. p. 652, 653, w7roXrtvo#‘Yv KdX-later than Aristotle’s age, for the writer appears Xara TWv’EXX)vwv, is the character given of to regard the dominion of Alexander as still Rhodes by Diodorus, XX. 81.

being one governed by the king, with his saI Diodorus, XXI. 81. Strabo, XIV. p. 652. traps in the several provinces, a notion which

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CHAP. XXXV.] SICILY-SYRACUSE. 369 chus, a scholar of Aristotle, and a friend of Theophrastus, on the topography of Greece. And not only the contemporary, but the later literature, which might have illustrated these times, has also for the most part perished; the entire and connected history of Diodorus ends for us with the 119th Olympiad, and the history of the subsequent years can be gleaned only from scattered and meagre sources; from one or two of the lives of Plutarch, from Justin’s abridgment, from the mere sketches contained in Appian, and from the fragments of the chronologers, which are exclusively chronological, preserved to us by Eusebius. The names of Sicily, of Syracuse, and of Agathocles, are never once mentioned in the ninth and tenth books of Livy, while he is giving the his-Sicily. The Romane must have regarded tory of the second and third Samnite wars; nor would any one with anxietythe great suspect, from his narrative, that there had existed during a period power of Agathocles. of twentyeight years, from 436 to about 464 or 465,42
separated from Italy only by a narrow strait, one of the greatest powers ard one of the most remarkable men to be found at that time in the world.

But this is merely one of the consequences of the absence of all Roman historians contemporary with the fifth century. Livy did and could only copy the annalists of the seventh, or of the middle of the sixth century, and the very oldest of these, separated by an interval of a hundred years from the Samnite wars, and having no original historian older than themselves, did but put together such memorials of the past as happened to be still floating on the stream of time, stories which had chanced to be preserved in particular families, or which had lived in the remembrance of men generally. Thus, as I have before observed, the military history of the Samnite wars is often utterly inexplicable: the detail of marches, the objects aimed at in each campaign, the combinations of the generals, and the exact amount of their success, are lost in oblivion; but particular events are sometimes given in great detail, and anecdotes of remarkable men have been preserved, while their connection with each other has perished. Agathocles never made war with the Romans, and his name therefore did not occur in the triumphal Fasti of any great Roman family.

What uneasiness his power gave to the senate; how gladly they must have seen his arms employed in Africa;43 how anxiously they must have watched his movements when his fleet invaded and conquered the Liparsean islands,44 or when he crossed the Ionian gulf, and defended Corcyra with success against the power of Cassander;45 above all, when he actually landed in Italy, with Etruscan and Ligurian soldiers in his service, and formed an alliance with the Apulians and Peucetians or Pediculans,46 to assist him in his conquest.of Bruttium: this no Roman tradition recorded, and therefore. no later annalist has mentioned; but they who can represent to themselves the necessary relations of events, can have no difficulty in conceiving its reality. It is mentioned also that Agathocles,47 in his African wars, had many Samnite soldiers in his army as well as Etruscans, and in the year 446 or 447, an Etruscertainly may have outlasted the life of Alexan-certainly. Agathocles reigned in all twentyder himself, for his generals for several years eight years. See Diodorus, XXI. 12. Fragm.

professed to be the subjects of his infant son, Iloeschel. but which must have passed away, at any rate 43 During four years, from Olymp. 117-3 to within a few years, when the generals assumed 118-2 inclusive; that is, during, the Etruscan severally the kingly diadem. campaigns of Q. Fabius in the second Samnite 42 The beginning of Agathocles’ dominion is war.

placed by Diodorus in Olymp. 115-4, which, ac-44 In Olymp. 119-1, the last year of the second cording to his synchronism, is the year of the Samnnite war. Diodorus,. XX. 101. Zonsulship of M. Foslius and L.

Plautius, and 45 In the 120th Olympiad, but the exact year the ninth year of the second Samnite war. His is not known, and therefore, somewhere about death cannot be determined exactly, because the beginning of the third Samnite war. Dioof the confusions and different systems of the dorus, XXI. 2. Fragm. Hoeschel. Compare Roman chronology. It would fall in Olymp. also Fragm. Vatican, XXI. 2. 122-4, or B. c. 289; but whether that year would 46 About the same period, just after his expecoincide with the consulship of M. Valerius dition to Corcyra. Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel,, and Q. Csedicius, one year after the end of the XXI. 3, 4. third Samnite war, or with one of the two suc-47 Diodorus, XX. 11 64. ceeding consulships, it is impossible to fix 24

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837( HISTORY OF ROME. [CIAP. XXXV His connection with can fleet of eighteen ships48 came to his relief at Syracuse, when so.e of the nations of he was blockaded by the Carthaginians, and enabled him to defeat athe enemy and effect his passage once more to Africa. This was three or four years before the end of the second Samnite war, and just after the submission of the principal Etruscan states to Rome, in consequence of the great successes of Q. Fabius. We are told, also, that at one time the Tarentines49 applied to him to command their forces against the Messapians and Lucanians, and that he went over to Italy accordingly, which, though the date is not mentioned, must have taken place in the latter part of his reign, when he was making war upon the Bruttians; that is, as nearly as we can fix it, in the 120th or 121st Olympiad, whilst the third Samnite war was raging. It is strange that neither the Samnites nor the Etruscans ever asked him to aid them against Rome, or, if they did, that he should not have been tempted to engage in so great a contest. But the nearer interest of humbling the Carthaginians, and of establishing his power on the south coast of Italy, prevented him from penetrating through the straits of Messana, and sending a fleet to the mouth of the Tiber. And no doubt, if he had attacked the Romnans, they would have formed a close alliance with Carthage against him, as they did shortly afterwards against Pyrrhus; nay, it is probable that the renewal of the old league between the two countries, which took place in 448,50 may have been caused in some degree by their common fear of Agathocles, who had at that period finally evacuated Africa, but had not yet made peace with Carthage. Agathocles died in the last year of the 122d Olympiad, about three years after Distracted state of Si-the end of the third Samnite war. Had he lived fifty years earlier, oily dauring his govern minet. /Mvisery of hi.e, like Dionysius, would have been known by no other title than later years. that of tyrant; but now the successors of Alexander had accustomed men to tolerate the name of king, in persons who had no hereditary right to their thrones; and Agathocles certainly as well deserved the title as Lysimachus, or the ruffian Cassander. Polybius accused Timmus of calumniating him; but surely his own character of him must be no less exaggerated on the other side, when he says”’ that although in the beginning of his career he was most bloody, yet when he had once firmly established his power, he became the gentlest and mildest of men. Like Augustus, he was too wise to indulge in needless cruelty; but his later life was not so peaceful as that of Augustus, and whenever either cruelty or treachery seemed likely to be useful, he indulged in both without scruple. The devastation and misery of Sicily during his reign must have been extreme. Dinocrates, a Syracusan exile,52 was at the head of an army of 20,000 foot and 3000 horse, and had made himself master of several cities, and so well was he satisfied with his buccaneer condition, that he rejected Agathocles’ offer of allowing him to return to Syracuse, and of abdicating his own dominion that the exiles might return freely. Then Agathocles called the Carthaginians over to put Dinocrates down; and gave up to them as the price of their aid all the cities which they had formerly possessed in Sicily. The exiles were afterwards defeated, and Dinocrates was now glad to make his submission;53 and from this time, A.

u. c. 449, we hear of no further civil wars or massacres in Sicily, till the period immediately preceding Agathocles’ death, which took place sixteen or seventeen years later. But his last days were full of misery.

His son, Agathocles,54 was murdered by his grandson Archagathus, and the old tyrant, who’ was now reduced almost to the brink of the grave by a painful and hopeless disorder, dreaded lest Archagathus should murder the rest of his family as soon as he should himself be no more. Accordingly, he resolved to send his wife, Texena,55 with his two young sons, and all his treasure, to Egypt, her na-I Diodorus, XX. 61. In Olymp. 118-2. 52

Diodorus, XX. 77, 78. 4o Strabo, VI. p. 280. S3 Diodoras, XX. 89, 90. be Livy, IX. 43. 54 Diodorus XXI. 12. Fragm. Hoeschel. 1 Polybius, IX. 23. 5

Justin, XXIII. 2. The account of the part

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CHArP. XXXV.] DEATH OF AGATHOOLES. 371 tive country, whilst he himself should be left alone to die. On his death, the old democracy6 was restored without a struggle, his property was confiscated, and his statues thrown down. But it was a democracy in name only, for we find that the same man, Hicetas, was continued in the office of captain-general for the next nine years57 successively; and so long a term of military command in times of civil and foreign war was equivalent to a despotism or tyranny. At the moment of Agathocles’ death, there was a Syracusan army58 in the field, consisting, as usual, chiefly of mercenaries, and commanded 7. Excesses committed by by the tyrant’s grandson, Arcagathus. But Menon, who is said the mercenary soldiers. I.- a. w ^ n,, They occupy Messana. in Diodorus’

account to have poisoned Agathocles, and who was now with the army of Archagathus, contrived to murder Archagathus, and to get the army into his own hands. He then attempted to get possession of Syracuse, and to make himself tyrant, and finding himself resisted by the new government and the captain-general, Hicetas, he too called in the Carthaginians. Syracuse was quite unable to resist, and submitted to the’terms which they imposed.

They gave 400 hostages, and consented to receive back all the exiles, under which term all Menon’s army were included. What was become of Msenon himself we know not; but the mercenaries, being mostly Samnite or Lucanian foreigners, were still looked upon as an inferior caste to the old Syracusan citizens; and as these last formed the majority of the people, none of the new citizens could ever get access to any public office. This led to fresh disturbances, but at last the strangers agreed to sell their properties within a certain time, and to leave Sicily. They accordingly came to Messana,59 in order to cross the strait and return to Italy; but being admitted into the city, they rose by night and massacred the principal inhabitants, and kept the women and the city for themselves.

From this time forwards the inhabitants of Messana were known by the name of Mamertini, sons of Mamers or Mars, that being the name by which these Italian soldiers of fortune had been used to call themselves. While Messana had thus fallen into the lands of a barbarian soldiery, the condition of the rest of Sicily was scarcely happier. Hicetas had the Tyrants ini the several power of a tyrant in Syracuse, Phintias60 was tyrant in Agrigen-citiesofSicily. tum, Tyndarion in Tauromenium, Heraclides in Leontini, ~and other men whose names have not reached posterity exercised the same dominion in the smaller cities. Hicetas and Phintias made war upon each other, made plundering inroads into each other’s territories, and mutually reduced the frontier districts to a state of utter desolation. Gela was destroyed by Phintias, and its inhabitants removed to a new town which he founded on the coast near the mouth of the Himera, and called after his own name. And the Mamertines availed themselves of all this misery to extend their own power, even t: the opposite side of the island; they sacked Camarina and Gela,61 which had bten again partially inhabited after its destruction by Phintias, and obliged several of the Greek cities to pay them tribute. Thus the Greek power in Sicily, which had been so formidable under Agathocles, was now quite prostrated, and the whole island seemed likely to become the spoil of the Carthaginians and Mamertines. This course of events on one side of the strait, and the extension of the Roman dominion a few years later to the extreme coast of Bruttium on the other side, tended inevitably to bring about a collision between Rome and Carthage, such as Pyrrhus foretold when he found it impossible to revive and consolidate’ the Greek interest, and restore in a manner the dominion of Agathocles. ing betwoen Agathocles and his family is given expressions are,‘IKEira; rvvia rsT7

6vvaearEteasby Justin with much simplicity and good feel-ieKfdAXgerat 7ji rvpavvidog. ing, and it is much to his credit that he pre-68 Diodorus, Fragm. oeschel. XXI. 12, 13. forred this story to the horrible and incredible 69 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXI. 13. Potales about the last days of Agathocles which lybius, I. 7. Diodorus has copied apparently from Timeus. 60 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXII. 2, 11. 16 Diodorus, Fragm.

Ioeshel. XXI. 12. a6 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXIII. 2. Pc67 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXII. 6. His lybius, I. 8.

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372 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXV And now, before I speak of Pyrrhus himself and the fortunes of his early years, Greece. Its degraded we must turn our eyes to Greece, the worn-out and cast-off skin conhediineksAttemtho from which the living serpent had gone forth to carry his youth oke after the deathof and vigor to other lands. Greek power, Greek energy, Greek Seleucus. genius, might now be found indeed anywhere rather than in Greece. Drained of all its noblest spirits, for so hopeless was the prospect at home, that any foreign service6” offered a temptation to the Greek youth to enter it; yet exposed to the miseries of war, and eagerly contended for by rival sovereigns, because its possession was still thought the most glorious part of every dominion; mocked by every despot in turn with offers of liberty, yet as soon as it was delivered from the yoke of one, condemned under some pretence to receivw the garrison of another into its citadels; Greece, in the middle of the fifth century of Rome, seemed utterly exhausted, and lay almost as dead.

Demetrius Poliorcetes had retained his hold upon it after his Asiatic dominion had been lost by the event of the battle of Ipsus; and even when he himself engaged in his last desperate attempt upon Asia, and whilst he was passing the last years of his life as a prisoner in the hands of Seleucus, Greece was still, for the most part, under the power of his son, Antigonus Gonatas. But upon the death of Seleucus Nicator, when Antigonus was disputing the sovereignty of Macedonia with Ptolemy Ceraunus, Seleucus’ murderer, the Greeks made63 a feeble attempt to assert their, liberty. Sparta once more appeared at the head of the national confederacy, and Areus, the Spartan king, was intrusted with the’conduct of the war. The Greeks attacked LEtolia, which appears at this time to have been in alliance with Antigonus, but they were repulsed with loss; and then, as usual, jealousy broke out, and the confederacy was soon dissolved. Yet, almost immediately afterwards, there was formed the first germ of a new confederacy, which existed from this time forwards till the total extinction of Grecian independence, and in which there was revived a faint image of the ancient glory of Greece, the pale martinmas summer of her closing year. This confederacy was the famous Achaian or Achaean league. The Achaian name is conspicuous in the heroic ages of Greece, and in her last FormationoftheAch.- decline, but during the period of her greatness is scarcely ever an leagee. brought before our notice. The towns of Achaia were small and unimportant, and the people lived for many generations in happy obscurity; but after the death of Ptolemy Ceraunus, when dread of a Gaulish invasion kindled a general spirit of exertion, and when Antigonus was likely to have, sufficient employment on the side of Macedonia, four Achaean cities,t4 Dyme, Patrae, Tritaea, and Pharce, formed a federal union for their mutual defence. According to the constitution of the league, each member was to appoint in succession, year by year, two captainsgeneral,“6 and one secretary, or civil minister, to conduct the affairs of the union. These four states, like the forest cantons of Switzerland, were the original members, and in a manner the founders of the confederacy; and at the period of Pyrrhus’ invasion of Italy, it consisted of these alone. It is not possible to discover the condition of the several states of Greece, however much their ancient fame must excite an interest even for The cities of Pelopon-.e.us mostly held in their last decay. But generally they were subjected to the Masubjection by tyrants. cedonian king, Antigonus,66 either directly, by having a Macedonian garrison in their citadels, or indirectly, as being ruled by a tyrant from among their own people, who for his own sake upheld the Macedonian supremacy. Sicyon67 had been governed by various tyrants ever since it had been taken by Demetrius Poliorcetes, when he destroyed the lower town, and removed 0a Diodorus XX. 40. He says that when Aratus delivered Sicyon in 63 Justin, XXIV.. 251 B. c. some of the exiles whom he then re”Polybius, II. 41. stored had been in banishment fifty years. And 5

Polybius, II. 43. Cicero, copying from the same source however, W

Polybius, II. 41. IX. 29. namely, Aratus’ own memoirs, says the same Pr Diodorus, XX, 102. Plutarch, Aratus, 9. thing. De Officiis, II. 23.

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CHAP. XXXV.] NORTHERN GREECE. 373 the whole population within the precincts of the old citadel. Megalopolis68 about this time must have been under the dominion of its tyrant, Aristodemus, of Phigalea, who owed his elevation to factions in the oligarchy by which the city had been before governed. In Argos69 Aristippus had the ascendency, through the support of king Antigonus. The Acropolis of Corinth70 was held by one Alexander (we know not when or by what means he won it), and the strength of the place enabled him to enjoy a certain degree of independence; so that, after his death, Antigonus was obliged to employ stratagem in order to get it for himself out of the hands of Alexander’s widow, Niceea. Society was generally in a state of disorder, robbery and plundering forays wzere almost universal, and Greece could no longer boast that she had banished the practice of carrying arms in peace;71 for men now went armed so commonly, that conspirators could meet and arm themselves in open day without exciting any suspicion. Something more of life was to be seen in the states to the north of the isthmus of Corinth. When the Gauls invaded Greece in the second year NortheGreece.Stt of the 125th Olympiad, Athens, Megara, Bceotia, Phocis, Locris, of Bheotia.,Disord,.r and zEtolia sent a confederate army to Thermopylke to oppose them; and the Boeotian force72
amounted to 10,000 heavyarmed infantry, and 500 horse, a number equal to that which won the battle of Delium against the whole power of Athens in the Peloponnesian war. Thebes had twice revolted from Demetrius Poliorcetes, and had been twice reduced by him,73 and after his second conquest of it he had pulled down its walls”4 and left it defenceless.

Antigonus Gonatas retained possession of it till he succeeded in establishing himself in Macedonia; then his hold upon southern Greece was relaxed, except on those cities where he still kept a garrison of his soldiers, or where a tyrant who looked to him for protection governed almost as his officer. But Boeotia seems to have been left to itself, with nearly its old constitution; according to which Thebes enjoyed a certain supremacy over the other cities, but nothing like that dominion which she had claimed in the days of her greatness. The country was safe and flourishing when compared with Peloponnesus, and Tanagra is mentioned”5 as a place at once prosperous and deserving its prosperity; its citizens were wealthy yet simple in their manners, just, and hospitable. Thebes, on the contrary, is described as a scene of utter anarchy; acts of violence were constantly committed with impunity, and justice was so evaded or overborne by violence, that twentyfive or even thirty years7t sometimes elapsed before the injured party could obtain a hearing for his cause before the magistrates. This was owing principally to the numerous societies or clubs which existed, avowedly for mere objects of convivial entertainments; but which becoming extremely wealthy, for men without children, and even some who had children, often left all their property to their club, were enabled no doubt to corrupt justice, in order to screen 08 Pausanias, VIII. 27. He puts Aristodemus, lieve, in the older constitution. Bckh thinks however, too early, when he says that he be-that it was one of the prerogatives of Thebes, came tyrant soon after the Lamian war, and that this magistrate should be always a Theban. confounds Acrotatus, son of Areus, with Acro-Corpus Inscript. Vol. I. p. 729. tatus, son of Cleomenes. In 318. c. Megalopo-16 Polybius, XX. 6. Dicearchus, Stat.

Grec. lis was governed by a strict oligarchy. See )Dio-p. 15, et seqq.

Hudson. The text in these fragdorus, XVIII. 68. Compare Polybius, X. 25.

ments of Dicearchus is often hopelessly cor69 Plutarch, Pyrrhus, 30. rupt; but they seem also, independently of 70 Plutarch, Aratus, 16, 17. such faults, to have been interpolated by some 7’ Plutarch, Aratus, 6. more modern writer, or rather their substance ~ Pausanias, X. 20. to have been given by him in his own language, 7S Plutarch, Demetrius, 39, 40. not without many additions. We know the D4 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXI. 10.

manner in which old topographical accounts 76 I)icmarchus, Stat. Grec. p.

13. Ed. Hud-are copied by one writer after another, each of son. The inscriptions of this period show that whom adds something to them of his own; and there was still a government for all Boeotia, thus the work of Dicsearchus seems to have Kovor IIap3oleriv avvdpiov, and Bceotarchs, as in formed the groundwork of the existing fragancient times; there was also a magistrate ments, which have been wrought up by a later called apXwv iv KOtvv BorwrTv, or a’pxcv Botwrois, writer, and altered both in their language and who seems to have been the head of the Beo-matter. tarchs, and of whom there is no mention, I be

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374 HISTORY OF ROME. [CnP., XXXV the outrages of their members. A strong but not improbable picture of the worst abuses of such clubs, which even in their best state, and in the healthiest condition of society, are always fraught with evil either politically or morally. Forty years had now passed since Athens had lost Demosthenes. His death, as was most fitting, coincided exactly with the period of his counertcyoverthrown by An. try’s complete subjection; within a monthl after Antipater had tipater. established a Macedonian garrison in Munychia, Demosthenes escaped his vengeance by a sudden and painless death?8 in the island of Calauria. The shade of Xerxes might have rejoiced to see that his own people had a share in the humiliation of his old enemy; for in the army with which Antipater crushed the Greek confederates in the Lamian war there were Persian archers, slingers, and cavalry,f9 who had been brought to his aid from Asia by Craterus, and who thus strangely found, in their actual subjection to a Greek power, an opportunity of revenging the fatal days of Salamis and Platea. That great democracy, with all its faults, by far the noblest example of free and just government which the world had then witnessed, was again destroyed by Antipater, after a duration of seventy-one years since its restoration by Thrasybulus. All citizens whose property fell short of 2000 drachmme were deprived of their political rights; and more than half of the Athenian people were thus disfranchised.

Lands in Thrace were offered to them, and they migrated thither in great numbers;80 whilst the remnant, who were now exclusively the Athenian people, were left in mockery to the enjoyment of Solon’s laws, while a Macedonian garrison occupied Munychin, and commanded the entrance into the harbor of Pirseus. Then followed a period of fifteen years, during which Athens remained subn ject, first to Antipater and then to Cassander his son; and alAnd nominally restored o aX by Demetrius Polior-though the qualification of a citizen was reduced by Cassanders to 1000 drachmse, only half of the sum fixed by his father, and thus the internal government became somewhat more popular, yet still, whilst Munychia and Piraeus were in the power of a foreign prince, Athens could have no independent national existence. In the year of Rome 447, three years before the end of the second Samnite war, Cassander’s garrisons were driven out by Demetrius Poliorcetes,82 the old democracy was restored, and the Athenians were declared to be free. But it was only a shadow of the “fierce democratie,”

and of the real freedom of the days of Pericles and Demosthenes. The utmost baseness of flattery was lavished on Demetrius, such flattery as was incompatible with any self-respect, and which confessed that Athens was dependents for the greatest national blessings not on itself, but on foreign aid. A few years afterwards, when his fortune was ruined by the event of the Demetrius htimself oc-battle of Ipsus, the Athenians refused to receive him into their pAtpheian s….a nothi city; and this so stung him that when his affairs began to mend, garrisons. he laid siege to Athens, and having obliged it to surrender, he not only occupied Piraeus and Munychia, but put a garrison into the city itself, converting the hill84 of the Museum into a Macedonian citadel. It was recovered 77

Plutarch, in Demosth. 28. Sons of the brave who fought at Marathon t 78

Ibid. 30. The common story was that De-Your feeble spirits. Greece her head hath mosthenes killed himself by a poison which he bowed carried about him; but his nephew, Demo-As if the wreath of Liberty thereon chares, expressed his belief that his death was Would fix itself as smoothly as a cloud, natural; or rather, in his own language, ” that Which, at Jove’s will, descends on Pelion’s the gods, in their care for him, had rescued top. him from the cruelty of the Macedonians by a -* o *

* speedy and gentle death.” Ah! that a conqueror’s word should be so,D

Diodorus, XVIII. 16. dear I!’ Diodorus, XVIII. 18. Ah! that a boon could shed such rapturous N-l Diodorus, XVIII. 74. joys I 82 Diodorus, XX. 45, 46. A gift of that which is not to be given “3 Who can help remembering Mr. Worcls-By all the blended powers of earth and heavWorth’s beautiftil lines? en.” “.qo ye prop, ” Plutarch, Demetr. 30, 34. Pausanias, i. 25

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CHAP. XXXV.] ~TOLIA. 375 again, when he had been driven out of Macedonia by Lysimachus and Pyrrhus, by one of the last successful efforts of Athenian valor. Olympiodorus,85 who had already acquired the reputation of a soldier and a general, led the whole population of Athens into the field; he defeated the Macedonians, stormed the Museum, and delivered Pirmeus and Munychia. This was in the second year of the 123d Olympiad: so that when Pyrrhus sailed for Italy seven years afterwards, Athens was really independent, for she had gained her freedom, not by the gift of another, but by her own sword. This, however, was almost a solitary gleam of light amidst the prevailing darkness. In general there were neither soldiers, statesmen, nor orators now to be found in Athens. The great tragedians had Athens. Zeno andEplong since become extinct; and Thucydides has neither in his own country, whether free or in subjection, nor in any other country or age of the world, found a successor to rival him. Plato’s divine voice was silent, and the ” Master of the Wise”s6 had left none to inherit his acuteness, his boundless knowledge, and his manly judgment, at once so practical and so profound. The theatre, indeed, could boast of excellence, but it was only in the new comedy, the sickliest refinement of the drama, and a sure mark of a declining age. Still there was intellectual life of no common kind existing at this time in Athens. There were now living and teaching within her walls, two men whose doctrines in philosophy were destined to influence most widely and lastingly the characters and conduct of their fellow-creatures, the founders of the two great rival sects of the later age of the’Roman republic,-Epicurus and Zeno. But Bceotia and Athens were no longer the principal powers of northern Greece; the half-barbarous.Etolians had risen to such an emi-Etolia. Its bands ao nence, that we find them able, at a somewhat later period, to con-adventurers or “Ptend single-handed with the kingdom of Macedon. Their country was still, as in the days of Thucydides, separated from Acarnania”8 by the AcheIous, and was stretched in length from the shores of the Gulf of Corinth to those of the Malian Bay, at the back of Locris, Doris, and Phocis. But a sort of federal government succeeded, in later times, to the multitude of scattered and independent villages which formerly composed the _Etolian nation; a general assembly of deputies firom all the tolian towns met every year at Thermum to elect a captain-general,“s a master of the horse, and a secretary for the general government of the confederacy; great fairs89 and festivals, to which the people came up from all parts of the country, were held at the same place; and Thermum thus grew in wealth and magnificence, and its houses became noted for the magnificence of their furniture, as the inhabitants, on these great occasions, opened their doors to receive all comers, with a hospitality not common in Greece since the heroic ages. But there were other points in which the z]tolians equally retained the habits of an early state of society; in the best days of Grecian civt’O Plutarch, Demetr. 46. Pausanias, I. 26. in the year before the Gaulish invasion, the no6,,Vidi‘1 maestro di color cthe sanno Etolians obtained possession of Heraclea in Seder tra filosofica famiglia.1” Trachinia. (Pausanias, X. 20, 9.) At a later DANTE, Inferno, IV. period, Naupactus was become an AEtolian town, but we do not know when it was con87 It had, however, acquired several towns qnered..Atuated in its neighborhood which had former-8 Polybius, V. 8, XXII. 15, ~ 10. The caply been independent. The date of these several tain-general and secretary were officers also of acquisitions is diffiult to fix precisely. The the Achaean league. Whether the ]Etolian iEtolians had occupied the fatnous Cirrhsan league was formed on -the Achaean model, or plain just after the death of Seleucus; a repe-whether it existed earlier, we cannot tell. tition of the old Phocian sacrilege, which was 8 oyopao Kat 7rasiV7ypEgc. Polyb. V. 8. These the caese or pretence of a general attack upon fairs and religious festivals, held along with the them by the Peloponnesian Greeks under the assemblies for political purposes, remind us of; supremacy of Sparta. But in this new sacred the great Etruscan assemblies at the temple of war, the authors of the sacrilege were more Voltumna. The fairs seemed to imply that the fortunate than the Phocians of old, and the towns in iAtolia were still little better than vil/Etolians repelled their assailants with great lages, so as to have but few shops for the reguloss Jilstii, XXIV. 1.

About the same time, lar supply of commodities.

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37 6 HISTORY OF ROME. [CEAP. XXXV ilization, when life and property were scarcely less secure at Athens than they are at this day in the best governed countries of Europe, the AEtolians went always armed;9 and the character of a robber was still deemed honorable amongst them, as it had been in all parts of Greece in the Homeric age. As the nation became more powerful, this spirit was displayed on a larger scale, and./Etolian adventurers, countenanced, but not paid or organized, by the national government, made plundering expeditions on their own account both by land and sea, and were not very scrupulous in their choice of the objects of their attack. These adventurers were called ” pirates,” s-CigcTasi, a name”9 which occurs in the written language of Greece for the first time about this period, when the long wars between Alexander’s successors and the general decline of good government had multiplied the number of such marauders. The /E3tolians will play an important part hereafter in this history, when their Political relations of quarrels with Macedon and the Achaan league led them to conEtolia. clude an alliance with Rome, and to array themselves with the Roman armies, on their first crossing the sea to carry on war in Greece. At present their place in the Greek political system seems not to have been definitely fixed; they were in alliance with Antigonus Gonatas92 before he obtained possession of Macedon, at the time when their occupation of the Cirrhuean plain involved them in a sacred war with Peloponnesus, and they were also the allies of Pyrrhus and the Epirots; but their peculiar hostility to Macedon and to the Achmans had not as yet been called into existence. Polybius, from whom we derive most of our knowledge of them, was too much their enemy to do them full justice; and on the great occasion of the Gaulish invasion of Greece, they performed their duty nobly, and no state served the common cause more bravely or more effectually. Yet a people who made plunder their glory can have had little true greatness; and it must have been an evil time for Greece, when the iEtolians became one of the most powerful and most famous of the Grecian states. Northward of the Ambracian gulf, and lying without the limits of ancient as rpirus. Its various of modern Greece, the various Epirot tribes occupied the coast of g, their mnnetof the Ionian sea as far as the Acroceraunian promontory, reaching iving, and early history and traditions. inland as far as the central mountains which turn the streams eastward and westward, and from the western boundary of Thessaly and Macedonia. Within these limits the Molossians, Thesprotians, Chaonians, and many other obscurer people, had from the earliest times led the same life, and kept the same institutions. They lived mostly in villages”9 or in small village-like towns, scattered over the mountains, in green glades opening amidst the forests, or along the rich valleys by which the mountains are in many places intersected, going always armed, and, with the outward habits, retaining also much of the cruelty and faithlessness of barbarians, attended by their dogs, a breed of surpassing excellence,94
and maintaining themselves chiefly by pasturage, their ox90 Thucydides, I.

5. 92 Justin, XXIV. 1. Dion Cassius, Fragm. “9 Polybius, IV. 3. 6.

Valckenaer says that Peiresc. XXXIX. the word rEqpariS occurs, for the first time in 93 olroVCa Karai galas, iS the character given by the surviving Greek literature, in the Septua-Scylax of the Chaonians, Thesprotians, and gint translation of the Bible. There it is to be Molossians equally. Periplus, p. 11. 12, Ed. found in Job XXV. 3, and Hosea VI. 10; in Hudson. But we hear of some towns among both instances, I think, signifying a robber by them, although of none of any considerable size and rather than by sea. And so cruparTspnov is or importance. used in Genesis XLIX. 19. Thus the Scholiast‘4 The ancient character of the Molcssian on Pindar, Pyth. 62, says that rruparat properly dogs is well known. Mr. Hughes found them means on Ev Ub5 KaKrovpyouvreS. See Valckenaer as numerous and as fierce as they were in anon Ammonius, p.

194. The Greek translators cient days; the breed, he thinks, has in no.of the Bible could not have got the word from respect degenerated. He describes them as.old Greece, but the robber population of Isauria “
varying in color through different shades:and Cilicia, who made the name of pirate so from a dark brown to a bright dun-, their long (famous about two centuries afterwards, had fur being very soft, and thick and glossy; in probably already begun to be troublesome, and size they are about equal to an English mastiff: -to molest the Egyptian merchant vessels. they have a long nose, delicate ears finely point

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CHAP. XXXV.] FAMILY OF PYRRHUS. 377 en95 being amongst the best of which the Greeks had any knowledge. In the heart of their country stood the ancient temple of Dodona, a name famous for generations before Delphi was yet in existence; the earliest seat of the Grecian oracles, whose ministers, the Selli, a priesthood of austerest life, received the answers of the god through no human prophet, but from the rustling voice of the sacred oaks which sheltered the temple. These traditions ascend to the most remote antiquity: but Epirus had its share also in the glories of the heroic age, and Pyrrhus the son of Achilles was said to have settled in the country of the Molossians after his return from Troy,96 and to have been the founder of the line of Molossian kings. The government, indeed, long bore the character of the heroic period; the kings, on their accession, were wont, it is said, to meet their assembled people97 at Passaron, and swore to govern according to the laws, while the people swore that they would maintain the monarchy according to the laws. In later times Epirus had become connected with Macedonia by the marriage of Olympias, an Epirot princess, with Philip the father of Alexander. Her brother, Alexander of Epirus, was killed, as we have seen, in Italy, where he had carried on war in defence of the Greek Italian cities against the Lucanians; and on his death his first cousin9s LEacides succeeded to the throne..Aacides married Pthia, the daughter of Menon of Pharsalus, a distinguished leader in the last struggle between Greece and Macedon after the death of Alexander, and the children of this marriage were two daughters, Troias and Deidamia, and one son, Pyrrhus. AEacides had taken part with his cousin Olympias,99 when Cassander wanted to destroy all the family of Alexander in order to seat Farl fortunes of Pyrhimself on the throne of Macedon. But Cassander had tampered,h,.ZHe isn brough up with some of the Epirot chiefs; the cause of Olympias was not popular, and the Epirots did not wish to be involved in a quarrel with the party which was likely to be the ruling power in Macedon. They accordingly met in a general assembly, and deposed and banished their king. AEacides himself was out of their power, as he was still in the field on the frontiers of Macedonia with the few soldiers who remained true to him, and his daughter Deidamia was with Olympias. But Pyrrhus, then an infant, had been left at home, and the rebel chiefs’~~ having murdered many of his father’s friends, sought for him also to destroy him. He was hurried off in his nurse’s arms by a few devoted followers, and carried safely into Illyria, where Glaucias, one of the Illyrian kings, protected him, and as his father was killed in battle soon afterwards,‘0~ Pyrrhus remained under Glaucius’ care, and was brought up by him along with his own children. Ten or eleven years afterwards, when the power of Cassander in Greece seemed to be tottering, and Demetrius Poliorcetes had re-estab- H recovers his father’ lished the democracy at Athens, Glaucias‘02 entered Epirus with throne, losesit, and roan armed force, and restored Pyrrhus to the throne.

But again coveritagain. the face of affairs changed; the great league between Cassander, Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Lysimachus was formed, and Demetrius was obliged to loosen his hold on Greece, that he might help his father in Asia; thus Cassander’s party recovered their influence in Epirus, and Pyrrhus, who was still only seventeen years old, was driven a second time into exile. He now joined Demetrius, who, besides their common enmity to Cassander, had married Deidamia his sister; ed, magnificent tail, legs of a moderate length, might mislead; as, for instance, he confounds with a body nicely rounded and compact.” Tharyntas or Tharypus, the great grandfather Travels in Albania, &c., Vol. I. p. 483. of Azacides, with Arybas his father, and makes 95 See Kruse’s Hellas, Vol. I.

p. 368, and the BEacides and Alexander brothers instead of authorities there quoted. cousins, unless by the term ” frater” he means I6 Pausanias I. 11. frater patruelis” and not ” frater germanus.” 97 Plutar(h, Pyrrhus, 56. 99 Diodorus, XIX. 36. 9’ Foi the family of Pyrrhus, see Plutarch, 100

Plutarch, Pyrrh. 2. Pyrrh. I. Pausanias, I. 11. Diodorus, XVI. 1o0

Diodorns, XIX. 74. 72, and XIX. 51. See also Justin, XVII. 3; but 102

Plutarch, Pyrrh. 3. in his account there are some things which

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378 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXV and with him he crossed over into Asia, and was present at the battle of Ipsus. After that great defeat he still remained faithful to Demetrius, and went as a hostage for him’~3 into Egypt, when Demetrius had concluded a separate peace with Ptolemy Soter.

Here fortune first began to smile upon him; he obtained the good opinion and regard of Ptolemy’s queen, Berenice, and received in marriage Antigone, her daughter by a former husband. By Berenice’s assistance he was supplied with men and money, and returned once more to Epirus. His kinsman, Neoptolemus, the son apparently of Alexander, who had died in Italy, had been placed on the throne, when he himself had been driven from it; but Neoptolemus was become unpopular, and Pyrrhus found many partisans. Dreading, however, lest Neoptolemus should apply to some foreign prince for aid, he entered into a compromise with him,‘04 and the two rivals agreed to share the regal power between them. The end of such an arrangement could not be doubtful; suspicions arose, and Pyrrhus accusing Neoptolemus of forming designs against his life, did himself what he charged his rival with meditating, and having treacherously murdered him, after having invited him to his table as a guest, he remained the sole sovereign of Epirus. HIis old enemy Cassander died in the first year of the 121st Olympiad, five Io interferes in the years after the battle of Ipsus. Not one of Alexander’s succesqu.arrels between the so’S had gained his power by more or worse crimes than Cassan-.o.s of C.ssander. der; and as his house had been founded in blood, by the murder of Alexander’s family, so now in its own blood was it to perish. His sons Antipater and Alexander’~5 quarrelled for his inheritance. Antipater murdered his own mother, Thessalonica, the daughter of the great Philip of Macedon, and halfsister of Alexander; and now the last survivor of the old royal family of the race of Hercules. Alexander his brother applied to Pyrrhus for aid, and purchased it by ceding to him all that the Macedonian kings had possessed on the western side of Greece; Tymphaea and Paraumea,‘5~ just under the central ridge which turns the streams to the two opposite seas,.and Ambracia, Acarnania, and Amphilochia, on the northern and southern shores of the Ambracian gulf. These were added permanently to the kingdom of Pyrrhus, and he fixed his capital at Ambracia. The price was thus paid, and Alexander drove out his brother, by Pyrrhus’ Extinetion of Cassan-help, and became king of Macedonia. Antipater fled to Lysima-:er’s fanily. chus for protection, and was afterwards put to death by him.‘01

Alexander was in his turn murdered by Demetrius Poliorcetes, who, after all his reverses, thus established his family on the throne of Macedon; and the bloody house of Cassander utterly perished. Six or seven years afterwards the restless ambition of Demetrius leagued his Pyrrlus wins Macedo-old enemies, Seleucus, Ptolemy, and Lysimachus, once more reigns vi Epit. nnH aga inst him, and they encouraged Pyrrhus to invade Macedonia. reigns over Epirus and ge o ifp ptag cof the neighbor-Pyrrhus dethroned Demetrius,‘08 and obtained possession of a part for aboutsixyers. of his dominions, the other part being claimed by Lysimachus.‘3 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 4.‘04 Ibid. 5. tribe; by Thucydides, II.

80, and it appears 105 Porphyry and Dexippus; apud Euseb. that Alexander was but restoring to Pyrrhus Chronic. Ed. Scaliger. p. 58, 63. Plutarch, countries which geographically belonged more Pyrrh. 6. to Epirus than to Macedon, and some of which 10o Plutarch, Pyrrh. 6. The present text had in earlier times been connected with it reads Trv re NvycQaiav kca ri’

raoaXnav a7 r MaKe0o-politically. via;. Palmer had corrected yrvUs0aitav or Tvtrpaiav In Stephanus Byzant. in Xaovta, there is a instead of Nvtepatav, and Niebuhr with no less quotation from Proxenus (an historian who certainty has restored Ilapavaiav for rapa~Xsav. wrote about Pyrrhus; see Dionys. Halic. XIX. Rom. Geschichte, Vol. III. p. 536. He ob-11, Fragm. Mai. and Fynes Clinton, Fasti Helserves that 7rapastav could only mean the coast len. Vol. III. 563) enumerating the people of between Dium and the Strymon, which it is ab-Chaonia. It runs, Tvp#alos, TapaXtotr, 1AlVPovsS, surd to suppose ceded to Pyrrhus. Tymphsea where K. O. Muller corrects Tvu0aot, rlapavarlo. and Parausea, Niebuhr adds, are mentioned to- “Uber die Makedoner. N. 33.” 7His correction gether by Arrian, Exped.

Alexand. I. 7, as and Niebuhr’s mutually confirni one another. countries which Alexander passed by on his 107 Porphyry and Dexippus, apud Euseb.

pp. march from Illyria into Thessaly. The Pa-58-63. Plutarch, Pyrrh. 7.

Demetrius, 36. raunans are reckoned along with the Epirot 108 Plutarch, Demetrius, 44. Pyrrh. 11.

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CHAP. XXXV.] HE IS INVITED TO ITALY. 379 But at the end of seven months‘09

Lysimachus made himself master of the whole of Macedonia, and drove Pyrrhus across the mountains into his native kingdom of Epirus. There he reigned in peace for about six years, his dominions including not Epirus only, but those other countries which had been the price of his first interference in the quarrels of Cassander’s sons, Tymphzea and Parauaea on the frontiers of Macedonia, and the coasts on both sides of the Ambracian gulf. He united himself in an alliance with his neighbors the,Etolians, which was renewed in the reign of his son. And thus he had leisure to ornament his new capital, Ambracia, which he enlarged by adding-to it a new quarter”s called after his own name, and decorated it with an unusual number of statues and pictures. But although Pyrrhus himself was reigning peaceably in Epirus, yet the period which elapsed between his expulsion from Macedonia and his Ital-RevolutionaduringthM ian expedition was marked by great revolutions elsewhere. Ptol-period in other counemy, the founder of the Macedonian dynasty in Egypt, died after a reign or dominion of forty years from the death of Alexander. Demetrius Poliorcetes ended his days about the same time after a two years’ captivity in Syria.

Lysimachus was killed soon afterwards, as has been already mentioned,, in a battle with Seleucus, and Seleucus himself, the last survivor of Alexander’s immediate successors, was murdered seven months after his victory by Ptolemy Ceraunus. The murderer, who was half brother to Ptolemy Philadelphus, the second of the Macedonian kings of Egypt, took possession of the vacant throne of Macedonia, and became immediately involved in war with Antiochus, son of Seleucus, and with Antigonus, the son of Demetrius;”’ the first of whom wished to revenge his father’s death, while the other was trying to recover Macedonia, which, as having been held by his father during six or seven years, he regarded as his lawful inheritance. In the mean time, he was actually the sovereign of Thessaly, and exercised a great power over all the states of Greece; and was in alliance with Pyrrhus and the,Etolians. The Greeks, as we have seen, made a fruitless attempt to assert their independence, by attacking his allies, the iEtolians; but they were easily beaten, and Antigonus seems to have reigned without further molestation in Thessaly and Boeotia, whilst Ptolemy Ceraunus still held his ill-gotten power in Macedonia. Things were in this state when ambassadors”2 fiom Tarentum entreated Pyrrhus to cross over into Italy, to protect both themselves and the Pyrrhus is invited by other Greek cities of Italy firom a barbarian enemy far more for-tlH

T.rentine, i1to midable than the Lucanians, the old enemies of his kinsman Alex-Italy. ander. Times were now so changed that the Lucanians and Samnites were leagued in one common cause with the Greeks, with whom they had been so long at enmity; the Etruscans had taken part also in the confederacy; yet the united efforts of so many states were too weak to resist the new power which had grown up in the centre of Italy, and -was fast arriving at the dominion of the whole peninsula. To conquer these fierce barbarians, and to save so many Greek cities from slavery was a work that well became the kinsman of the great Alexander, the descendant of Achilles and AEacus. The prayer of the Tarentines suited well with the temper and the circumstances of Pyrrhus. He promised them his aid, and began forthwith to prepare for his passage to Italy, and for his war with the Romans.,” Porphyry and Dexippus, apud Euseb. pp.‘l Justin, XXIV. 1.

Memnon, apud Pho. 68-63. tium, p. 226. Ed. Bekker. 1ie See Polybius, XXII.

0, 13. 12 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 13.

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CHAPTER XXXVI. ROME AND THE ROMAN PEOPLE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR WITH

THE TARENTINES AND WITH PYRRHUS. ” Privatus illis census erat brevis Commune magnum; nulla decempedis Metata privatis opacam Porticus excipiebat Arcton, Nec fortuitum spernere cespitem 4eges sinebant, oppida publico Sumtu jubentes et deorum Templa novo decorare saxo.” HORAT.

Carmin. II. 15. THE preceding chapter has been compiled from materials which in their actual Sketch of the internal state are often fragmentary, and even when they are perfect, are ttat of Rome. not original. But yet they were derived from original sources; for although the contemporary histories of Alexander’s successors have long since perished, yet they did once exist, and were accessible to the writers whom we read and copy now.

We cross the Adriatic to inquire into the state of Italy, and not only are our existing materials the merest wreck of a lost history, not only would they tell their story to us at second hand, if they had been preserved entire; but even these very accounts could have been taken from no contemporary historians, for none such ever existed. In this absolute dearth of direct information, it is impossible that the following sketch should be other than meagre, and it must also rest partly on conjecture.

Unsatisfactory as this is, yet the nature of the case will allow of nothing better; and I can but encourage myself, while painfully feeling my way amid such thick darkness, with the hope of arriving at length at the light, and enjoying all the freshness and fulness of a detailed contemporary history. In the middle of the fifth century, the Roman people was divided into threeThe divisionsof the Ro-and-thirty tribes;’ and the total number of citizens, which included, oon people.: besides those enrolled in the tribes, the aerarians, and the people of those foreign states, which had been obliged to receive the civitas sine suffragio, amounted to 272,000.2 What proportion of these were enrolled in the tribes, or, in other words, enjoyed the full rights of citizenship, we cannot tell, nor have we any means of estimating the number of the aerarians; nor again, can we draw any inference as to the population of the city of Rome, as distinguished from the country tribes; nor can we at all compute the proportion of slaves at this time to freemen. The class of vararians, however, must have been greatly diminished, since freedmen and persons engaged in retail trade or manufactures had been enrolled in the tribes; and it could have only contained those 1 That is to say, twenty tribes are known to tribes were created, which included the Priverhave existed in the earliest period of the com-natians, and the settlers in the Falernian plain. monwealth, and another was added soon afterAnd, lastly, after the Equian war, two moro wards. The number of twenty-one continued were added in 455, the Aniensian and the Tetill after the Gaulish invasion, when four more rentine, in which were enrolled the.Equians. were added on the right bank of the Tiber, in All these are clearly local tribes, and their 368; namely, the Stellatine, the Tromentine, situation is well known. The same may be the Sabatine, and the Arniensian. Two more said of the four city tribes, the Colline, the Eswere added in 397 for the inhabitants of the old quiline, the Palatine, and the tribe of Subura. Volscian lowlands near the Pomptine marshes, But to the remaining seventeen, which are the Pomptine and the Publilian. Two more were mostly named after some nokle Roman family, added after the Latin war in 422, the Mecian as the.Emilian, the Cornelian, the Fabian, &c., and the Scaptian, for the Lanuvians and some it is extremely difficult to assign their propeg other people of Latium. In the second Sam-locality. nite war, in 436-7, the Ufentine and Falerian 2 Livy, Epit. XI.

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CHAP. XXXVI.] MANNER OF LIFE OF THE COUNTRY TRIBES. 381 who had forfeited their franchise, either in consequence of their having incurred legal infamy, or by the authority of the censors. The members of the country tribes, of those at least which had been created within the last century, lived on their lands, and probably only Manner of life of th, went up to Rome to vote at the elections, or when any law of citizens of the eonntry great national importance was proposed, and there was a powerful party opposed to its enactment. They were also obliged to appear on the Capitol on the day fixed by the consuls for the enlistment of soldiers for the legions.3 Law business might also call them up to Rome occasionally, and the Roman games, or any other great, festival, would no doubt draw them thither in great numbers. With these exceptions, and when they were not serving in the legions, they lived on their small properties in the country; their business was agriculture, their recreations were country sports, and their social pleasures were found in the meetings of their neighbors at seasons of festival; at these times there would be dancing, music, and often some pantomimic acting, or some rude attempts at dramatic dialogue, one of the simplest and most universal amusements of the human mind. This was enough to satisfy all their intellectual cravings; of the beauty of painting, sculpture, or architecture, of the charms of eloquence and of the highest poetry, of the deep interest which can be excited by inquiry into the causes of all the wonders around us and within us, of some of the highest and most indispensable enjoyments of an Athenian’s nature, the agricultural Romans of the fifth century had no notion whatsoever. But it was not possible that an equal simplicity should have existed at Rome. Their close and constant intercourse with other men sharpens and And ofthoseofthecity awakens the faculties of the inhabitants of cities; and country Studyofthe law. Ap pius Claudius, Ti. Coo. sports being by the necessity of the case denied to them, they upncunius,andthe Ogul learn earlier to value such pleasures as can be supplied by the art or genius of man. Besides, the conduct of political affairs on a large scale, much more when these affairs are publicly discussed either in a council or in a popular assembly, cannot but create an appreciation of intellectual power and of eloquence; and the multiplied transactions of civil life, leading perpetually to disputes, and these disputes requiring a legal decision, a knowledge of law became a valuable accomplishment, and the study of law, which is as wholesome to the human mind as the practice of it is often injurious, was naturally a favorite pursuit with those who had leisure, and who wished either to gain influence or to render services. Thus the family of the Claudii seem always to have aspired after civil rather than military distinction. Appius Claudius, the censor, was a respectable soldier, but he is much better known by his great public works and by his speech against making peace with Pyrrhus, than by his achievements in war; nay, it is said, that his plebeian colleague in the consulship, L. Volumnius, taunted him with his legal knowledge and his eloquence, as if he could only talk4 and not fight. The Claudii, however, were distinguished by their high nobility, independently of any personal accomplishments; but the family of the Coruncanii owed its celebrity entirely, so far as it appears, to their acquaintance with the law. Ti.

Coruncanius5 was consul with P. Laevinus in the year when Pyrrhus came into Italy, and was named dictator more than thirty years afterwards for the purpose of holding the comitia. He left no writings behind him, but was accustomed to the very latest period of his life to give answers on points of law to all that chose to consult him; and his reputation was so high that he was the first plebeian6 who was ever appointed to the dignity of pontifex maximus. The Ogulnii also appear to have been a family distinguished for knowledge and accomplishments. Two brothers of this name were, as we have seen, the authors of the law which threw open the offices of Polybius, VI. 19. 5 Pomponius, de Origine Juris, 35, 88. Ci-‘ Livy, X. 19. cero, Brutus, 14. Cato Major, 9. ~ Livy, Epit. XVIII.

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382 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVI augur and pontifex to the commons, and afterwards in their aedileship they ornamented the city with several works of art; and one of them, besides his embassy to Epidaurus, already noticed, was sent as one of three ambassadors7 to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, soon after the retreat of Pyrrhus from Italy. There was as yet no regular drama, for Livius Andronicus did not begin to exTotal absence of a.lllit - hibit his plays till after the first Punic war;’ but there were panerataure. tomimric dances performed by Etruscan actors;9
there were the saturee” or medleys, sung and acted by native performers; and there were the comic or satirical dialogues on some ludicrous story (fabelle atellanae), in which the actors were of a higher rank, as this entertainment was rather considered an old national custom, than a spectacle exhibited for the public rnusement. There were no famous poets, nor any Homer, to embody in an imperishable form the poetical traditions of his country; but there were the natural elements cf poetry, and the natural love of it; and it was long the custom at all entertainments” that each guest in his turn should sing some heroic song, recording the worthy deeds of some noble Roman. So also there was no history, but there was the innate desire of living in the memory of after-ages; and in all the great families, panegyrical orations were delivered at the funeral of each of their members, containing a most exaggerated account of his life and actions.‘2 These orations existed in the total absence of all other statements, and from these chiefly the annalists of the succeeding century compiled their narratives; and thus every war is made to exhibit a series of victories, and all the most remarkable characters in the Roman story are represented as men without reproach, or of heroic excellence. But whilst literature was unknown, and poetry, and even the drama itself, Pblic amusements. were in their earliest infancy, the Romans enjoyed with the keen The great games of the est delight the sports of the circus, which resembled the great national games of Greece. Every year in the month of September‘3 four days were devoted to the celebration of what were called indifferently, the Great or the Roman Games. Like all the spectacles of the ancient world, they were properly a religious solemnity, a great festival in honor of the three national divinities of the Capitoline temple, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. On the first day of the festival, the whole people went in procession!4 from the Capitol through the Forum to the circus; there the sacrifice was performed, and afterwards the exhibition of the various games began, which was so entirely a?

Dionysius, XX. 4. Fragm. Vatic. Valeor. Roman Antiquities. The view of the circus Maxim. IV. 3. ~ 9. and the Palatine, given in Panvinius’ work, is 8

Clinton, Fasti IIellenici, Vol. 11I. p. 25, B. c. curious as showing how greatly Rome has 240. changed in the last 250 years. A shorter ac9 Livy, VII. 2. count may be found in Rosini and Dempster’s I am not venturing to determine the ety-work on Roman antiquities; and the topogiolo0gy of this word, but giving merely a de-raphy of the circus is given in Bunsen and scription of the thing. ” Olim carmen quod ex Platner’s description of Rome, Vol. III. p. 91. vatriis poemrnatibus constabat, satyra vocabatur, Gibbon has given one of his lively and comnquale scripserunt Pacuvius et Ennius.” Dio-prehensive sketches of the games of the circus, medes, III.

9. Livy speaks of the saturn or in his account of the reign of Justinian, which satyrs, as an intermediate state in the dramatic notices every important point in the subject. art between the acting of regular stories with a A representation of the circus is given on sevplot, and the mere rude sparring with coarse eral coins which may be seen in Panvinius’

jests, “versum incompositum temere ac rudem work, and which enables us to form a sufficient ailternis jaciebant,” which used to go on between notion of its appearance. The bands or factions two perfoemers. The saturae appear, then, to of the drivers are noticed in numerous inscriphave been comic songs in regular verse, in tions. which a great variety of subjects were succes-14 Tertullian, De Spectaculis, VII. I-is enusively noticed, without any more connection meration of the several parts of the great prothan as being each of them points on which the cession is full and lively. ” De, simulacrorum hearers could be readily excited to laughter.

serie, de imaginum agrmine, de curribus, de n” Cicero, Brutus, 19.

thensis, de armamaxis, de sedibus, de coronis, 12 Cicero, Brutus, 16.

Livy, VIII. 40. de exuviis, quanta prseterea sacra, quanta sac13 The fullest work on the games of the cir-rificia prnecedant, intercedant, succedant, quot cuns is, I suppose, that of Onuphrius Panvinius collegia, qunot sacerdotia, quot officia moveantur, (Onofrio Panvini, a Veronese, who flourished. sciunt homines illius urbis in qua deemoiornum inl the latter part of the 16th century), published colventus consedit.” in the ninth volume of Gruevius’ Collection of

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CIAs. XXXVI.] PUBLIC BUILDINGS, TEMPLES, ETC. 383 national ceremony, that the’magistrate of highest rank who happened to be in Rome gave the signal for the starting of the horses in the chariot race. The circus itself was especially consecrated to the sun, and the colors by which the drivers of the chariots were distinguished, were supposed to have a mystical allusion to the different seasons.‘5 Originally there were only two colors, white and red, the one a symbol of the snows of winter, the other of the fiery heat -of summer; but two others were afterwards added, the spring-like green, and the autumnal gray or blue. The charioteers, who wore the same colors, were called the red or white, or green or blue band (factio), and these bands became in later times the subject of the strongest party feeling; for men attached themselves either to the one or the other, and would have as little been induced to change their color in the circus as their political party in the commonwealth. It does not appear that these colors were connected with any real differences, social or political; there were no ideas of which they were severally the symbols; and thus, while the commonwealth lasted, the bands of the circus seem to have excited no deeper or more lasting interest than the wishes of their respective partisans for their success in the chariot race. But afterwards,?when ttie emperor was known to favor any one color moIe than another, that color would naturally become the badge of his friends, and the opposite color the rallying point of his enemies; and when a real political feeling was connected with these symbols, it was not wonderful that the bands of the circus became truly factions, and that their quarrels in the lower empire should have sometimes deluged Constantinople with blood. The Romans in the fifth century enjoyed the games as keenly as their descendants under the emperors; but the lavish magnificence of the imperial circus was as yet altogether unknown. Wooden boxes‘6 ous temples built amed supported on poles, like the simplest form of a stand on an Eng-onamented lish race-course, were the best accommodation as yet provided for the spectra tors; and it was only in the fifth century that the carceres‘7 were first erected, a line of buildings of the common volcanic tufo of Rome itself, extending along one end of the circus, each with a door opening upon the course, from which the horses were brought out to take their places, before they started on the race. But although the works of this period were simple, yet they now began to be very numerous, and some of them were on a scale of very imposing grandeur. Livy has recorded the building of seven new temples‘8 within ten years, between 452 and 462; for the period immediately following we have no detailed history, but the foundation of the temple of ZEsculapius, about two years later, is noticed in the epitome of Livy’s eleventh book; and many others may have been founded, of which we have no memorial. It is mentioned also that C. Fabius’” ornamented one of these temples, that of Deliverance from Danger, with frescoes of his own execution, in consequence of which he obtained the surname of Pictor. The date of the Greek artists, Damophilus and Gorgasus,2~ who painted the frescoes of the temple of Ceres, close by the circus, we have no means of determining, but several notices show that a taste for the arts was beginning at this time to be felt at Rome. The colossal bronze statue of Jupiter, set up by Sp. Carvilius in the Capitol, in the year 461, has been already noticed, as well as the famous group of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, which was placed in the comitium three years before. And at the same time a statue of Jupiter in 15

Tertullian, ibid. VIII. IX. in the great battle of Sentinumn (X. 29); a third.’~ Livy, I. 35. near the circus, dedicated to Venus (X. 31); a 1

Livy, VIII. 20. Suetonius in Claud. 21. fourth dedicated to Victory (X.

33); a fifth to There are representations of the carceres in one Jupiter the Stayer of Flight (X. 37); a sixth to or two of the engravings of Panvinius’ work, Fortis Fortuna (X. 46); and a seventh to Salus, copied from antiques. or Deliverance from Danger, which was the t, Namely, a temple of Bellona, vowed by temple painted by Fabius Pictor (Livy. X. 1).

Appius Claudius in 458 (Livy, X. 19); another 19 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XXXV.

~ 19. of Jupiter the Victorious, vowed by Q. Fabius 20 Pliny, Hist. Natur.

XXXV. 45.

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384 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVI a chariot drawn by four horses,2’ the work of an Etruscan artist, and wrought in clay, was erected on the summit of the Capitol. The temple of Bellona, built by Appius Claudius22 in fulfilment of a vow made Family images worn on the field of battle, was decorated with a row of shields or like masks at funeralf. escutcheons, on which were represented his several ancestors with scrolls recording the offices which they had filled, and the triumphs which they had won.

Whoever of these had been the father of a family was represented with all his children by his side, as in some of our old monuments. In these and in all similar works, an exact likeness23 was considered of much greater importance than any excellence of art; for the object desired was to transmit to posterity a lively image of those who had in their generation done honor to their name and family. For this purpose waxen busts, the scorn of the mere artist, were kept in cases ranged along the sides of the court in the houses of all great families; these were painted to the life, and being hollow, were worn like a mask24 at funerals by some of the dependents of the family, who also put on the dress of the office of rank of him whose semblance they bore; so that it seemed as if the dead were attended to his grave by all the members of his race of past generations, no less than by those who still survived. None were so represented who had not in their lifetime filled some honorable public station, and thus the number of images worn at any funeral was the exact measure of the family’s nobility. No other aqueduct had yet been added to that constructed by Appius ClauThe Appian rod paved dius in his famous censorship; nor had any later road rivalled as far as Bovill. tile magnificence of the Appian.

This was paved with lava in the year 461, from the temple of Mars,25 a little on the outside of the city walls, to Bovillke, at the foot of the Alban hills. The city itself was still confined within the walls of Servius Tullius. The Extent and aspect of Capitol and the Quirinal hills formed its northern limit, and the city. looked down immediately on the open space of the Campus Martius, now covered with the greatest part of the buildings of modern Rome. Art or caprice had not yet effaced the natural features of the ground, by cutting down hills and filling up valleys, nor had the mere lapse of time as yet raised the soil by continued accumulations to a height far above its original level. The hills, with their bare, rocky sides, and covered in many parts with sacred groves, the remains of their primeval woods, rose distinctly and boldly from the valleys between them; on their summits were the principal temples and the houses of -the noblest families; beneath were the narrow streets and lofty houses,26 roofed only with wood, of the more populous quarters of the city, and in the midst, reaching from the Capitoline hill to the Palatine, lay the comitium and the Roman Forum. A spot so famous well deserves to be described, that we may conceive its prinDescription of the Fo-cipal features, and image to ourselves the scene as well as the actors ruan, in so many of the great events of the Roman history. From the foot of the Capitoline hillV to that of the Palatine, there ran an open space of 21 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XXXV. 158. the ancestors of the first Appius, and what; Pliny (Hist. Nat. XXXV. 2, 3) ascribes offices could they have filled at Rome, when he these shields to the first Appius Claudius, who himself was the first of his family who became was consul with P.

Servilius in 259. But un-a Roman 2 less the words ” qui consul cum Servilio fuit 23 Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXXV. 4. 6. anno urbis CCLIX.” are an unlucky gloss of 24 Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXXV. 6. Polybius, some ignorant reader, as is most probable, they VI. 53. seem to show an extraordinary carelessness in a Livy, X. 47. Pliny himself; for to say nothing of the direct 26 Pliny, XVI. ~ 36, quoting from Cornelius testimony, which ascribes the foundation of the Nepos. temple of Bellona to Appius the Blind in 458, 2 The whole of the following description of Pliny’s own statement says, that Appius caused the Forum is taken from Bunsen’s article in the the figures of his ancestors, and scrolls record-third volume of the “Beschreibung def Stadt ing the offices which they had filled, to be af-Rom.” The substance of this article has been fixed to this temple: but who could have been given by its author in another form, in a letter

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CHAP. XXXVI.] DESCRIPTION OF THE FORUM. 385 unequal breadth, narrowing as it approached the Palatine, and enclosed on both sides between two branches of the Sacred Way. Its narrower end was occupied by the comitium, the place of meeting of the populus or great council of the burghers in the earliest times of the republic, whilst its wider extremity was the Forum, in the stricter sense, the market-place of the Romans, and therefore the natural place of meeting for the commons, who formed the majority of the Roman nation. The comitium was raised a little above the level of the Forum, like the dais or upper part of our old castle and college halls, and at its extremity nearest the Forum stood the rostra, such as I have already described it, facing at this period towards the comitium, so that the speakers addressed, not indeed the patrician multitude as of old, but the senators, who had, in a manner, succeeded to their place, and who were accustomed to stand in this part of the assembly, immediately in front of the senate-house, which looked upon the comitium from the northern side of the Via Sacra. The magnificent basilicae, which at a later period formed the two sides cf the Forum, were not yet in existence, but in their place there were two rows of solid square pillars of peperino, forming a front to the shops of various kinds, which lay behind them. These shops were like so many cells, open to the street, and closed behind, and had no communication with the houses which were built over them. Those on the north side of the Forum had been rebuilt or improved during the early part of the fifth century, and were called in consequence the new shops, a name which, as usual in such cases, they retained for centuries. On the south side, the line of shops was interrupted by the temple of Castor and Pollux, which had been built, according to the common tradition, by the dictator, A. Postumius, in gratitude for the aid afforded him by the twin heroes in the battle of the lake Regillus. On the same side also, but further to the eastward, and nearly opposite to the senate-house, was the temple of Vesta, and close to the temple was that ancient monument of the tinles of the kings which went by the name of the court of Numa. In the open space of the Forum might be seen an altar which marked the spot once occupied by the Curtian pool, the subject of such various tra-Statues, &c.,in theFoditions. Hard by grew the three sacred trees28 of the oldest rum. known civilization, the fig, the vine, and the olive, which were so carefully preserved or renewed that they existed even in the time of the elder Pliny. Further towards the Capitol, at the western extremity of the Forum, were the equestrian statues of C. Maenius and L. Camillus, the conquerors of the Latins. Nor was the interior of the comitium destitute of objects entitled to equal veneration. There was the black stone which marked, according to one tradition, the grave of Faustulus, the foster-father of Romulus, Joteq of intorot in. the according to another that of Romulus himself. There was the comitu statue of Attius Navius, the famous augur; and there too was the sacred figtree, under whose shade the wolf had given suck to the two twins, Romulus and Remus. A group of figures representing the wolf and twins had been recently set up in this very place by the sediles, Q. and Cn. Ogulnius, and the figtree the Chevalier Canina, written in French (Rome, history, that his topography is necessarily ren1837). He has also prefixed to some impressions dered of less value. Bunsen has had every adof his German article, which have been printed vantage of local knowledge no less than Nibby, separately, all the passages in the ancient writers but with his local knowledge he combines othei which throw any light on the topography of the qualities which Nibby is far from possessing Forum. equally. Since this chapter was written, I have seen However, the general correctness of the loeNibby’s latest work on the topography of Rome, scription of the Forum in the fifth century of which was published in 1839. His plan of the Rome, as given in the text, is indepenent of Forum differs topographically from Bunsen’s; the question whether the position of the Forum he places it further to the west, and arranges is to be fixed a certain number of yards more the buildings differently. But historically his to the eastward or to the westward. And most views are so imperfect, and he follows so con-of those buildings, the site of which has been tentedly the old popular accounts, without the so much disputed, were not in existence at the slightest knowledge, so far as appears, of the period to which this sketch relates. light which Niebuhr has thrown on the Roman 28 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XV. ~ 78. 25

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386 HISTORY OF ROME. ECHAP. XXXVI itself had been removed by the power of Attius Navius, so said the story,29 from its original place under the Palatine, that it might stand in the midst of the meetings of the Roman people. Nor were statues wanting to the comitium any more than to the Forum. Here were the three sibyls, one of the oldest works of Roman art; here also were the small figures of the Roman ambassadors who had been slain at Fidenae by the Veientian king Tolumnius; and here too, at the edge of the comitium where it joined the Forum, were the statues which the Romans, at the command of the De]phian oracle, had erected in honor of the wisest and bravest of the Greeks, the statues of Pythagoras and Alcibiades. The outward appearance of the Forum in the fifth century was very different characterof the popufrom its aspect in the times of the Caesars, and scarcely less difklaton; the shops, c. ferent was the population by which it was frequented at either period. Rome was not yet the general resort of strangers from all parts of the world; the Tiber was as yet not only unpolluted by the Syrian Orontes, but its waters had received no accession from the purer streams of Greece; and the crowd which thronged the Forum, however numerous and busy, consisted mainly of the citizens, or at least of the inhabitants of Rome. The shops of the silversmiths had lately superseded those of a less showy character on the north side of the Forum; but, on the other side, the butchers’ and cooks’

shops still remained, as in the days of Virginius, and it marks the manners of the times, that the wealthier citizens used to hire cooks30
from these places to bake their bread for them, having as yet no slaves who understood even the simplest parts of the art of cookery. The names of the principal families, as well as of the most distinguished men Orent families of thi, of this period, have naturally been mentioned already in the course period. - of the narrative. It is enough to remark that Appius Claudius was still alive, though now old and blind, that M. Valerius Corvus was also living, but his public career had been for some time ended; and that Q. Fabius, the hero of the third Samnite war, had died not long after its conclusion. Q. Publilius Philo was also dead, and with him expired the nobility of his family. But there were ready to meet Pyrrhus, the two victorious generals of the great campaign of 461, L. Papirius Cursor and Sp. Carvilius Maximus; M’. Curius Dentatus was still in the vigor of life, and Q. Fabius and P. Decius had both left sons to uphold the honor of their name. The great Cornelian house contributed eminent citizens for their country’s service from three of its numerous branches; among the consuls of the fourth Samnite war we find a Cornelius Lentulus, a Cornelius Rufinus, and a Cornelius Dolabella. Two other names will demand our notice for the first time, those of C. Fabricius and L.

Cmecilius Metellus, the first pre-eminent in the purest personal glory, but a glory destined to pass away from his family after one generation, “
no son of his succeeding;” while L. Caecilius, if he did not attain himself to the highest distinction, was yet “the father of a line of more than kings,” of those illustrious Metelli who, from the first Punic war to the end of the commonwealth, were amongst the noblest and the best citizens of Rome. Against a whole nation of able and active men the greatest individual genius of a single enemy must ever strive in vain. The victory of Pyrrhus at Heraclea was endangered by a rumor that he was slain, for in his person lay the whole strength of his army and of his cause. But had the noblest of the Fabii or Cornelii fallen at the head of a Roman army, the safety of the commonwealth would not have been for a single moment in jeopardy. This contrast alone was sufficient to ensure the decision of the great war on which we are now about to enter.’ The passage in Pliny which mentions this 0 Pliny, Histor. Natur. XVIII. ~ 108.

So in story, XV. ~ 77, is clearly corrupt, and various the Aulularia of Plautus, the cooks are hired in corrections of it have been attempted.

Bunsen the Forum to go to Euclio’s house, and dress has given one in a note to his article on the his daughter’s wedding dinner. Forum, Beschreib. der Stadt. Rom. III. p. 62.

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CHAPTER XXXVII, FOREIGN HISTORY FROM 464 TO 49 WARS WITH THE ETRUSCANS, GAULS, AND TARENTINES-FOURTH SAMNITE WAR-PYRRHUS KING OF EPIRUS IN

ITALY-BATTLES OF HERACLEA, ASCIULUIM, AND BENEVENTUM. Non Simois tibi nec Xanthus nee Dorica castra Defaerint; alius Latio jam partus Achilles.

VIRGIL, Eln. VI. 87. TiiH third Samnite war ended in the year 464, and Pyrrhus invaded Italy exactly ten years later, in the year 474. The events of the inter~ven-Fourth Semnite we, ing period, both foreign and domestic, are, as we have seen, in-and coalition against volved in the deepest obscurity; but as I have attempted t c pre-Rome. sent an outline of the internal state of Rome, so I must. now endeavor to;race the perplexed story of her foreign relations, from the first seeds of war, which the jealousy of the Tarentines either sowed or earnestly fostered, to the organization of that great coalition, in which the Gauls at first, and Pyrrhus afterwards, were principal actors. On the side of Etruria there had been for a long time past neither’certain peace nor vigorous war. Jealousies, between city and city, and -party State and dispositions revolution in the several cities themselves, were, as we’have seen, ofthe Etruscans. forever compromising the tranquillity and paralyzing the exertions of the Etruscan nation. In 461 the cities of southern Etruria had taken up arms, and had persuaded the Faliscans to join them;’ and in‘462 we hear of victories obtained over the Faliscans by the consul, D.

Junius Brutus.’ No further particulars are known of the progress of the contest, but it appears from the epitome of Livy’s eleventh book, that at some time or other within the next eight years, the people of Vulsinii took a principal part in it, and in 471 the whole, or nearly the whole, of the Etruscan nation were engaged in it once again. Further to the north “the Senonian Gauls remained’quiet,” says Polybius,2 “for a period of ten years after the battle of Sentinum.” If we take this statement to the letter, we must fix the renewal of the Gaulish war in 469; yet we cannot trace any act of hostility till the year 471. The Gauls appear first to have engaged as mercenaries in the Etruscan service, and afterwards to have joined the new coalition in their own name. To the south of Rome, Lucania, during the third Samnite war, had remained faithful to the Romans, and in the year 460 we expressly read of Of the Lucianis. and Lucanian cohorts serving with the Roman legions. Of Tarentum Taro.tine.

nothing is recorded after its short war with the Lucanians and Romans in 451, which appears to have been ended, as I have already observed,4 by anequal treaty. Italy was in this state when the Lucaitians attacked the Greek city of.Thurii. We know not the cause or pretext of the quarrel, but those unforThe Luc.nians attack tunate Greek cities of Italy were at this time the prey of every Thria, app, tthe Thespoiler; Agathocles had made repeated expeditions to that coast ns for aid. in the latter years of his reign, and had taken Croton and Hipponium,5 while the Italian nations of the interior had from time immemorial regarded them as enemies. Thurii itself had been taken by Cleonymus in 4526 when he was playing Zonaras, VIII. 1. See chap. XXXIII. 2 Polybius, II. 19. Diodorus, XXI. 4, 8, Fragm.

Hoesclhol. s Livy, X. 33. 6 Livy, X. 2.

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388 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. XXXVIL the buccaneer along all the coasts of Italy; and a Roman army had then come to its aid, but too late to prevent its capture. This was perhaps remembered now, when the city was threatened by the Lucanians, and the Romans were implored once again to bring help to the people of Thurii. The request was not at first granted; as far as we can mnlake out the obscure story of these times, the first attacks must have been made about the period of the domestic troubles at Rome, when the commons occupied the Janiculum, and obliged the senate to consent to the Hortensian laws. During two successive summers, the Lucanians ravaged the territory of Thurii,1 and so far as appears, there was no power of resistance in the inhabitants themselves, and no foreign sword was drawn to defend them. Meanwhile the Hortensian laws were passed, and with them, or shortly before, The eople i their an agrarian law had been passed also.

The power of the assembly tribesvote for w.r..with of the tribes had been acknowledged to be sovereign, and the popular party for some years from this time, feeling itself to have the disposal of all that the state might conquer, appears to have been as fond of war as ever was the Athenian democracy under Pericles, while the aristocratical party, for once only in the history of Rome, seems to have adopted the peaceful policy of Cimon and Nicias. C. z.Elius, one of the tribunes, proposed and carried in the assembly of the tribes what Pliny8 calls a law against Stenius Statilius,9
the captain-general of the Lucanians; in other words, he moved that war should be declared against Stenius Statilius and all his followers and abettors; and the tribes gave their votes for it accordingly.,The people of Thurii voted to _Elius, as a mark of their gratitude, a statue and a crown of gold, and probably a Roman army was sent to their aid, and relieved them from the present danger; but the Lucanians were not subdued, and it was evident that they would not be left to contend against Rome single-handed. 7 The data for the arrangement of all these it in the very year 468, when C. Elius was conevents in order of time are as follows: 1.

The sul. On the whole, I would arrange these interposition of the Romans in behalf of the events in the following order: Thurians is mentioned in the epitome of the A. U. C. 464. End of the third Samnite war. eleventh book of Livy, and the twelfth book be-A. U. C. 466, 467. Lucanians attack the Thugan apparently with the consulship of Dolabella rians. and Domitius in the year 471. 2. M’. Curius A. U. C. 467. The Iortensian laws. C.

obtained an ovation or smaller triumph for his Elius, tribune, carries his motion in the assemvictories over the Lucanians. (Auctor de Viris bly of the tribes for a war with the Lucanians. Illstribus, in M’. Curio.) This must either A. U. C. 468. C. Elius, consul, chosen perhave been in the year after his consulship, when haps as a reward for his popular conduct ill his he was perhaps prcetor, or else in 471, when we tribuneship. know that he was appointed prator after the A. U. C. 471. M’. Curius prector.

His ovadefeat and death of L. Cacilius. 3. But when tion over the Lucanians. C. 2Elius carried his resolution for a war with A. U. C. 472.

C. Fabricius consul. He doethe Lucanians, the Lucanian general Sthtilius feats the Lucanians and raises the siege of had twice assailed the Thurians (” bis infestave-Thurli. rat, Pliny, Hist. Natur. XXXIV. ~ 32), which, If it be thought that this scheme leaves too I think, implies that he had ravaged their lands great an interval between the declaration of war for’ two successive years; but the peace with against the Lucanians, and any recorded events the Samuites was only concluded in the year of the war (although, in the total absence of all when Curius was consul; and throughout the details of this period, this objection is not of war the Lucanians were in alliance with Rome, much weight), then we must suppose that C. nor were they likely then to meddle with the 2Elius, the tribune, and C. Elius, the consul, Thurians. 4. C. 2Elius passed his resolution as were different persons; and we might then tribune; but before the Hortensian laws were place the resolution against the Lucanians a carried, such a resolution was not likely to have year or two later. But it seems more probable been brought forward by a tribune, nor would that the consul and the tribune were one and it have been carried had the senate been opposed the same man, and then I think the above scheme to it; and had they not been opposed to it, it offers fewer difficulties than any other.

would have been moved probably by one of the Histor. Natur. XXIV. ~ 32.

consuls with their authority. 5. There is a C. 3 It was probably a rogatio to the following 2Elius recorded in the consular Fasti, as having effect: ” Vellent juberentne cum Stenio Statilio been consul in 468; we do not know whether Lucanorum praetore, quique ejus sectam secuti this is the same person with the tribune; but essent, helium iniri.” If there was a Roman if he were, his tribuneship, as preceding his party still predominant in any part of Lucania, consulship, must have taken place before the it would explain why the rogatio should have year 468. 6. The date of the Hortensian laws rather specified Statilius personally than deie -lnknown, but several modern writers place clared war against the whole Lucanian people.

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CHAP. XXXVII.] ROMAN AMBASSADORS MASSACRED. 389 These events appear to have taken place about six years after the conclusion of the third Samnite war, in the year 470, when C. Servilius Tucca The Tareatinee are bu and L.

CXecilius Metellus were consuls. Whatever was the cause, sy in forning a coalition against Rome. the Tarentines’~ at this period were most active in forming a new coalition against Rome. They endeavored to excite the Samnites to renew the.war, and the Samnites, with the Lucanians, Apulians, and Bruttians, were to form a confederacy in the south of Italy, of which Tarentum was to be the head. The Romans sent C. Fabricius to the several Samnite and Apulian cities, to persuade them, if possible, to remain true to their alliance with Rome. But the states to whom he was sent laid hands on him and arrested him, and then dispatched an embassy with all speed into Etruria, to secure, if possible, the aid of the Etruscans, Umbrians, and Gauls. Fabricius, we may suppose, was made a hostage for the safety of those Samnite hostages who had been demanded by the Romans after the late peace, and his release was probably the stipulated price of theirs. In the following year, 471, the Roman consuls were P. Cornelius Dolabella and Cn.

Domitius Calvinus. The storm broke out against Rome in every direction. In the south the Samnites, Lucanians, Brut-Etrescans and Gaulsabesiege Arretium, which tians, and probably the Apulians, were now in a state of declared remains faithful to hostility; while in the north the mass of the Etruscans were in Rome. arms, and had engaged,” -it seems, large bodies of the Senonian Gauls in their service, although the Senonians, as a nation, still professed to be at peace with Rome. In Arretium, however, the Roman party was still predominant; the Arretines would not join their countrymen against Rome; and A. U. c. 471. A. c. accordingly Arretium‘2 was besieged by an Etruscan army, of which 283. a large part consisted, as we have seen, of Gaulish mercenaries. The new consuls came into office at this period, about the middle of April; so that the season for military operations had begun before they could be ready to take the field. Thus L.

Cmcilius Metellus, the defeated and slin in a consul of the preceding year, had been left apparently with his battenearX A. consular army in Etruria duling the winter; and when the Etruscans began the siege of Arretium, he marched at once to its relief. According to the usual practice of this period, he was elected prietor for the year following his consulship, and he seems to have just entered upon his new office when he led his army against the enemy. We know nothing of the particulars of the battle, but the result was most disastrous to the Romans.“3 L. Metellus himself, seven military tribunes, and 13,000 men were killed on the field; and the remainder of the army were made prisoners. The consternation caused by such a disaster at such a moment must have been excessive. M’.

Curius Dentatus was appointed proctor in the room The Gaulma.ssanre the of Metellus, and sent off with all haste with a fresh army to main-Roman ambassadors. tain his ground if possible. At the same time an embassy was sent to the Gauls to complain that their people were serving in the armies‘4 of the enemies of Rome, while there was peace between the Gauls and Romans, and to demand that the prisoners taken in the late battle might be released. But the Gauls were at once elated and rendered savage by their late victory. The Romans assuredly had not sold their lives cheaply; many brave Gauls had fallen, and amongst the rest one of their noblest chiefs, Britomaris. His son, the young Britomaris, called for Zonraras, VIII. 2, and’Dion Cassius, Frawm. writers shows that both are taken from a comUrsin. C2XLIV. mon source, which doubtless was Livy. They n Appian, de Rebus Gallic. XI. Samnitic. vary from the accountgiven by Polybhius, in repVI. resenting the murder of the Roman ambassa2 Polybius, II. 19. dors as preceding the defeat of Metellus. Ap13 Orosins, III. 22, and Augustine, de Civi-pian, copyig from Dionysius, agrees with Potate Dei, III. 17.‘Orosius dedicated his history lybius. to Augustine, and the exact similarity of the 14 Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. VI. Gallic. XI.

notices about the defeat of L. AMetellus in both

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390 tHISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVII vengeance for his father’s blood; and the Roman ambassadors, the sacred fecieles themselves, were murdered by the barbarians, and their bodies hewed in pieces, and the mangled fragments cast out without burial. The consul, P. Dolabella, had already left Rome with the usual consular army, and was on his march into northern Etruria,‘5 when he received Great victories obtain. ed ovet the Senoiaen the tidings of this outrage. Immediately he resolved on vengeance, and instead of advancing into Etruria, he turned to the right, marched through the country of the Sabines into Picenum, and from thence led his army into the territory of the Gauls. The flower of their warriors were absent in Etruria; those who were left, and endeavored to resist the invaders, were defeated with great slaughter: no quarter was given to any male able to bear arms: the women and children were carried off as slaves, the villages and houses were burnt, and the whole country was made a desert. Meanwhile the Gauls in Etruria, maddened at these horrors, and hoping to enjoy a bloody revenge, urged the Etruscans to seize the opportunity, and to march straight upon Rome. But Cn. Domitius, with the other consular army,!6 was covering the Roman territory; perhaps M’. Curius had joined him, or was hanging on the rear of the enemy during their march through Etruria, and was so at hand to cooperate in the battle. At any rate, the victory of the Romans was complete; and the Gauls who survived the battle slew themselves in despair. It was resolved by the senate to occupy their country without delay, and to plant in it a Roman colony. These events had passed so rapidly that the season for military operations was And also ortheBoian not yet nearly at an end. The Boian Gauls,”’ the neighbors of the Btutll of theke a Senonians, enraged and alarmed at the total extermination of their B nttld Etr oan enraged aaterma dimon. countrymen, took up arms with the whole force of their nation, poured into Etruria, and encouraged the party adverse to Rome to try the fortune of war once again. What the Samnites and Lucanians were doing at this moment we know not; but probably a preetorian or proconsular army with the whole force of the Campanians, and perhaps of the Marsians and Pelignians, was in the field against them; and after the loss of C. Pontius we hear of no Samnite leader whose ability was equal to the urgency of the contest. Thus Dolabella and Domitius were enabled to turn their whole attention to the Etruscans and Gauls. Again, however, all details were lost, and we only know that the scene of the decisive action‘8 was the valley of the Tiber, just below its junction with the Nar, and the neighborhood of the small lake of Vadimon, which lay in the plain at no great distance from the right bank of the river. The victory of the Romans was complete;19 the flower of the Etruscan army perished, while the Gauls suffered so severely that a very few of their number wer. all that escaped from the field. The consuls of the ensuing year were C. Fabricius and Q. ~Emilius Papus. A. U.

C. 41. A. C. Again the Etruscans and Gauls renewed their efforts, but one 2s2. The Gnels make consular army was now thought enough to oppose to them, and peace with Rome.,Emilius alone defeated them utterly, and obliged the Gauls to conclude a separate peace.20 The Etruscans, who seemed to ” like nor peace nor 15 Appian, Samnitic. VI. Gallic. XI. rival of the consul’s messenger. The same story 6 Appian, Samnitic. VI. Gallic.

XI. is told of one of the battles fought between Tar17 Polybius, II. 20.

quinius Priscus and the Sabines; but there, at 18 Polybius, II. 20. Dion Cassius, Mai Scrip-any rate, the scene of the action was within a tor.

Vatican. t. II. p.536. Florus II 13 The very few miles of Rome. Livy, I.

37. lake Vadimon was esteemed sacred. See Pliny 20 Polybius, II. 20. It must have been AEmilEpist. VIII. 20, where he gives a description ofit.

ius who defeated the Gauls because we know’ Polybius, II. 20. One of thle fragments of that Fabricius was employed in the south: but Dion Cassius, published by Mai in his Scriptor. the fragments of the Fasti Capitolini for this Veter. Vatican. Collect. Vol. II. p. 536, states year contain only thus much: that Dolabella attacked the Etruscans as they “…

eisque….. III. Non. Mart.” were crossing the Tiber, and that the bodies of Dionysius, however, says expressly that Emilthe enemy carried down by the stream brought ins, the colleague of Fabricius, commanded the news of the battle to Rome before the ar-against the Etruscans in this year.

XVIII. 5.

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CnAP.-XXXVII.] CRUISE OF THE ROMAN FLEET. 393 war,” would not yet submit; or perhaps some states yielded while others con. tinued the contest; but there remained only the expiring embers of a great fire; and the Roman party in the several cities was gradually gaining the ascendency, and preparing the way for that lasting treaty which was concluded two years afterwards. In the south, C. Fabricius was no less successful. He defeated the Samnites, Lucanians, and Bruttians in several great battles,2’ and penetrated Victories of Fabiri through the enemy’s country to the very shores of the Ionan sea, inu the t.over.h where Thurii was at that very time besieged by Statilius at the Luc..ian.. head of a Lucanian and Bruttian army. Fabricius defeated the enemy, stormed their camp, and raised the siege of Thurii;22 fCr which service the Thurians expressed their gratitude as they had done two years before to the tribune, C.

AElius, by voting that a statue should be made and given to him, to be set up by him in Rome. Thus the coalition which the Tarentines had formed seemed to be broken to pieces, while its authors had not yet drawn the sword, and were still nominally at peace with the Romans. Fabricius left a garrison in Thurii, and led his army back to Rome with so rich a treasure of spoil,23 that after having made a liberal distribu-,,.. A Roman fleet is sen. tion of money amongst his soldiers, and returned to all the citi-to cruie on the oa zens the amount of the war-taxes which they had paid in that ines. year, he was still able to put four hundred talents into the treasury. In the mean time, as the army was withdrawn from Lucania, a fleet was sent to protect the Thurians, and to watch probably the movements of the Tarentines, whose dispositions must, ere this, have become sufficiently notorious. Accordingly, L. Valerius,24 one of the two officers annually chosen to conduct the naval affairs of the commonwealth, with a fleet of ten ships of war, sailed on to the eastward of Thurii, and unexpectedly made his appearance before the walls of Tarentum,t5 and seemed to be preparing to force his way into the harbor. It was the afternoons6 of the day, and as it was the season of the Dionysia, when the great dramatic contests took place and the prizes were The Tarentines attack awarded to the most approved poet, the whole Tarentine people rnd defeatit. were assembled in the theatre, the seats of which looked directly towards the sea. All saw a Roman fleet of ships of war, in undoubted breach of the treaty existing between the two states, which forbade the Romans to sail to the eastward of the Lacinian headland, attempting to make its way into their harbor. Full of wine, and in the careless spirits of a season of festival, they readily listened to a worthless demagogue, named Philocharis, who called upon them to 2z Dionysius, XVIII. 5. or land-locked basin, running far into the land, 22

Dionysius, XVIII. 5. Valerius Maximns, and communicating with the open sea by a sinI. 8, 6. Pliny, Hist. Natur. XXXIV. 32. gle narrow passage. It is now called the Mare Mr. Fynes Clinton, by mistake, refers the ac-Piccolo. The ancient city formed a triangle, count in Valerins Maximt. t!o Fabricins’ second one side of which was washed by the open sea, consulship in 476. But the mention of the re-and another by the waters of the harbor: the lief of Thurii shows clearly that it belongs to his base was a wall drawn across from the sea to first consulship. the harbor, and the point of the triangle came The story in Valerius Maximus relates a won-down to the narrow passage which was the harderfil. appearance of a warrior of extraordinary bor’s mouth. Here at the extreme point of the stature, who led the Romans to the assault of city. was the citadel, the site of which is occuthe enemy’s camp, and who was not to be found pied by the modern town. An enemy entering the next day when the consul was going to re-the harbor of Tarentum would therefore be as ward him with a mural crown. This, it was completely in the heart of the city, as in the said, was no other than Mars himself, who great harbor of Syracuse; and Cicero’s descripfought on this day for his people. Compare the tion will apply even more strongly to Tarentum story in Ierodotus of the giganticwarrior whose than to Syracuse; “quo simul atque adisset mere appearance struck the Athenian Epizelus non modoe a latere sed etiam a tergo magnam blind at Marathon, VI. 117. partem urbis relinqueret.”’-Verres, Act. II. 23

Dionllyius, XVIII. 16. T. 38. See Keppel Craven, Tour through the 24

Appian calls him ” Cornelius,” Samnitic. southern provinces of Naples, p.

174, and GaFragm. VII. Dion Cassius, Franm. Bekker. e gliardo, Descrizione di Taranto. libro IX. calls him “Valerius,” and so does 26 Dion Cassius, Fragm. Ursin. CXLV. Zoo Zonaras, who copies Dion, VIII. 2. naras, VIII. 2.

1’ The harbor of Tarentum was a deep gulf,

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392 HISTORY OF ROME. COMAP. XXXXVI1 punish instantly the treachery of the Romans, and to save their ships anid their city. Wiser citizens might remember, that by the Greek national law, ships of war belonging to a foreign power appearing under the walls of an independent city, in violation of an existing treaty,27 were liable to be treated as enemies.

But explanations and questionings were not thought of now: the Tarentines manned their ships, sailed out to meet the Romans, put them instantly to flight, sunk four of their ships without resistance, and took one, with all its crew. L. Valerius, the duumvir, was killed, and of the prisoners, the officers and soldiers serving on board were put to death, and the rowers were sold for slaves. Thus fully committed, the Tarentines determined to follow up their blow. TheyexpeltheRomans They taxed the Thurians2s with preferring barbarian aid to that of froalThurii. Tarentum, a neighboring and a Greek city, and with bringing a Roman fleet into the Ionian sea. They attacked the town, allowed the Roman garrison to retire unhurt, on condition of their opening the gates without resistance, and having thus become masters of Thurii, they drove the principal citizens into exile, and gave up tile property of the city to be plundered. “iThe Romans immediately sent an embassy to demand satisfaction for all these And insult the ambaR-outrages. L. Postumius was the principal ambassador,u and the dand sa.tisfart.io fttr instant that he and his colleagues landed, they were beset by a these aggressions. disorderly crowd, who ridiculed their foreign dress, the white toga wrapped round the body like a plaid, with its broad scarlet border. At last they were admitted into the theatre, where the people were assembled, but it was again a time of festival, and the Tarentines were more disposed to coarse buffoonery and riot than to serious counsel. When Postumius spoke to them in Greek, the assembly broke out into laughter at his pronunciation, and at any mistakes in his language; but the Roman delivered his commission unmoved, gravely and simply, as though he had not so much as observed the insults offered to him. At last a worthless drunkard of known profligacy came up to the Roman ambassador, and purposely threw dirt in the most offensive manner upon his white toga. Postumius said, “We accept the omen; ye shall give us even more than we ask of you,” and held up the sullied toga before the multitude, to show them the outrage which he had received.

But bursts of laughter pealed from every part of the theatre, and scurril songs, and gestures, and clapping of hands, were the only answer returned to him. “Laugh on,” said the Roman, “laugh on while ye may; ye shall weep long enough hereafter, and the stain on this toga shall be washed out in your blood.” The ambassadors left Tarentum, and Postumius carefully kept his toga unwashed, that the senate might witness with their own eyes the insult offered to the Roman name. He returned to Rome with his colleagues late in the spring of the year 473, A.U.C. 473. A.C. 2c. after the new consuls, L. _/Emilius Barbula and Q. Marcius Pihiwar against the Taren lippus, had already entered upon their office. Even now the Rotines. mans were reluctant to enter on a war with Tarentum, whilst they had so many enemies still in arms against them, and the debates in the senate lasted for several day. It was resolved30 at last to declare war; but still, when 27 The CorcyrTeans agreed to receive a single Ursin. CXLV. Who this L.

Postumius was is Athenian or Lacedoemonian ship into their har-not known.

ie may have been one of the Posbor, but if a greater number appeared, they tumii Albini, although the L. Postumius Albiwere to be treated as enemies.

Thucyd. III. nus, who was consul in 520, was the son and 71. And when the Athenian expedition coasted grandson of two Auli Postumii. But it may along Iapygia on its way to Syracuse, Tarentum have been the consul who had been fined for would neither allow them to enter the city, nor his madc conduct in 464, for with all his faults even to bring their vessels to shore under the he was an able and resolute man, and the amwalls.

Thucyd. VI. 44. So again the Cama-bassadors sent to so great a city as Tarentum rineanis, although they had been in alliance were likely to have been men of consular digwith Athens a few years before, refused to sad-nity. mit more than a single ship of the Athenian ar-3 Dionvsius, XVII.

10. Veisle has made mament within their harbor. VI. 52. Dionysius say just the contrary to this, by al2n Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. VII. tering oerot into al. He gives no reason for the a Zonaras, VIII. 2. Dion Cassius, Fragm. alteration, but merely says, ” at de meo dedi

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CHAP. XXXVII.] WAR WITH THE TARENTINES. 393 the consuls toolk the field as usual with their two consular armies, Q. Marcius was sent against the Etruscans, and L. 3milius was ordered, not immediately to attack Tarentum, but to invade Samniume and subdue the revolted Samnites. But whether the exhausted state of Saraniumn assured -milius that no great danger was to be apprehended there, or whether a pratorian L Amilius invades and army was seat to keep the Samnites in check, and to leave the b ryr.wste the T..enconsul at liberty for a march into southern Italy, it appears that gleseof p.ties in Tarei. instructions were sent to L.,Elmilius soon after his arrival in Sam-tum nium,3 to advance at once into the territory of Tarentum, and after offering once again the same terms which Postumius had proposed before, to commence hostilities immediately if satisfaction should still be refused. The terms were again rejected by the Tarentines, and Emilius began to ravage their terrhtory with fire and sword. But knowing that the aristocratical party in Tarentum, as elsewhere, were inclined to look up to Rome for protection, he showed much tenderness to some noble prisoners who fell into his hands,32 and dismissed them unhurt. Nor did the result disappoint him, for the presence of the Roman army struck terror into the democratical party, while the mildness shown to those who had taken no part in the shameful outrages offered to the Romans, induced moderate men to hope that peace with Rome was a safer prospect for their country than an alliance with Pyrrhus. Agis, one of the aristocratical party, was chosen captain-general, and it was likely that the Tarentines would now in their turn offer that satisfaction which hitherto they had scornfully refused.

But before any thing could be concluded, the popular party regained their ascendency. An embassy to Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, had been Pyrrhus is invited into sent off early in the summer,33 inviting, him over to Italy in the Italy. name of all the Italian Greeks, to be their leader against the Romans. All the nations of southern Italy, he was assured, were ready to join his standard; and he would find amongst them a force of 350,000
infantry, and 20,000 cavalry able to bear arms in the common cause. Every Greek looked to foreign conquest only as a means of establishing his supremacy over Greece itself, the proudest object of his ambition. A4 1..

[ no Ad, 01.. He sends over.ilo to Victorious over the Romans,3d thence easily passing over into ccupy the citadel of”” T~~~“‘b sarentum. Tbe popuSicily, and from thence again assailing more effectually than Aga-lnar prty recovers the thocles the insecure dominion of the Carthaginians in Africa, Pyr-ascendecy. rhus hoped to return home with an irresistible force of subject allies, to expel Antigonus from Thessaly and Boeotia, and the ruffian Ptolemy Ceraunus fiom Macedonia, and to reign over Greece and the world, as became the kinsman of Alexander and the descendant of Achilles. He promised to helft the Tarentines; but the force needed for such an expedition could not be raised in an instant; and when the invasion of the Roman army, and the probable ascendency of their political adversaries, made the call of the popular party for his aid more pro vulg.

orot.”’ The old reading, however, at the extremity of Italy till measures had been is quite correct in grammar, and perfectly in-taken to secure it against an attack of the Samtelligible, and seems to be recommended by the nites on its rear. When this was provided for, general structure of the passage. It may be the consul might safely be ordered to advance thought that it is inconsistent with Appian’s upon Tarentum. account, who says that the consul Emilius was -1 The consuls came into office in April, and already in Samnium when he received orders Emilius was in the Tarentine territory before to march against the Tarentines (Samnitic. the corn was cut, for the Fragment of DionysFragm. VII. 3), whereas Dionysius makes him ius, XVII. 12, clearly relates to this invasion: to have been present in the senate when the apo’pa T C re a&Kua?ov J7 r’ L rTIK 0eOlpS Eos0xaa question of war or peace was debated; and had hadupi pto6S. In 1818, Mr.

Keppel Craven tound immediate war been then resolved upon, would the harvest going on briskly a little to the he not, it may be said, have been ordered to southwest of Tarentum on the 1st of June.attack Tarentum at once, instead of being sent Tour through the southern provinces of Naples, into Samnium, and receiving asubsequent order p. 197. to march against Tarentum? This, however, 32 Zonaras, VIII. 2. would not necessarily follow; for the senate 33 Zonaras, VIII. 2. Plutarch, Pyrrh. 13 may have thought it unsafe to hazard an army 4 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 14.

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394 HISTORY OF ROME. C0HAr1. XXXV urgent, he sent over Cineas,35 his favorite minister, to assist his friends by his eloquence and address, and shortly afterwards Milo, one of his generals, followed with a detachment of 3000 men, and was put in possession of the citadel. A political revolution immediately followed;36 Agis was deprived of his command, and succeeded by one of the popular leaders who had been sent on the embassy to Pyrrhus; all prospect of peace was at an end, and the democratical party held in their hands the whole government of the commonwealth. The Tarentines were masters of the sea, and the arrival of an experienced The R.om..n.y regeneral and a body of veteran soldiers gave a strength to their ireatsfromtho Taren-land-forces, which in numbers were in themselves considerable. te territory. Winter was approaching, and AEmilius proposed to retreat into Apulia, to put hisarmy into winter quarters in those mild and sunny plains. He was followed by the enemy,3’

and as his road lay near the sea, the Tarentine fleet prepared to overwhelm him with its artillery, as his army wound along the narrow road between the mountain sides and the water. AlEmilius, it is said, put some of his Tarentine prisoners in the parts of his line of march most exposed to the enemy’s shot, and as the Tarentines would not butcher their helpless countrymen, they allowed the Romans to pass by unmolested. The Roman army wintered in Apulia, and both parties had leisure to prepare their best efforts for the struggle of the coming spring. It was still the depth of winter38 when Pyrrhus himself arrived at Tarentum. Pyrrhus arrives at To-His fleet had been dispersed by a storm on the passage, and he c.ipline is irksome t.o the himself had been obliged to disembark on the Messapian coast Tlrent.i.es. with only a small part of his army, and to proceed to Tarentum by land. After a time, however, his scattered ships reached their destination safely, and he found himself powerful enough to act as the master rather than the ally of the Tarentines. He shut up the theatre, the public wallis, and the gymnasia, obliged the citizens to be under arms all day, either on the walls or in the market-place, and stopped the feasts of their several clubs or brotherhoods, and all revelry, and all riotous entertainments throughout the city. Many of the citizens, as impatient of this discipline as the Ionians of old when Dionysius of Phocaea tried in vain to train them to a soldier’s duties, left the city in disgust; but Pyrrhus, to prevent this for the future, placed a guard at the gates, and allowed no one to go out without his permission. It is further said that his soldiers were guilty of great excesses towards the inhabitants, and that he himself put to death some of the popular leaders, and sent others over to Epirus; and this last statement is probable enough, for the idle and noisy demagogues of a corrupt democracy would soon repent of their invitation to him, when they experienced the rigor of his discipline; and if they indulged in any inflammatory speeches to the multitude, Pyrrhus would consider such conduct as treasonable, and would no doubt repress it with the most effectual severity. So passed the winter at Tarentum. But the Italian allies, overawed perhaps Amount oftho forces of by the Roman army in Apulia, were slow in raising their promised Pyrrhus. contingents,‘9 and Pyrrhus did not wish to commence offensive preparations till his whole force was assembled. What number of men he had brought with him or received since his landing from Greece itself, it is not easy to estimate: 3000 men crossed at first under Milo; the king himself embarked with 20,000 foot, 3000 horse,40 2000 archers, 500 slingers, and 20 elephants, and Ptolemy Ceraunus is said to have lent him for two years the services of 5000 Macedonian foot, 4000 horse, and 50 elephants.4’ The Macedonian foot 95 Zonaras, VIII. 2. so Plutarch, Pyrrh. 16. t Zonaras, VIII. 2.

Frontinus, Strategem. 40 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 15. Zonaras agrees as, to I. 4, ~ 1. the number of elephants; of the numbers o’ tha Zonaras, VIII. 2.

Plutarch, Pyrrh. 15, 16. infantry and cavalry he gives no account. Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. VIII. 41 Justin, XVII. 2.

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CrarP, XXXII.] AMOUNT OF THE ROMAN FORCES. 395 may have been included in the 20,000 men whom he himself brought into Italy; the cavalry and elephants of course cannot have been so, if the numbers are correctly given; but we find his cavalry afterwards spoken of as amounting only to 3000, and we can hardly think that he had at any time so many as 70
elephants. Some deductions must also be made, in’all probability, for losses sustained by shipwreck, when the armament was dispersed by a storm in its passage. Yet still the Greek army with which Pyrrhus was ready to take the field from Tarentum in the spring of the year 474, must have been more numerous, both in foot, horse, and elephants, than that with which Hannibal, about sixty years later, issued from the Alps upon the plain of Cisalpine Gaul. The Romans, on their part, finding that not Tarentum only, bmu so great a king and good a soldier as Pyrrhus was added to their numerous enemies, And of the Romans. made extraordinary exertions to meet the danger. Even the pro-A.U. C.474.A. C2SO. letarians,42 or the poorest class of citizens, who were usually exempt from the military service, were now called out and embodied, and these probably formed a great part of the reserve army kept near Rome for the defence of the city. The new consuls were P. Valerius Laevinus and Ti. Coruncanius, of whom the latter was to -command one consular army against the Etruscans, while the former was to oppose Pyrrhus in the south. No mention is made of the army of L.

AEmilius, which had wintered in Apulia, so that we do not know whether it joined that of Leevinus, or was employed to watch the doubtful fidelity of the Apulians, and to prevent the Samnites from joining the enemy’s army.

We learn accidentally,43 that a Campanian legion was placed in garrison at Rhegium, and other important towns were no doubt secured also with a sufficient force; but the whole disposition of the Roman armies in this great campaign cannot be known, from the scantiness of our remaining information respecting it. It is briefly stated in the narrative of Zonaras44 that the Romans chastised some of their allies who were meditating a revolt, and that some State of the allies od citizens-of Preeneste were suddenly arrested and sent to Rome, Rome. where they were imprisoned in the vaults of the erarium on the Capitol, and afterwards put to death. If even the Latin city of Prmeneste could waver in its fidelity, what was to be expected from the more remote and more recent allies of Rome, from the Vestinians, Marsians, Pelignians, Sabines, and even from the Campanians, whose faith in the second Samnite war, little more than thirty years before, had been found so unstable? Yet one of the consuls for this year, Ti. Coruncanius, was a native of Tusculum, and those Latin, Volscian, and AEquian towns which had received the full rights of Roman citizenship were incorporated thereby so thoroughly into the Roman nation, that no circumstances could rend them asunder. Still the senate thought it best on every ground to keep the war, if possible, at a distance from their own territory, and Loevinus therefore marched into Lucania, to separate Pyrrhus from his allies, and to force him to a battle whilst he had only his own troops and the Tarentines to bring into the field.

“Laevinus,” says Zonaras,45 “took a strong fortress in Lucania, and having left a part of his amy to overawe the Lucanians, he advanced with Lvinus, the Romea the remainder against Pyrrhus.” Yet Pyrrhus, after all, fought, PC0nrh’us.Trches gains we are told, with an inferior army;” nor indeed can we conceive that so able a general would have exposed himself to the unavoidable disadvantage of seeming to dread an encounter with the enemy, had the number of his troops been equal to theirs. But a Roman consular army never contained more than 20,000 foot soldiers, and 2400 horse; and the army which Pyrrhus brought with him from Epirus was more numerous than this, without reckoning the Tarentines, and allowing that Milo and his detachment of 3000 men still garrisoned the 4” Orosius, IV. 1. 1. VIII. 3.

4’ Orosius, IV. 3. Polybius, I.?. A Justin, XVIII. 1. 44 Zonaras, VIII. 8.

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396 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. XXXVIL. citadel of’Tarentum. It is clear, then, either that Laevinus had taken will him the whole or the greater part of the consular army which had wintered in Apulia, or that a pratorian army had marched under his command from the neighborhood of Rome, so that his force cannot be estimated at less than 30,000 foot and 3600 horse. Pyrrhus.not thinking himself strong enough to meet the enemy with the army Pyrrhus enrlrv,s to actually at his disposal, endeavored to gain time by negotiation. gin time tll it iallies He wrote to Lmvinus,47
offering his mediation between the Roshould hae ji a-ed him. mans and his Italian allies, and saying that he would wait ten days for the consul’s answer. But his offer was scornfully rejected; and in the same spirit, when one of his spies was detected in the Roman camp, Levinus is said to have allowed the spy to observe his whole army on their usual parade,48
and then to hlave sent him back unharmed, with a taunting message, that if Pyrrhus wished to know the nature of the Roman army, he had better not send others to spy it out secretly, but he should come himself in open day, and see it and prove it, Thus provoked, or more probably fearing to lose the confidence of his allies if he should seem to have crossed the sea only to lie inactive ia hiem. Battle ofHre-. Tarentum, Pyrrhus with his own army and with the Tarentines took the field and advanced towards the enemy. The Romans lay encamped on the right or southern bank of the Siris not far from the sea, and Pyrrhus having crossed the Aciris between the towns of Pandosia and Hera-,clea, encamped in the plain49 which lies between the two rivers, and which was’favorable at once for the operations of his heavy infantry, and for his cavalry and elephants. A nearer view of the strength of the Roman army determined him still to delay the battle, and he stationed a detachment of troops on the bank of the Siris, to obstruct, if possible, the passage of the stream. But the river, though wide, is shallow,5” and while the legions prepared to cross directly in front of the enemy, the cavalry5’ passed above and below, so that the Greeks, afraid of being surrounded, were obliged to fall back towards their main body. Pyrlhus then gave orders to his infantry to form in order of battle in the middle of the plain, while he himself rode forward with his cavalry, in hopes of attacking the Romans before they should have had time to form after their passage of the river. But he found the long shields of the legionary soldiers advancing in an even line fiom the stream, and their cavalry in front ready to receive his attack. He charged instantly, but the Romans and their allies, although their arms were very unequal to those of the Greek horsemen, maintained the fight most valiantly, and a Frentanian captain52 was seen to mark Pyrrhus himself so eagerly, that one of his officers noticed it, and advised the king to beware of that barbarian on the black horse with white feet. Pyrrhus, whose personal prowess was not unworthy of his hero-ancestry, replied, “What is fated, Leonatus, no man can avoid; but neither this man nor the stoutest soldier in Italy shall encounter with me for nothing.” At that instant, the Frentanian rode at Pyrrhus with his levelled lance, and killed his horse; but his own was killed at the same instant, and while Pyrrhus was remounted instantly by his attendants, the brave Italian was surrounded and slain. Finding that his cavalry could not decide the battle, Pyrrhus at length 47 Dionysius, XVII. 15, 16. Heraclea, for about three miles, and is ft’r the 48 Dionysius, XVIII. 1. Zonaras, VIII. 8.

most part highly cultivated. 40 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 16. At present a thick o60 eppel Craven, p. 204. Mlr. Keppel Craforest covers the western part of this plain, ex-ven forded it below the point where the Rotending along the left bank of the Siins for sev-man army effected its passage. eral miles upwards from its mouth, as far as the l’ Plutarch, Pyrrh. 16. point where the hills begin. See Keppel Cra-52 Plutarch, Lyrrh. 16. Dionysius, XVIII. yen, p. 203, and Zannoni’s map. [But in ancient 2-4. Part of this story of the Frentanian captimes it is probable that the whole plain be-tain has been copied by Plutarch from Dionystween the two rivers was open, and mostly corn ius, but he has some other particulars which land. The plain rises in a gradual slope from are not,to be found in Dionysius, and which he Policoro, supposed to be the site of the ancient got probably from Hierorymus.

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CHAP. XXXVII.] THE ROMANS ARE DEFEATED. 397 ordered his infantry to advance and attack the line of the Roman rn. cco..onod by th, legions.” He himself, knowing the importance of his own life to roppoed death of Pyran army in which his personal ascendency was all in all, gave his own arms, and helmet, and scarlet cloak to Megacles, one of the officers of his guard, and himself put on those of the officer in exchange. But Megacles bought his borrowed splendor dearly: every Roman marked him, and at last he was struck down and slain, and his helmet and mantle carried to Lmvinus, and. borne along the Roman ranks in triumph. Pyrrhus feeling that this mistake was most dangerous, rode bareheaded along his line to show his soldiers that he was still alive; and the battle went on so furiously that either army seven times,5 it is said, drove the enemy from the ground, and seven times was driven from its own. Loevinus, true to the tactic of his country, proposed to win the battle by keeping back his last reserve55 till all the enemy’s forces were in Thorn. are deaction. His triarii, it seems, were already engaged, and their long feooted, and thair camp spears might enable them to encounter, on something like equal terms, the pikes of the phalanx; but Lzevinus held back a chosen body of his cavalry, hoping that their charge might at last decide the day. They did charge, but Pyrrhus met them with a reserve still more formidable, his elephants. The Roman horses could not be brought to face monsters strange and terrible alike to them and to their riders; they fell back in confusion-the infantry were disordered by their flight; and Pyrrhus then charged with his Thessalian cavalry, and totally routed the whole Roman army. The vanquished fled over the Siris,56 but did not attempt to defend their camp, which Pyrrhus entered without opposition. They retreated to a city in Apulia,57 which Niebuhr supposes must have been Venusia, with a loss variously estimated as usual by different writers,5s but sufficient at any rate to cripple their army, and to leave Pyrrhus undisputed master of the field. His Italian allies now joined him;59 and though he complained of the tardiness of their aid, he distributed to them a share of the spoils of his vic-Effects of the victory. tory. The allies of Rome began to waver; and the Roman garrisons in distant cities, cut off from relief, were placed in extreme jeopardy. The 63 Plutarch, Pyrrll. 17. 56

The destruction of the Roman army was 6o Tos7rrci ETa yE-rat EcvydvrcWv avdfraLv Kal prevented, according to Orosius, by an acciewKS6vrwv yEvcsOat. Plutarch, Pyrrh. 17. From uent. One Minucius, a soldier of the fourth this and other circumstances related of this bat-legion, cut off with his sword the trunk of one tie, it appears certain that only a very small part of the elephants; which made the animal turn, of Pyrrhus’

infantry could have had the arms and run back upon his own army. The confiuand array of the regular phalanx. For as the sion and delay thus occasioned enabled the ground was open and level, and the two armies Romans to escape over the Siris with the bulk met front and front, if Pyrrhus’ heavyarmed of their army. Orosius, IV. 1. infantry had been numerous, they must have- * Zonaras, VIII. 3. had the same advantage which the phalanx had 58 Hieronymus, a contemporary, who in his at Cynocephalie and at Pydna as long as it kept account of the loss sustained in the battle of its line unbroken; and the Roman infantry Asculum, is known to have copied Pyrrhus’ own could not have maintained the contest. While, commentaries, makes the Roman loss in thA on the other hand, if the phalanx did not keep first battle to have amounted to 7000 men, and its order, so that the Romans were able to pen-that of Pyrrhus to less than 4000. Dionysius etrate it in several places, then they would have stated the Roman loss at 15,000 and that of Pyrobtained an easy victory, as the phalanx when rhus at 13,000, copying probably from the exonce broken became wholly helpless. But it aggerated accounts of some of the Roman anwould seem that the Greek infantry in this bat-nalists, perhaps from Valerius Antias himself. tie consisted mostly of peltastue, or troops not See Plutarch, Pyrrhus, 17. Orosius, copying formed in the close array of the phalanx; such from Livy, who in his turn probably followed were the Epirots generally, and such would be Fabius, reckons the Roman loss at 11,880 killed, also the Etolians and Illyrians, some of whom, it and 310
prisoners; while of their cavalry 243 is said [Dion Cassius, Fragm.

Peiresc. XXXIX.], were killed and 802 taken. He says also that were serving at this time in Pyrrhus’ army. twenty-two standards were taken.

But what is Thus the infantry in both armies were armed curious, and which shows that neither he himand formed in a manner not very different from self nor Livy could have at all consulted the each other; and this would account for the Greek writers on this war, he asserts that of the length and obstinacy of the action, and the loss on Pyrrhus’ side no record had been preausnber of slain on both sides. served. 55 Zonaras1 VIII. 3.

Plutarch, Pyrrh. 17. 59 Zonaras, VIII. 3. Plutarch, Pyrrh. 17.

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398 HISTORY OF ROME. [OCu.P. XXXVIL The Roman garri;on Locrians rose upon the garrison of their city, and opened their massacrizes the habid gates to Pyrrhus.6 At Rhegium”6 the garrison, which consisted tanrs. of the eighth legion, composed of Campanian soldiers, acted like the garrison of Enna, in similar circumstances in the second Punic war: they anticipated the inhabitants by a general massacre of all the male citizens, and made slaves of the women and children. For this alone they might have received reward rather than punishment from the Roman government; and the Roman annalists would have pleaded necessity as a sanction for the act. But the Campanians, looking to the example of their Mamertine countrymen on the other side of the strait, and thinking that Rome was in no condition to enforce their allegiance any more, held the city in their own name, and refused to obey the consul’s orders. Thus Rhegium, no less than Locri, was for the present lost to the Romans. Pyrrhus, however, had not won his victory cheaply. Nearly four thousand of his men had fallen, and amongst these a large proportion of his end an. embassy to best officers and personal friends; for the Greek loss must have fallen heavily on the cavalry, and when the king exposed his own life so freely, those immediately about his person must have suffered in an unusual proportion.

The weather also, if we may trust some stories in Orosius,62 was very unfavorable, and the state of the roads may have retarded the advance of the victorious army, and particularly of the elephants. Besides, so complete a victory, won by Pyrrhus with his own army alone, before the mass of his allies had joined him, might dispose the Romans to peace without the risk of a second battle. Accordingly, whilst the army advanced slowly from the shores of the Ionian sea towards central Italy, Cineas was sent to Rome with the king’s terms of peace and alliance.3 The conditions offered were these: peace, fiiendship, and alliance between He proposes terms of Pyrrhus and the Romans;64 but the Tarentines were to be included peace. in it, and all the Greek states in Italy were to be free and independent. Further, the king’s Italian allies, the Lucanians, Samnites, Apulians, and Bruttians, were to recover all towns and territories which they had-lost in war to the Romans. If these terms were agreed to, the king would restore to the Romans all the prisoners whom he had taken without ransom. Cineas, the ambassador of Pyrrhus on this memorable occasion, was, in the ineas sent as hi am versatility and range of his talents, worthy of the best ages of bassadlor. Greece. He was a Thessalian,65 and in his early youth he had heard Demosthenes speak; and the impression made on his mind by the great orator was supposed to have enkindled in him a kindred spirit of eloquence: the tongue of Cineas, it was said, had won more cities than the sword of Pyrrhus. Like Themistocles, he was gifted with an extraordinary memory; the very day after his arrival at Rome, he was able to address all the senators”6 and the citizens of the equestrian order by their several proper names. He had studied philosophy, like all his educated countrymen, and appears to have admired particularly the new doctrine of Epicurus;6” which taught that war and state affairs were but toil and trouble, and that the wise man should imitate the blissful rest of the gods, who, dwelling in their own divinity, regarded not the vain turmoil “o Justin, XVIII. 1. showed sufficient respect on the part of Pyrrhus “I Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. IX.

Dion Cas-for the power and resolution of the Romans, sius, Fragm.

Peiresc. XL. but they would not satisfy the Roman vanity. O2 Orosius, IV.

1. One of the Roman forag-and accordingly, Plutarch says that ” the king ing parties, soon after the battle, was overtaken merely asked for peace for himself and indemby so dreadful a storm, that thirty-four men nity for the Tarentines, and offered to aid the were knocked down, and twenty-two left nearly Romans in conquering Italy.” Pyrrh. 18. dead; and many oxen and horses were killed 65 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 14. or tuaime l. 66 Pliny, Histor. Natur. VII. ~ 88. 6s Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. X. Plutarch, 67

Cicero, de Senectut. 18. Plutarch, PyrrhL Pyrrh. 18. 20.’” Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. X. These terms

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CaHA. XXXVII.] APPIUS CLAUDIUS SPEAKS AGAINST PEACE. 399 of this lower world. Yet his life was better than his philosophy; he served his king actively and faithfully in peace and in war, and he wrote a military work,68 for which he neither wanted ability nor practical knowledge. He excited no small attention as he went to Rome, and his sayings at the places through which he passed were remembered and recorded.69 Some stories said that he was the bearer of presents to the influential senators, and of splendid dresses”7 to win the favor of their wives; all which, as the Roman traditions related, were steadily refused. But his proposals required grave consideration, and there were many in the senate who thought that the state of affairs made it necessary to accept them.

Appius Claudius, the famous censor, the greatest of his countrymen in the works of peace, and no mean soldier in time of need, was now, in Appius Claudius is the thirtieth year after his censorship, in extreme old age, and had Ied ptog te senate, an’ been for many years blind. But his active mind triumphed over peace. age and infirmity; and although he no longer took part in public business, yet he was ready7” in his own house to give answers to those who consulted him on points of law, and his name was fresh in all men’s minds, though his person was not seen in the Forum. The old man heard that the senate was listening to the proposals of Cineas, and was likely to accept the king’s terms of peace. He immediately desired to be carried to the senate-house, and was borne in a litter by his slaves through the Forum. When it was known that Appius Claudius was coming, his sons and sons-in-law72 went out to the steps of the senate-house to receive him, and he was by them led into his place. The whole senate kept the deepest silence as the old man arose to speak. No Englishman can have read thus far without remembering the scene, in all points so similar, which took place within our fathers’ memory in Similar scene in Engour own house of parliament. We recollect how the greatest of list history.

English statesmen, bowed down by years and infirmity like Appius, but roused, like him, by the dread of approaching dishonor to the English name, was led by his son and son-in-law into the house of lords, and all the peers, with one impulse, arose to receive him. We know the expiring words of that mighty voice, when he protested against the dismemberment of this ancient monarchy, and prayed that if England must fall, she might fall with honor. The real speech of Lord Chatham against yielding to the coalition of France and America, will give a far more lively image of what was said by the blind Appius in the Roman senate, than any fictitious oration which I could either copy from other writers, or endeavor myself to invent; and those who would wish to know how Appius spoke should read the dying words of the great orator of England. When he had finished his speech, the senate voted that the proposals of Pyrrhus should be rejected, that no peace73 should be concluded with The senate rejects the him so long as he remained in Italy, and that Cineas should be termproposed.

ordered to leave Rome on that very day. Even whilst the senate had been considering the king’s proposals, there had been no abatement of the vigor of their preparations for war. Two And prepare vigorously new legions,74
which must have been at least the ninth and tenth for war ” At least Cicero, in writing to Poetus, says, 70 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 18. t” Plane nesciebam te tam peritum esse rei mili-71 Cicero, de Senectut. 6, 11.

Tusculan. Disp. taris. Pyrrhi te libros et Cinete video lectitas-V. 38.

se.” Ad Familiar. IX. 25. Now the coin-72 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 18. He had four sons and mlentaries of Pyrrhus are referred to by Plutarch, five daughters, but how many of his daughters and it would seem therefore that the allusion to were married, we know not. See Cicero de the writings of Cineas is alsoto be taken literally. Senect. 11. A speech was extant in Cicero’s 9O At Aricia, on the Appian Way, Cineas had.time purporting to be that which Appius spoke remarked the luxuriance of the vines, as they on this occasion. De Senectut. 6. Brutus, 16. festooned on the very summits of the elmns, and But Cicero does not seem to have regarded it at the same time complained of the harshness as genuine. of the wine. “The mother which bore this 73 Plutarch,‘Pyrrh. 19. Appian, Samnitic. wine well deserves,” he said, ” to be hung on so X. 2. Zonaras, VIII. 4. high a gibbet.” Pliny, Hist. Natur. XIV. ~ 12. 14 Appian, Samnitic. X. 3. The Campanian

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400 HISTORY OF ROME. [(CHAP. XXXVII in number, were raised while Cineas was at Rome by voluntary enlistment, proclamation being made, that whoever wished to offer his services to supply the place of the soldiers who had fallen in battle, should enrol himself immediately. Niebuhr supposes that this was the period of P. Cornelius Rufinus’ dictatorship, and that he superintended the recruiting of the armies. The new legions were sent to reinforce Levinus, who, as Pyrrhus began to advance northwards, followeda him hanging upon his rear, but not venturing to engage in a second battle.

Cineas returned to the king, to tell him that he must hope for nothing from Pyrrhus advances into negotiation. He expressed, according to the writers15 whom we Campania. are obliged to follow, the highest admiration of all that he had seen. “To fight with the Roman people was like fighting with the hydra, so inexhaustible were their numbers and their spirit.”

“Rome was a city of generals, nay, rather of kings,” or, according to another and more famous version of the story, “The city was like a temple, the senate was an assembly of kings.” Did we find these expressions recorded by Hieronymus of Cardia, who wrote before Rome was the object of universal flattery, we might believe them; but from the later Greek writers they deserve no more credit than if reported merely by the Romans themselves; and nothing is more suspicious than such statements of the language of admiration proceeding from the mouth of an enemy. But be this as it may, Pyrrhus now resolved to prosecute the war with vigor. At the head of a large army,7 for the Italian allies had now joined him, he advanced through Lucania and Samnium into Campania. The territory of the allies of Rome had now for some years been free from the ravages of war,”

and its scattered houses, its flourishing cultivation, and luxuriant fruit-trees, were a striking’ contrast to the wasted appearance of Samnium and Lucania. All was ravaged and plundered without mercy, by the Italians in revenge, by the Greeks to enrich themselves and force their enemy to submission, but in some instances it only provoked a firmer resistance, and Neapolis and Capua8s were attacked, but refused to surrender, nor could Pyrrhus make himself master of either of them. From Campania he ascended the valley of the Liris, and followed the Latin road towards Rome. Fregellme79 wrested formerly from the VolAnd through the Hernican counltry. He scians by the Samnites, and the occupation of which by the Rotakes PrYeneste, and advances within eighmans had led to the second Sarmnite war, now yielded to the teen miles of Rome. teenGreek conqueror.

The Hernicans, who, under the name of Roman citizens, without the right of suffrage, were in fact no better than Romnan subjects, received Pyrrhus readily, and Anagnia,5s their principal city, opened its gates to him.

Still advancing, he at last looked out upon the plain of Rome from the opening in the mountains under Prmeneste; and Prueneste itself,8’ with its almost impregnable citadel, fell into his hands, for the Proanestines remembered the execution of their principal citizens a few months before, and longed for vengeance. Prieneste is barely twenty-four miles distant from Rome, but Pyrrhus advanced yet six miles further,82 and from the spot where the road legion which garrisoned Rhegium had been the Siris, for it would have been very hard to have eighth. Orosius, IV. 3. But perhaps the pro-involved in their sentence the newly raised solletarians raised to form the army of reserve had diers who had no share in the defeat. already formed a ninth and tenth legion, in 76 Plutarch, in Pyrrh. 19. Appian, Samnit. which case those inow raised would be the X. 3. Florus,I.18.

DionCassiusapud laium, eleventh and twelfth. We cannot account for Script.

Veter. Collect. tom. II. p. 538. four legions in the two consular armies, two 6 Zonaras, VIII. 4. Eutropius, II. Florus, more under the proconsul, L. 2Emilius; one or I. 18. two, we know not which, forming the reserve 77

Dion Cassius, Fragm. 50. Script. Veter. army under the walls of Rome, and one in gar-Collect. rison at Rhegium. The legions of Lmvinus had 78

Zonaras, VIII. 4. suffered so greatly in the battle that their, num-79

Florus, I. 18. bers were no doubt very incomplete; but the 8s Appian, Samnitic. X. 8. reinforcements formed two fresh legions, and ” Florus, I.

18. Eutropius, II did not merely serve to recruit the old ones, as 82 “

Milliario ab urbe octavodecimo. Eutroappears both by Appian’s express language, and pius. If this statement is correct, Pyrrhus also by what is afterwards said of the punish-must have passed beyond Zagarolo, and reached ment of the legions’which had fought on the the spot where the road descends to the level

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CHAP. XXXVII.] EMBASSY SENT TO PYRRHUS. 401 descends from the last roots of the mountains to the wide level of the Campagna he cast his eyes upon the very towers of the city. One march more would have brought him under the walls of Rome, where, as he hoped, there was nothing to oppose him but the two legions, The Etru.odden which, at the beginning of the campaign, had been reserved for ly make peace with Rome, and the second the defence of the capital. But at this moment he was informed coslar., a.ry isem.

that the whole Etruscan nation had concluded a peace83 with Rome, rChusmd HgireteaPst and Ti. Coruncanius, with his consular army, was returned from Campaa. Etruria, and had joined the army of reserve. At the same time Lmevinus was hanging on his rear, and before he could enter Rome, both consuls would be able to combine their forces, and he would have to deal with an army of eight or nine Roman legions, and an equal number of their Latin and other allies. Besides, his own army was feeling the usual evils of a force composed of the soldiers of different nations; the Italians complained of the Greeks,84 and charged them with plundering the territory of friends and foes alike; the Greeks treated the Italians with arrogance, as if in themselves alone lay the whole strength of the confederacy.

Pyrrhus retreated, loaded with plunder, and returned to Campania; Lsevinus fell back before him, but it is said that when Pyrrhuss5 was going to attack him, and ordered his soldiers to raise their battlecry, and the Greeks to strike their spears against their brazen shields, and when the elephants, excited by their drivers, uttered at the same time their fearful roarings, the Roman army answered with a shout so loud and cbeerful, that he did not venture to bring on an action. Neither party made any further attempts at active operations; the Samnites and Lucanians wintered in their own countries, Pyrrhus himself returned to Tarentum, and the Romans remained within their own frontiers,86 excepting only the legions which had been beaten in the first battle,; and which were ordered to remain in the field during the wintei in the enemy’s country, with no other supplies than such as they could win by their own swords. As soon as the campaign was over, the senate dispatched an embassy te Pyrrhus to request that he would either allow them to ransom his Roman prisoners, or that he would exchange them for an equal to Pyrrhus. Hisinterview with Fabricius. number of Tarentines and others of his allies who were prisoners at Rome.87 The ambassadors sent to Pyrrhus were 0. Fabricius, Q.

IEmilius, and P. Dolabella, all of them men of the highest distinction; but Fabricius was the favorite hero of Roman tradition, and the stories of this embassy spoke of him alone. That Pyrrhus was struck with the circumstance of his being at once so eminent among his countrymen, and yet so simple in his habits, and even, act cording to a king’s standard of wealth, so poor, is perfectly probable: he may have asked him to enter into his service, for the Greeks of that age thought iit no shame to serve a foreign king; and if the Thessalian Cineas was his minister, he could not suppose that a similar office would be refused by the barbarian.

Fabricius. It was the misfortune of Pyrrhus to live in a state of society where of the Campagna, close by what is called the Hernican town, had revolted, and that these lelake of Regillus, and just at the junction of the gions were employed in reducing it. But nomodern road from La Colonna.

(Labici.) thing can be decided with certainty. 3 Zonaras, VIII. 4. See also Appian, X. 3, 8 Appian, Samnitic. Fragm..,. The although his statement is not quite accurate as names of the Roman ambassadors, and long to time. speeches put into the mouths of Pyrrhus and of 84 Dion Cassius, Fragm. 50. Script. Veter. Fabricius, are to be found in the fragments of Collect. Dionysius, XVIII. 5-26. The famous anac15 Zonaras, VIII. 4. Dion Cassius, Fragm. dotes, how Fabricius was neither to be bribed LI. by the king’s money, nor frightened by the “I Frontinus, Strategem. IV. 1. ~ 24. The sudden sight of one. of his elephants, which at name of the place to which Lsevinus’ army:was a signal given stretched out its trunk immesent is corrupt. Oudendorp and the Bipont diately over his head, are given by Plutarch, edition read “Firmum,” which, of course, must Pyrrh. 20. Speeches of Pyrrhus and of Fabribe wrong, as Firmum was far away from the cius in answer, declining the king’s offers, are seat of war. Niebuhr conjectures Samnium or also preserved in the Vatican Fragments ola Ferentinum, supposing that Ferentinum, the Dion Cassius, LIII. LIV. 26

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402 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVII patriotism was become impossible; the Greek commonwealths were so fallen, and their inner life so exhausted, that they could inspire their citizens neither with respect nor with attachment, and the military monarchies founded by Alexander’s successors could know no deeper feeling than personal regard for the reigning monarch; loyalty to his line could not yet have existed, and love for the nation under a foreign despotism is almost a contradiction. In Rome, on the other hand, the state and its institutions were in their first freshness and vigor, and so surpassed any individual distinction, that no private citizen could have thought of setting his own greatness on a level with that of his country, and the world could offer to him nothing so happy and so glorious as to live and die a Roman.’ But the particular anecdotes recorded of the king and Fabricius are so ill attested and so suspicious, and the speeches ascribed to them both are so manifestly the mere invention of the writers of a later age, that I have thought it best to exclude them from this history, and merely to give a slight mention of them in a note, on account of their great celebrity. Pyrrhus would neither ransom nor exchange his prisoners, unless’ the Romans His generous treatment would accept the terms of peace proposed to them by Cineas.`8
ofthe Rosanprisoners. But to show how little he wished to treat them with harshness, he allowed Fabricius to take them all back with him to Rome to pass the Saturnalia, their winter holydays, at their several homes, on a solemn promise that they would return to him when the holydays were over, if the senate still persisted in refusing peace. The senate did persist in its refusal, and the prisoners returned to Pyrrhus; the punishment of death having been denounced by the Roman government against any prisoner who should linger in Rome beyond the day fixed for their return. And thus both parties prepared to try the fortune of war once again. The new consuls were P. Sulpicius Saverrio, whose father had been consul in A. U.

C. 45. A. C. the last year of the second Samnite war, and P. Decius Mus, the 279. Second campain. son of the Decius who had devoted himself at Sentinum, and the Both consuls are posed to Pyryhus i grandson of him who had devoted himself in the great battle with Apulia. the Latins. The legions required for the campaign were easily raised,“9 every citizen being eager to serve in such a season of danger, and C. Fabricius acted as lieutenant to one of the consuls; but beyond this we know nothing of the number or disposition of the Roman armies, nor of their plan of operations, nor of the several generals employed in different quarters.

Nor do we know whether any of the places which had revolted to Pyrrhus during his advance upon Rome continued still to adhere to him after his retreat; nor, if they did, how much time and what forces were required to subdue them. We are only told that Pyrrhus took the field in Apulia, and reduced several places in that quarter;90 and that he was employed in besieging Asculum when both consuls, with their two consular armies, advanced to relieve it and to offer him battle. The ancient Asculum, if its site was exactly the same with that of the modern Preparations for battle Ascoli, stood on a hill of inconsiderable size”9 on the edge of the on both sides. plains of Apulia; but, geologically speaking, it belongs to the plains, for the hill is composed only of beds of sand and clay, and the range of the limestone mountains sweeps round it at some distance on the west and south. The country is, for the most part, open, and must have been favorable for the operations of the king’s phalanx and elephants, as the soil, which after the winter rains is stiff and heavy, must, later in the year, have recovered its hardness. Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. X. 4, 5.

Zona-89 Dion Cassius, Fragm. Vatic. LV. Ororas, following Dion Cassius, and Dionysius also, sius, IV. 1. place Vat this period the free release of all the 90 Zonaras, VIII. 4. Roman prisoners by Pyrrhus without ransom. 91

See Dr. Daubeny’s Excursion to AmsancAnd so also does the epitome of Livy, XIII. tus, p. 30. Ascoli is a poor town, though it Plutarch agrees with Appian, and their account contained in 1797, according to Giustiniani, is so much the more probable of the two that 5270 souls. It has suffered repeatedly from l have not hesitated to follow it. earthquakes.

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CHAP. XXXVII.] BATTLE OF ASCULUM. 403 When the armies were opposed to each other, a rumor spread among Pyrrhus’ soldiers92 that the consul Decius intended to follow the example of his father and grandfather, and to devote himself, together with the enemy’s army, to the powers of death, whenever they should join battle. The men were uneasy at this report, so that Pyrrhus thought it expedient to warn them against yielding to superstitious fears, and to describe minutely the dress worn by any person so devoting himself. “If they saw any one so arrayed,” he said, ” they should not kill him, but by all means take him alive;” and he sent a message -to the consuls, warning them that if he should take any Roman practising such a’ trick, he would put him to an ignominious death as a common impostor. The consuls replied, that they needed no such resources, and trusted to the courage of Roman soldiers for victory, The first encounter took place on rough ground,93 and near the swampy banks of a river; and Pyrrhus having assailed the Romans in such a:posi-Battle of Asculum. tion, was repulsed with loss. But he manceuvred so as to bring them fairly into the plain, and there the two armies engaged. He kept his cavalry and elephants to act as a reserve; the Tarentines formed the centre of his line;‘the Lucanians, Bruttians, and Sallentines94 were on the left, and the Greeks and Samnites on the right. The Romans, as usual, had their cavalry on the wings, and their own legions formed the’first line, and also the reserve; the troops of their allies forming a second line between them. If this be true, the Romans must have suspected the fidelity of their allies; for their courage had been proved in a hundred battles; and the Marsians and Pelignians now, as at Pydna, would have thrown themselves on the pikes of the phalanx as fearlessly as the bravest Roman. On the other hand, Pyrrhus intermingled the Samnites with his Greek infantry, on purpose to combine’ the advantages of the Italian tactic95
with those of the Macedonian; that if his line should be attacked in flank, or if the enemy should penetratei it in any quarter, the Samnites might meet the Romans with their own weapons, and allow the Greeks time to recover the position and close order which, to their mode of fighting, were indispensable. But he had no occasion to try the effect of this disposition; for his phalanx kept its advantage, and as the nature of the ground obliged the The Romans are deRomans to attack it in fr ont, they hewed in vain with their swords96 fented. at the invincible mass of the Macedonian pikes, or tried to grapple them with their hands and break them. The Greeks kept an even line, and the Romans, finding it impossible to get within the hedge of spears, were slaughtered without returning a wound. At last they gave way, and then the elephants charged, and completed the rout. The other parts of the line opposed to the Tarentines and Lucanians were obliged to follow the example, and the Roman army fled to its camp. This was so close at hand that the loss did not’ exceed six thousand men, while in the army of Pyrrhus there had fallen 3505 according to the statement copied by Hieronymus from the commentaries of the king himself. This loss must again have fallen on the cavalry, light troops, and.peltastse of Pyrrhus’ army, unless it was sustained chiefly by his allies on the centre and left wing; for the circumstances of the’battle make it certain that the victory of his heavyarmed Greek infantry must have been almost bloodless. In this account of the actual battle of Asculum, Plutarch luckily chose to copy Hieronymus; but immediately after it he follows Dionysius, and Exaggeratedand, fa we have nothing but the: usual exaggerations-of Roman vanity, nccount ofthisbattle. which leave the real facts of the campaign in utter darkness. The victory of Asculum was not improved, and at the end of the season the Romans wintered in Apulia, and Pyrrhus again returned to Tarentum. A victory followed by no 02 Zonaras, VIII. 5. Dion Cassius,’ Fragm. 95 Polybius, XVtIII. 11.

9vatican. LV. 96 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 21, copying:apparently 93 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 21. from Hieronynus. 4 Frontinus, Stratagem. II. 38 ~‘21.

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404 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVII. results is easily believed to be a defeat; and where there is no other memorial of events than unchecked popular report and unsifted stories, facts which have no witness in their permanent consequences are soon hopelessly perverted. Niebuhr declares from his own personal observation, that within a few days after the battle of Bautzen every Prussian who had not been actually engaged in the action, maintained that the allies had been victorious; and we can remember the extraordinary misrepresentation which for a moment persuaded the English public that Napoleon had been defeated at Borodino. The successive steps of Roman invention with respect to the battle of Asculum are so curious, that I have given a view of them in a note:97 but it is not so easy to determine what were the real causes which neutralized to Pyrrhus the result of his victory, and made the issue of the campaign, as a whole, decidedly unfavorable to him. Both Zonaras and Dionysius relate that the baggage of Pyrrhus was plundered It is attended with no during the battle by his Italian allies; by the Apulians according results. League be-athe tween the Romans and to Zonaras, or according to Dionysius by the Samnites. If this Carthlginidsl. were so, not only did it imply such bad discipline and bad feeling on the part of his allies as to make it impossible for Pyrrhus to depend on their cooperation for the future; but the loss of their plunder and baggage would greatly discourage his own soldiers, and indispose them to the continuance of the war. Besides, it was manifest that the brunt of every battle must fall on the Greeks; already Pyrrhus had lost many of his best officers, and as he never lost sight of his schemes of conquest in Greece, he would not be willing to sacrifice his bravest soldiers in a series of hard-won battles in Italy, for the sake of allies on whom he could place no reliance. It is likely also that the Apulian cities which he had taken, overawed by the Roman power, and disgusted with the arrogance and indiscriminate plundering of the Greeks, were ready to return to their alliance with Rome; and as the Roman army was certain to be speedily reinforced, whilst Pyrrhus could look for no additional soldiers from Epirus, it might be absolutely impossible for him to keep the field. Finally, the Romans had concluded a defensive alliance98 with the Carthaginians, for their mutual support against Pyrrhus; and-towards the autumn of the year Ptolemy Ceraunus, king of Macedon, was defeated and killed by the Gauls,99 and the presence of these barbarians in Macedonia made it certain that no more soldiers could be spared from Epirus for foreign warfare, when their own frontier was in hourly danger of invasion. Thus left with no prospect of further conquests in Italy, Pyrrhus eagerly listened during the winter to offers from other quarters, inviting him to a new field The account inthetextisPlutarch’s, copied, actually devote himself in this battle as his as I have said, from Hieronymus of Cardia, a father and grandfather had done before him. contemporary historian. And Justin agrees De Finib.

II. 19. Tusculan. Disp. I. 37. No with it: “The issue of the second battle,” he other existing account notices this circumsays, “was similar to that of the first,” XVIII. stance; and according to the author ” de Viris 1. Livy if we may trust the epitome of his Illustribus,” Decius was alive some years after13th book, describes the action as a drawn bat-wards, and was engaged in the last war with tie:’” dubio eventu pugnatum est.” But Flo-Volsinii. Probablyit was either a forgetfulnessin rus calls it a victory on the part of the Romans; Cicero himself, or he followed some exaggerated and Eutropius and Orosius, copying apparently account, which, as he was not writing a historv from the same source, says that Pyrrhus was of the period, he did not criticise, but adopted wounded, many of his elephants destroyed, it without inquiry. But such enormous disand 20,000 of his men killed, the Roman loss crepancies in the several accounts show what is not exceeding 5000. Zonaras, copying from the; character of the Roman history, of this Dion Cassius, says that Pyrrhus was wounded, period, that, except in particular cases, it is and that his army was defeated; owing chiefly merely made up of traditional stories and paneto an attack made on his camp during the bat-gyrical orations, and can scarcely be called histie by a party of Apulians, which spread a panic tory at all. r How different is the account given among his soldiers.

According to Dionysius, of the battle by the contemporary historian as quoted by Plutarch, Pyrrhus was wounded, Hieronymus, who was writing from really good the Samnites, and not the Apulians, assaulted materials, not from guess or fancy, but from his camp during the action, and the loss on knowledge! both sides was equal, amounting to 15 000 men 9e Livy, Epitome, XIII. Polybius, III. 25 in each army. It is no less remarkable that Justin, XVIII. 2. according to Cicero, the consul P. Decius did e”

Plutarch, Pyrrh. 22.

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CaaP. XXXVIL] PYRRHUS IS INVITED TO SICILY 405 of action. The death of Ptolemy Ceraunus and the anarchy Pyrhus crosses. which followed tempted him to win back his old dominion in toSicily. Macedonia, while envoys from some of the principal cities of Sicily called upon him to aid them against Carthage, and promised to make him master of the whole island. He was thus eager to seize the first pretext for abandoning Italy, and early in the following spring such an occasion was afforded him. The new consuls, C.

Fabricius and Q. AzEmilius, were sent against him:100:A. U.. U 4. A.. and he soon received a message from them to say that one of his 278 servants had offered to poison him, and had applied to the Romans to reward his crime, but that the consuls, abhorring a victory gained by treason, wished to give the king timely notice of his danger. Pyrrhus upon this expressed his gratitude in the warmest terms, furnished all his prisoners with new clothing, and sent them back to their own country, without ransom and without conditions.‘0’ Immediately afterwards, without paying any regard to the remonstrances of his allies, he left Milo still in possession of the citadel of Tarentum,‘02 and his second son Alexander at Locri, and set sail with the rest of his army for Sicily. It was apparently soon after the battle of Asculum, that a Carthaginian fleet ~of 120 ships’0 was sent to Ostia to offer aid to the Romans, and A Carthaginin fleeti the senate declining this succor, the Carthaginian commander ent to thaid of the sailed away to the south of Italy, and there it is said proposed to Pyrrhus that Carthage should mediate between him and the Romans, his real object being to discover what were the king’s views with respect to Sicily. Was then the Tarentine fleet wasting the coasts of Latium, so that Rome stood in need of naval aid? Or did so large a fleet contain a Carthaginian army, and was Rome wisely unwilling to see an African general making war in Italy, and carrying off the plunder of Italian cities-? The insinuation against the good faith of the Carthaginian commander seems quite unfounded; this very armament helped the Romans‘04 in attempting to recover Rhegium, and though the seige did not succeed, yet a large supply of timber, which the Campanians had collected for building ships, was destroyed, and the Carthaginians having made a league with the Mamertines of Messana, watched the strait with their fleet to intercept Pyrrhus on his passage. But it seems that their fleet was called off in the next year to be employed in the siege of Syracuse, so that Pyrrhus, avoiding Messana, crossed from Locri to Tauromenia05 without opposition, and being welcomed there by the tyrant Tyndarion, landed his army, and marched to the deliverance of Syracuse. His operations in Sicily lasted more than two years;106 his fortune, which at first favored him in every enterprise, was wrecked in a fruitless siege of Lilybaeum;107 disgusts arose, as in Italy, between him and his allies; they were unmanageable and he was tyrannical, so that when at length his Italian allies implored him to come once again to their aid, he was as ready to leave Sicily as he had before been anxious to invade it. During his absence the Samnites, Lucanians, Bruttians, and Tarentines still “o0 Claudius Quadrigarius, quoted by A.

tained no triumph over Tarentum, and the Gellius, III. 8. Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. XI. success for which Fabricius triumphed “de Plutarch, Pyrrh. 21. Tarentinis” (Fasti Capitol.) may have been ob10o Plutarch and Appian say that the senate tained in the early part of his consulship, before released an equal number of Tarentine and Sam-the truce with Pyrrhus was concluded. nite prisoners, and that Cineas was again sent 102

Justin, XVIII. 2. Zonaras, VIII. 5. to Rome to negotiate a peace, but that the Romans 103 Justin XVIII. 2. refused to treat, while PyrJhus remained in 104 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXII. 9. Italy. Yet Appian, in another fragment, says 105 Diod., Fragm. Hoeschel.XXII. 11. that Pyrrhus, “after his treaty with the Ro-lO From the middle of 476 to the latter end mans,”

terl ra; 7repr’Popaiov auvVOeKas, went of 478. rer rptrw is Appian’s expression, Samover to Sicily. Probably a truce for a certain nitic.

Fragm. XII., which Mr. Fynes Clinton period was agreed to, and with it a general ex-wrongly understands of the year.479, for that, change of prisoners. Whether Pyrrhus stipu-according to the Greek mode of reckoning, lated any thing for the Tarentines we cannot would not have been ErEt rptrt, but rerdpprq. tell; but the consuls of the two succeeding 07 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXII 14 years, although they triumphed over the Sam-Plutarch, Pyrrh. 22, 23. nites and Lucanians, yet appearsd to have ol

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406 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVII A.U.C.476,417.A.C. continued the war.

They ventured no battles in the field, but t28, 277. Progre ssof resolutely defended their towns and fastnesses,‘s0 and sometimes, th war in Italy during eabsence ofPyrrhus, as always happens in such warfare, inflicted some partial loss on the enemy, without being able to change in any degree the general fortune of the contest. The consuls employed against them enjoyed a triumph at the end of each campaign; Fabricius at the end of the year 476,109 C. Junius Brutus at the end of 477, and Q.

Fabius Gurges at the end of 478. In the mean time P. Cornelius Rufinus, the colleague of C. Junius in 477, had recovered Croton and Locri; but as he was considered the principal cause of a severe irepulse sustained by himself’ and his colleague from the Samnites at the beginning of the year, he was not thought deserving of a triumph. It seems to have been in the autumn of 478 that Pyrrhus returned to Italy.“l A. U. C. 478. A. CBut his return was beset with enemies, for a Carthaginian fleet 276. Pyrrhus returns attacked him on his passage, and sunk seventy of his ships of to Italy. war,12 and when he landed on the Italian coast he found that the Mamertines had crossed over from Messana to beset his road by land, and he had to cut his way through them with much loss. Yet he reached Tarentum with a force nearly as large as that which he had first brought over from Epirus; as large in numbers, but of a very different quality, consisting principally of mercenaries raised in his Sicilian wars, men of all countries, Greek and Barbarian, and whose fidelity would last no longer than their general was victorious. No sooner had he arrived at Tarentum than he commenced active operations. Heplunders thetemplo The Roman consuls were employed in Lucania and in Samnium,“3 of Proerpine at Locri.

but he received no interruption from them, and recovered Locri. He next made an attempt upon Rhegium, a place so important from its position to the success of any new expedition to Sicily, but the Campanian garrison resisted Pyrrhus”4 as stoutly as they had resisted the Romans, and the king was obliged to retire with loss. His old allies, the Samnites and Lucanians,”’ received him coldly, and, however anxious to obtain his aid, they had not, exhausted as they were, the means of supplying him with money, even if they had been disposed to rely on his constancy in their cause. Thus embarrassed, as he passed by Locri on his return from Rhegium to Tarentum, he listened to the advice of some of his followers,“6 and plundered the temple of Proserpine. In the vaults underneath this temple was a large treasure, which had been buried for unknown generations, and no mortal eye had been allowed to look on it. This he carried off, and.

embarked his spoil on board of his ships, to transport it by sea to Tarentum. A storm, however, arose and wrecked the -ships, and cast ashore the plundered treasure on the coast of Locri. Pyrrhus was moved, and ordered it t9o be replaced in the temple of the goddess, and offered sacrifices to propitiate her anger. But when there were no signs given that she accepted his offering, he put to death the three men who had advised him to commit the sacrilege, and even yet his mind was haunted by a dread of divine vengeance, and his own commentaries”’ recorded his belief that Proserpine’s wrath was still’- Zonaras, VIII. 6. - ginians employed in their engagement with F09 Fabricius triumphed in December, Brutus Duilius in the first Punic war a large ship, in January, thirteen months afterwards, and Fa-. which they took from Pyrrhus probably on his bins in the February of the year following, when retreat from Sicily.

(Polybius, I. 23.) We Pyrrhus in all probability was already returned must suppose that the ships of war were conto Italy. voying the transports on which Pyrrhus had m; Zonaras, VIII. 6. embarked his army; and that their resistance 1” Zonaras expressly says that Pyrrhus re-enabled the transports to escape. turned in the year after the consulship of P. 21!

Zonaras, VIII. 6. Rufinus, that is, in 478. VIII. 6. 11 4.Zonaras, VIII.

6. 112 Appian, Samnitic. Fragm. XII. Plutarch,- I5 Plutarch Pyrrh. 25.

Dion. Cassis, Fragm. Pyrrh. 24. Pyrrhus had obtained this fleet Peiresc.

XLII. chiefly from the Syracusans, who, on his first:11 Dionysius, XIX. 9.

Appian, Samnitio arrival in Sicily, gave up to him their whole Fragm. XII.

navy, amounting to 140 ships of war. Diodo- “* Dionysius, XIX., oLs rei i76s II Uppos’t tots rus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXII. 11. The Cartha-ilots {tropyvsaaat ypdocL.

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CHAP. XXXVII.] PREPARATIONS OF THE ROMANS. 407 pursuing him, and bringing on his arms defeat and ruin. If Pyrrhus nimself, after his long intercourse with the Epicurean Cineas, entertained such fears, they weighed far more heavily doubtless on the minds of many of his soldiers and his allies; and the sense of being pursued by the wrath of heaven may have well chilled the hearts of the bravest, and affected in no small degree the issue of the war. This was fast approaching. The consuls chosen for the year 479 were 1’. Curius Dentatus and L. Cornelius Lentulus. The Romans on their Religious terrors at side also were visited by religious terrors; during the year 478 a Rome. A. U. C. 479. A. C. 275. fatal pestilence had raged amongst them,“8 and now the clay A. 5. statue of Jupiter on the summit of the Capitoline temple was struck by lightning, and shattered to pieces. The head of the image was nowhere to be found, and the augurs declared that the storm had blown it into the Tiber, and commanded that it should be searched for in the bed cf the river. It was found in the very place in which the augurs had commanded the search to be made. Fears of the anger of the gods, together with the dread of the arms of Pyrrhus, made the Romans backward to enlist in the legions. Those Severity of the consul who were summoned did not answer to their names, upon which in the enlistment si the consul, M’. Curius,“9 commanded that the goods of the first de-oldier faulter should be publicly sold. A public sale of a man’s property by the sentence of a magistrate rendered him incapable of exercising afterwards any political rights; but the necessity of a severe example was so felt that no tribune interposed in behalf of the offender, and the consul’s order was carried into execution.

The usual number of legions was then raised; Lentulus‘20 marched into Lucania, Curius into Samnium. Pyrrhus took the field against Curius with his own army, and the flower of the force of Tarentum, and a division of Samnites; the rest of the Samnite army was sent into Lucania to prevent Lentulus from opposed to each other coming to join his colleague. Curius, finding that Pyrrhus was near marching against him, sent to call his colleague to his aid; and in the mean while the omens would not allow him to attack the enemy,121 and he lay encamped in a strong position near Beneventum. There is much rugged and difficult country behind the town on the road towards Apulia, and there is a considerable extent of level ground in the valley of the Calore below it, which was the scene of the decisive battle between Manfred and Charles of Anjou. But whether they fought on the same ground which had witnessed the last encounter between Pyrrhus and the Romans, it is not possible to determine. Pyrrhus resolved to attack Curius before his colleague joined him, and he planned an attack upon his camp by night.‘22 He set out by Unsuccessful nighttorchlight, with the flower of his soldiers and the best of his ele-mrtf tPyrrhus to phants; but the way was long, and the country overgrown with…Pp wood, and intersected with steep ravines; so that his progress was slow, and at last the lights were burnt out, and the men were continually missing their way. Day broke before they reached their destination; but still the enemy were not aware of their approach till they had surmounted the heights above the Roman camp, and were descending to attack it from the vantage-ground. Then Curius led out his troops to oppose them; and the nature of the ground gave the Romans a great advantage over the heavyarmed Greek infantry, as soon as the attempt to surprise them had failed. But the action seems to have been decided 118 Orosins, IV. 2.

Livy, Epitom. XIV. Cicero, most tolerant even of the greatest severity when de Divinat. I. 10. the public service seemed to require it. But’IO

Livy, Epitom. XIV. Valerius Maximus the authority of a collector of anecdotes is so VI. 3, ~ 4, adds to this story that Curius sold small, that Valerius’ addition to the story must not only the property of the defaulter, but the be considered very doubtful. man himnself, saying “
that the commonwealth 120 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 25. wanted no citizen who did not know how to 121 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 25. obey.” If the tribunes did not interfere, the la Plutarch, Pyrrh. 25. Dionysius, XIXD eonsul’s power might indeed extend to any 12-14. thing; and we know that the Romans were

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408 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVIIT by an accident; for one of Pyrrhus’

elephants was wounded, and running wild among its own men, threw them into disorder; nor could they offer a long resistance, being almost exhausted with the fatigue of their night-march. They were repulsed with great loss;“23 two elephants were killed, and eight being forced into impracticable ground from which there was no outlet, were surrendered to the Romans by their drivers. Thus encouraged, Curius no longer declined a decisive action on equal ground; Battle of Beneventum. he descended into the plain,‘24 and met Pyrrhus’ in the open field. Pyrrhus ie defeated. On the one wing the Romans were victorious; on the other, oppressed by the weight of the I edephants’ charge, they were driven back to their camp.‘25

But their retreat was covered by a shower of missiles from the guards on the rampart, and these so annoyed the elephants that.they turned about, and fled through their own ranks, bearing down all before them. When the phalanx was thus disordered the Romans attacked it vigorously, and made their way into the mass; and then their swords had an immense advantage over the long spears of the enemy, and their victory was speedy and complete. What number of men were killed or taken is variously reported; but the overHe finally leaves Italy throw was decisive; and Pyrrhus, retreating to Tarentum, resolved andreturnto Epirus. immediately to evacuate Italy. Yet, as if he still clung to the hope of returning hereafter, he left Milo with his garrison in the citadel of Tarentum, and then embarked for Epirus.‘26 He landed in his native kingdom with no more than eight thousand foot and five hundred horse,‘21 and without money to maintain even these. Thus he was forced to engage in new enterprises;“and often victorious in battle, but never successful in war, he perished two or three years afterwards, as is well known, by a woman’s hand, in his attack upon Argos. CHAPTER XXXVIII, GENERAL HISTORY FROMI THE DEPARTURE OF

PYRRHUS FROM ITALY TO TIIE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST PUNIC WAR-FINAL

SUBMISSION OF SAMNIUMCONQUEST OF TARENTUM-PICENTIAN AND VOLSINIAN

WARS-ROME ACQUIRES THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ALL ITALY DETACHED EVENTS AND

ANECDOTES RELATING TO THIS PERIOD.-479 TO 489 A. U. C., 275 TO 265 A. C. “

France was now consolidated into a great kingdom… And thus having conquered herself, if I may use the phrase, and no longer apprehensive of any foreign enemy, she was prepared to carry her arms into other countries.”-HALLArM, Middle Ages, Chap. I. Part 11. WE have seen that a Carthaginian fleet appeared on the coasts of Latium in Relations between the heat of the war with Pyrrhus, to offer its assistance to the Rome and Carthage. Romans. The offer was then refused, but very soon afterwards a‘3

Dionysius, XIX. 14. mother, and so excited her, that she, too, be124

Plutarch, Pyrrh. 25. The scene of the came ungovernable, and threw the Greek army battle is placed by Orosius and Florus “in into disorder, and that this accident first turned campis Arusinis,” or “sub campis Arusinis,” the fortune of the day. but this name is unknown to us, and does not 126 It is said that a report was purposely cirenable us to determine the place exactly. culated by Pyrrhus, of the speedy arrival of re125 Plutarcli, Pyrrh. 25. The story which inforcements from the kings of Macedonia and’ionysius and Plutarch relate of the first action Syria, and that the Romans therefore did not is by Zonaras and Florus referred to the last venture to advance upon Tarentum. Pausanias, and decisive battle; namely, that a young ele-I. 13; compare Niebuhr, Vol. III. p. 610, alnd phant having been wounded, and running note 927. about screaming, its cries were heard by its 127 Plutarch, Pyrrh. 26.

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CHAP. XXXVIII.] PREPARATORY EVENTS. 409 treaty was concluded between Rome and Carthage,’ in which both nations engaged to reserve to themselves the right of assisting one another, even if either should conclude an alliance with Pyrrhus; that is to say, their alliance with him was to be subordinate to their alliance with each other, and instead of aiding him in his attacks against the other, they were in such a case to aid one another, even against him. Such were the relations subsisting between Rome and Carthage in the year 479; eleven years afterwards these friendly ties were broken to pieces, and the two nations were engaged in the first Punic war. In fact, from the moment that Pyrrhus embarked at Tarentum to return to Epirus, the whole stream of our history begins to set towards that Preparation of events great period when Rome and Carthage first became enemies. The for th first Puni war. relics of wars in Italy, which still remain to be noticed, are only like a clearing of the ground for that mightier contest; and the union of all Italy under one dominion is rather to be regarded for the present as the forging of that iron power by which Carthage was to be crushed, and the whole civilized world bowed into subjection, than as the completion of the magnificent and complicated fabric in which law and polity were to abide as in their appointed temple.

The very barrenness of the political history of Rome during the half century which followed the war with Pyrrhus, is in itself a presumption that the energies of the Roman people at this time were employed abroad rather than at home. I shall therefore defer all notice of the internal state of Italy under the Roman sovereignty, till we come to the period of the second Punic war. Then, when Hannibal’s sword was probing so deeply every unsound part in the Roman dominion, and when he was laboring to array Campania and Samnium and Lucania and Bruttium in a fifth coalition against Rome, the internal relations of the Italian states towards the Romans and towards each other will necessarily demand our attention. But for the present I shall merely regard them as blended into one great mass, which was presently to be engaged in deadly conflict with the dominion of Carthage. After Pyrrhus left Italy, his general, Milo, retained the citadel of Tarentum for nearly four years. The aristocratical party, which had been from A. U. C. 48. A. C. the beginning opposed to the Epirot alliance, now endeavored to 2s7. Siege of Tofren. turn. Milo retires to rid themselves of it by force of arms. They failed, however, in Epiru..

Surrender of their attempt to recover the citadel, and then leaving Tarentum, thotown. they occupied a fort in the neighborhood,2 from whence they carried on a plundering warfare against the city, and were able to make their own peace with the Romans. Even the popular party were tired of the foreign garrison and its governor, but, feeling that they never could be forgiven by the Romans, they looked elsewhere for aid, and sent to the Carthaginian commanders3 in Sicily to deliver them from Milo’s dominion. A Carthaginian fleet appeared accordingly before the harbor, while L.

Papirius Cursor, the Roman consul, was besieging the town by land. But Papirius, dreading the interference of Carthage, treated secretly with Milo,4 and persuaded him to deliver up the citadel to the Romans, on condition of being allowed to retire in safety to Epirus with his garrison and all their baggage. Thus Tarentum was given up into the hands of the Romans, and the Carthaginian fleet returned to Sicily. The Roman government complained of its appearance on the coast of Italy,5 when its assistance had not been requested by Polybius, III. 25. between the Roman and Carthaginian forces, in 2 Zonaras, VIII. 6. This was like the aristo-which the Romans were victorious. cratical party in Corcyra, who, after their expul-4 Zonaras, VIII. 6. Frontinus, Strategem. sion from the city, built a fortiin the mountains, III. 3, ~ 1. from whence they plundered the lands of their 5 Orosius, IV. 5. That the interference of the opponents.

Thucyd. III. 85. Carthaginians on this occasion was complained Zonaras, VIII. 6. Orosius, IV. 3S. But the of by the Romans appears also from Livy, account in Orosius is greatly distorted and ex-Elitom. XIV. and from Dion Cassius, Fragm. aggerated, for he makes the Tarentines call in V;ttican.

LVII. Yet as Pyrrhus was the enemy the aid of Carthage not against Milo, but against of Carthage, the Carthaginians might lawfully Rome, and says that a regular action took place aid the Tarentines against his officer; the a -

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410 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVIII Rome; and the Carthaginians, now that Tarentum was actually in the Roman power, disavowed the expedition as an unauthorized act of their officers in Sicily. The death or banishment of the leaders of the democratical party at Tarentum Subjugation of T.r.n-atoned, no doubt, for the insult offered to the Roman ambassadors, tum.

and for the zealous enmity which had organized against Rome the fourth Samnite war. When vengeance was satisfied, policy demanded the complete humiliation of a city which had shown both the will and the power to injure.’ Tarentum was dismantled, its fleet and all its stores of arms were surrendered, it was made to pay a yearly tribute, and a Roman garrison,7 it seems, was quartered in the citadel. When thus effectually disarmed and fettered, the Tarentines were allowed to retain their municipal freedom, as the allies, and not the subjects of Rome. In the same year, immediately before the fall of Tarentum, Samnium, Lucania, and Bruttium had made their final and absolute submission. L. Sabmission of the Samnites Lue.t..ins, and Papirius Cursor and Sp. Carvilius Maximus, who had been consuls together one-and-twenty years earlier in the great campaign which decided the third Samnite war, were elected consuls together for the second time, to put the last stroke to the present contest. Carvilius invaded Samnium,s and received the submission of the Samnites; Papirius received that of the Lucanians and Bruttians. The three nations all retained their municipal freedom, or rather their several towns or districts were left free individually, but their national union was dissolved; and they were, probably, not even allowed to intermarry with’or to inherit property from each other. Besides this, they made, undoubtedly, large cessions of territory, and were obliged to give hostages9 for their future good behavior. It is mentioned in particular that the Bruttians ceded the half of their mountain and forest district, called Sila,T’ or the Weald; a tract rich to this day in all varieties of timber trees, and in wide ranges of well-watered pastures, and famous for yielding the best vegetable pitch known to the ancients. The right of preparing this pitch was let as usual by the censors, and brought into the republic a large revenue. Thus the Romans had put down all their enemies in the south of Italy, except A. U. c. 484. A. C. the rebellious soldiers of the eighth legion, who had taken posses2reolter garriaonu, f sion of Rhegium. Those, however, were reduced two years later Rhegium. by the consul, C. Genucius.” A separate treaty concluded with the Mamertines of Messanal2 had cut them off from their most natural succor, and Hiero, who since Pyrrhus had left Sicily had been raised by his merit and services‘3
to the throne of Syracuse, took an active part against them, and supplied the Roman besieging army not with corn only, but with an auxiliary force of soldiers. Thus the town of Rhegium was at last stormed, and most of the garrison put to the sword in the assault. Of the survivors, all except the soldiers of the original legion were executed‘4 by the consul on the spot; but these, as Campanian citizens,‘5 and, therefore, having all the private rights of citizens of Rome, were reserved for the judgment of the senate and people. When they were brought to Rome, one of the tribunes pleaded in their behalf that they fence complained of, however, was, in all prob-Lollius, a Samnite hostage, is said to have esability, the appearance of a foreign fleet, unin-caped from Rome. vited by the Romans, on the coasts of what’ Dionysins, XX. 5. Sila is, doubtless, the they would consider the Roman dominion. But same word as Silva and as OAr. For the actual the Carthaginians might answer that the coast state of this forest country, see Mr.. Keppel of Iapygia was not yet to be regarded as belong-Craven, Tour in the Southern Provinces of ing to Rome. Naples, p. 242. 6 Zonaras, VIII. 6. n Dionysius, XX. 7. -In the interval between the first and second 2 - Zonaras, VIII. 6. Punic wars, a legion was regularly stationed at “

Polybius, I. 8, 9. Justin, XXIII. 4. ZonaTarentum. Polybius, II. 24.

Niebuhr thinks ras, VIII. 6. that this had been the case ever since the sur-14 Orosius, IV. 3. render of the city. ” See Niebuhr, Rom. Hist Vcl.

II. p. 57. 8 Zonaras, VIII. 6. Eng. Transl. This appears from Zonaras, VIII. 7, where

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CasA,. XXXVIII.] CONQUEST OF THE PICENTIANS. 411 were Roman citizens,‘6
and ought not to be put to death, except by the judgment of the people; but the people were as little disposed to mercy as the senate, and the thirty-three tribes‘7 condemned them unanimously. They were thus all scourged and beheaded, to the number of more than three hundred, and their bodies were cast out unburied. Rhegium and its territory were restored to the survivors of the old inhabitants. In the next year one of the Samnite‘8 hostages escaped from Rome, and revived a guerilla warfare in the country of the Caracenians in north-A. U. C. 485. A. C. ern Sarmnium.

Both consuls were employed to crush at once an 269. Shortgurillal.ail enemy who might soon have become formidable, and the bands ilaium. which had taken up arms were soon dispersed, and their strongholds taken, although not without some loss and danger on the part of the conquerors. A war followed with a people whose name has only once before been heard of in Roman history, the Picentians, on the coast of the Adriatic. A. U. C.

48. A. C. 8. The Picentians had become the allies of Rome‘9 thirty-one years W’ar withandconquest before this period, at the beginning of the third Samnite war, and they had ever since observed the alliance faithfully. But in the year 486 we find two consular armies20 employed against them, and after a short struggle they submitted at discretion. A portion of them was removed to the coast of the Tuscan sea, and settled in the country which had formerly belonged to the Samnites, on the shores of the gulf of Salernum.2’ It may have been that this migration had been commanded by the Roman government as a measure of state policy, in order to people the old Samnite coast with less suspected inhabitants, and to acquire as Roman domain the lands which the Picentians had left in their old country; and the Picentians, perhaps, like the Carthaginians in the third Punic war, unwilling to be torn from their native land, rose against Rome in mere despair. But whatever was the cause of the war, it ended in the speedy and complete conquest22 of the Picentian people. The last gleanings of Italian independence were gathered in during the two years which next followed. The Sallentines and Messapians had at one time taken part in the confederacy23 of southern Italy against A. C. -67 a1d 266.

Con. Rome, but they had withdrawn from the cause before its over-Piest Occupation ot throw. Their repentance, however, availed them nothing, for the port of Brundisium, in the Sallentine territory, was a position which the Romans were very anxious to secure;24 the more so as Alexander, the son of Pyrrhus, was reigning in Epirus, and had inherited much of the warlike temper of his 16 Valerius Maximus, II. 7, 15. The same 19 See pace 331. thing happened after the reduction of Capua in 20 The Fasti Capitolini record that both the the second Punic war. The Campanians being consuls of the year, P. Sempronius and Appius Roman citizens, the senate could not determine Claudius, triumphed over the Picentians. their fate without being empowered by the 21 Strabo, V. p. 251. people to do so; and accordingly the tribes 22 The Picentian war is briefly noticed by voted that whatever sentence the senate might Florus, I. 19, by Eutropils, and by Orosius, IV. pass should have their authority for its full ex-4. A great earthquake happened just as the ecution. Livy, XXVI. 33. It is remarkable Roman and Picentian armies were going to enthat the power of taking up the Roman fran-gage, upon which P. Sempronius, the consul, chise at pleasure should be considered as so vowed to build a temple to the earth. The completely equivalent to the possession of the population of the Picentians, when they subfranchise actually, which is Niebuhr’s explana-fnitted to the lRomans, amounted, according to tion of the condition of the Campanians. Vol. Pliny (Hist. Natur. III. 110), to 360G000 souls. II. note 136. Eng. Transl. It rather appears 23 They had fought under Pyrrhus at Ascufrom the definition of the term municeps, given lum; see Frontinus Strategem. II. 3, ~ 21; and by Festus from Ser.

Sulpicius the younger, that they are not mentioned as conquered by -Iapirthe Campanians, and others in the same rela-ius and Carvilius, when the Samnites, Lucation to Rome, enjoyed actually all the:private nians, and. Bruttians submitted, so that they rights of Roman citizens, without forfeiting had probably left the confederacy at an earlier their own Campanian franchise; and this too period. seems implied by the fact of their forming a 2 Zonaras, copying from Dion Cassius, acregular legion in war, instead of being reckoned cuses the Romans of making war on the Sallenmerely as auxiliaries. tines because they wished to get possession of 17 Dionysius, XX. 7. Polybius, I. 7. Brundisiumn. VIII. 7.‘s Zonaras, VIII. 7. Dionysius, XX. 9.

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412 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVIII father; and whether for attack or defence, the possession of Brundisium, the favorite point of communication in later times with Greece and the East, appeared therefore to the Romans very desirable. Accordingly, the Sallentines and Messapians were reduced to submission, and Brundisium was ceded to the Romans. They did not send a colony. thither till some years25 afterwards, but the land must, in the mean while, have formed a part of their domain, and the port in all probability was occupied by a Roman garrison. In the midst of the Sallentine war, the consuls of the year 488 triumphed over Conquest of the Sar-the Sarsinatians,26 a people of Umbria, and the countrymen of the tinatians. comic poet Plautus. Livy’s epitome21 speaks of the Umbrians generally, and says that they, as well as the Sallentines, submitted to the Romans at discretion. One more conquest still remained to be achieved, a conquest called for by poWar with the Volsi-litical jealousy no less than by national ambition. The aristocracy niats. A. u. c. 489. of Volsinii28 applied to Rone for aid against the intolerable tyrA. C. 265.

anny of their former serfs or vassals, who were now in possession of the government. As the necessity of keeping up a large navy in the Persian invasions first led to the ascendency of the poorer classes at Athens, and as wars with foreign states had favored the liberties of the Roman commons, so the long wars in which Volsinii had been engaged with Rome had obliged the aristocracy to arm and train their vassals, till they, feeling their importance and power, had risen against their old lords, and had established their own complete ascendency. But in proportion as they had been more degraded and oppressed than the Roman commons, so was their triumph far less happy. Slaves let loose knew not how to become citizens; two only social relations had they ever known, those of oppressor and oppressed; and having ceased to be the one, they became immediately the other. They retaliated on their former masters the worst atrocities which they had themselves been made to suffer;29 and when they found that some of the oppressed party had applied to Rome for aid, they put many of them to death,30 as for an act of treason. This was more than sufficient to excite the Romans to interfere, and, as the present ruling party in Volsinii were regarded as little better than revolted slaves, the majority of the Roman commons would be ready to put them down no less than the senate. National ambition, no doubt,made the enterprise doubly welcome; perhaps too the accusation of Metrodorus3” was not without foundation, when he ascribed the war to a baser passion,- and said that the two thousand statues with which Volsinii was ornamented, tempted the Romans to attack it. Q. Fabius Gurges, one of the consuls of the year 489, 25 In the latter part of the first Punic war. there is a hill that runs up thirty stadia in See Livy, Epitom. XIX. But Florus says [I. height; and beneath there is a forest of all sorts 20] that Brundisium, with its famous port, was of trees, and much water. So the people of the reduced by M. Atilius, who was one of the concity, fearing lest any of them should become a suls of the year 487. And so also does Eutro-tyrant, set up their freedmen to be their mapius. gistrates; and these freedmen rule over them, 20 Fasti Capitolini. and others of the same sort are appointed in 27

Epitom. XV.. “Umbri et Sallentini victi their place at the end of the year.” in deditionem accepti sunt.” 20 Valerius Maximus IX. 1. The worst of 2Y Zonaras, VIII. Z. Auct. de Viris Illustrib. all the outrages there described was practised “Decius Mus.” Florus, I. 21. Valerius Maxi-in some instances by the feudal aristocracy in mus, IX. 1, Extern. ~ 2.

Orosius, IV. 5. All modern Europe; and it is far more likely that these writers call the revolution at Volsinii a the Volsinian serfs retaliated it upon their masrising of slaves against their masters; just as ters than that they should have been the first Herodotus represents a similar revolution at inventors of it. Argos, after the old citizens had been greatly 30 Zonaras, VIII. 1. weakened by their wars with Sparta. VI. 83.

21 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XXXIV. ~ 34. MetroThe story told in the work ” de Mirabil. Aus-dorus of Scepsis lived in the seventh century eultationibus,” 94, Ed. Bekker, wronglyascribed of Rome, and was intimate with Mithridates, to Aristotle, relates undoubtedly to Volsinii, whose hatred against the Romans he shared to and shows the vague and exaggerated form in such a degree, that he was called aI #pioe. amof. which even contemporary events in distant His charge, whether true or false, is at least concountries are related, when there is no real his-sistent with those other representations which torian to sift them. According to this story, speak of the growing wealth and increased love “the city is very strong; for in the midst of it of wealth among the Romans at this pericd.

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CHar. XXXVIII.] SOVEREIGNTY OF ALL ITALY. 413 laid siege to Volsinii with a consular army;32 but having been mortally wounded in one of the sallies of the besieged, he left the completion of his work to his successors.33

In the following year Volsinii was taken; bloody executions took place, and the remnant of the new Volsinian citizens, who were not put to death, were given up as serfs once again to their former masters. But the old Volsinian aristocracy were not allowed to return to the city of their fathers. Volsinii was destroyed, its statues, no doubt, were carried to Rome, and its old citizens were settled in a new spot34 on the lower ground near the shores of the lake, apparently on or near the site of the modern town of Bolsena. Thus the whole extent of Italy from the Macra and the Rubicon to Rhegium and Brundisium was become more or less subject to Rome. But TheRomanssovereigns it was not merely that the several Italian nations were to follow o““allItly in war where Rome might choose to lead them; nor yet that they paid a certain tribute to the sovereign state, such as Athens received from her subject allies. The Roman dominion in Italy had wrested large tracts of land from the conquered nations in every part of the peninsula; forests, mines, and harbors had become the property of the Roman people, from which a large revenue was derived; so that all classes of Roman citizens were enriched by their victories; the rich acquired a great extent of land to hold in occupation; the poor obtained grants of land in freehold by an agrarian law; while the great increase of revenue required a greater number of persons to collect it, and thus from the quaestors to the lowest collectors or clerks employed under them, all the officers of government became suddenly multiplied. The changes, indeed, which were wrought in the course of ten years, from the retreat of Pyrrhus to the conquest of Volsinii, must have affected Great changes which the whole life and character of the Roman people. Even the trio inthe conditio of mere fragmentary notices, which are all that we possess of this the Roans. period, record, first, the increase of the number of quaestors from four to eight 35 secondly, a distribution of land, in portions of seven jugera3l to each citizen, to the Roman commons generally: thirdly, a distribution of money amongst the citizens,37
probably amongst those of the city tribes who did not wish to become possessors of land; the money so distributed having arisen from the sale of conquered territory: fourthly, the first adoption of a silver coinage, copper having been hitherto the only currency of the state:38 fifthly, the appointment of several new magistrates or commissioners, such as the decemviri litibus judicandis,39 or S2 Zonaras, VIII. 7. for their own profit, but sanctioned by the state, Ha The author ” de Viris Illustrib.”

ascribes and controlled by the triumviri monetales. the’conquest of Volsinii to Decius Mus, who Qusestors are known to have coined money was consul in 475, and fought with Pyrrhus at when employed under a proconsul as his payAsculum., But whether Decius was employed master, but these coins are equally without any as prietor, or as dictator, we know not.: The peculiar national device, and relate to somesame writer also says that Appius Claudius, the thing in the qusestor’s own family or in the circonsul of the year 490, obtained the’ surname cumstances of his general. Thus on’ the gold of Caudex, after his conquests of the Volsinians; coins struck by P. Lentulus Spinther, when but the Fasti Capitolini give the honor of the he was qusestor to Cassius in Asia, we see the conquest to his colleague, M. Fulvius Flac-device of a cap of liberty and a dagger, in manicus, who triumphed ” de Vulsiniensibus, An.

fest allusion to the assassination of Caesar. Yet cDXxcix. K. Nov.” the two-horsed and four-horsed chariots which 34 Zonaras, VIII. 7. appear so often on the denarii are noticed by 95 Livy, C Epitom. XV. Pliny as a general device, from which the old86 Columella, Proefat. est silver coins received their name. It seems 97 Dionysius, XX. ad finem. probable that there was no fixed rule with re98 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XXXIII. 44. The sil-spect to the right of coining; that sometimes ver coinage was first introduced in the year 485; the state issued a coinage, that sometimes monand the coins struck were denarii, quinarii, and ey was struck by particular magistrates for the sestertii. It is still a great question in whose immediate use of their own department of the hands the right of coining money was placed. public service; and that sometimes also it was The devices on the consular denarii are so va-struck by individuals for their own profit, just rious, and refer so peculiarly to the house of as a large part of our own circulation at this day the individual who coined them, that Niebuhr consists in the notes issued by private bankers.

supposes them to have been really a private 3u, Pomponius de origine Juris,” 29. Set coinage, like the tokens occasionally issued in Niebuhr.

Rom. Gesch. III. p. 649. England, a coinage issued by private persons

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414 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXVITL the board of ten, who presided over the court of the centumviri or hundred judges; the board of four,40 who had the care of the streets and roads; the board of five,. who acted for the magistrates during the night,” the consuls’ ordinary responsibility ceasing with the going down of the sun; and the board of three, who had the care of the coinage. All these things are recorded as having been introduced for the first time about the period between the war with Pyrrhus and the first war with Carthage, and they clearly show what manifold changes the Roman people were then undergoing. The conquest of Italy was, indeed, to Rome what the overthrow of the AtheEffects of these on nian empire was to Sparta: the larger scale of all public transacthe national m..an.ners.t Anecdotes of Curius sand tions, the vast influx of wealth into the state, and the means of Fabrietius. acquiring wealth unjustly which were put within the reach of many private individuals, were a severe shock to the national character. Many other Romans, no doubt, besides P. Cornelius Rufinus, were as corrupt and tyrannical as Gylippus and Lysander; and it was this very corruption which made men dwell so fondly on those who were untainted by it:” the virtue of Fabricius and Curius, like that of Callicratidas, shone the brighter, because the temptations which they resisted were so often yielded to by others. In the present state of Italy any eminent Roman might seriously affect the condition of any of the subject people either for good or for evil: hence the principal citizens of Rome were earnestly courted: with compliments, and often, no doubt, propitiated with presents, and it was for refusing such presents when offered to them by the Samnites, that Fabricius and Curius became so famous. All know how deputies from Samnium came to Curius43 at his Sabine farm to offer him a present of gold. They found him seated by the fireside, with a wooden platter before him, and roasting turnips in the ashes. “I count it my glory,” he said, ” not to possess gold myself, but to have power over those who do.” So, again, other Samnite deputies came to bring a present44 of ten pounds of copper, five of silver, and five slaves, to Fabricius as the patron of their nation.

Fabricius drew his hands over his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, and then along his neck and down his body; and said that whilst he was the master of his five senses and sound in body and limb, he needed nothing more than he had already. Thus, whether refusing to have clients, or to accept from them their customary dues, Curius and Fabricius lived in such poverty as to be unable to give a dowry to their daughters;45 and in both cases the senate paid it for them. Men of this sort, so indifferent to money, and at the same time not without a roughness of nature which would delight in vexing the luxury and rapacity of others, were likely to struggle hard against the prevailing spirit of covetousness and expense. When Fabricius was censor in 479, he expelled P. Rufinus46 from the senate because he had returned amongst his taxable possessions ten pounds weight of silver plate; for there is often a jealousy against any new mode of:displaying wealth, when the greatest expenditure in old and accustomed ways -excites no displeasure. Silver plate was a new luxury in the fifth centuryof Rome, and therefore attracted the censor’s notice; three hundred years later, the possession of silver plate to any 4O 41 Pomponius, ~ 80, 31.

government of his province, the same spotless 42 Pope has said, that integrity which he proved actually in sitting by “Lucullus, when frugality’ could charm, his cottage fire, and refusing the humble presHad roasted turnips in the Sabine farm”’ ents of the Samnites. 43 Cicero, de Senectut. 16. Valerlus Maxim. as if the virtue of Curius had belonged to his IV. 3, 5. age and not to himself.: But this is the mistake 44-Julius Hyginus, apud Gellium, I. 14. Vaof a satirist and fatalist,‘whose tendency it lerius Maximus, IV. 3, 6. always is to depreciate human virtue. Had Lu-46 I borrow this from Niebuhr, who refers qllus,lived, in Curius’ day, he would have for the story to Apuleius. shown in the possession of ten pounds of silver -4 Livy, Epitom. XIV. Niebuhr supposes plate, the same spirit which, -in his own days, that Fabricius may have suspected this plate to’was shown in the splendor of his feasts in the have been a part of the spoils won by Rufinus Apollo: had Curius lived in the days of Cicero, at, Croton, and have thought that he ought to he would have displayed, like Cicero in the have accounted for it to the treasury.

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CHAP. XXXVIII.] FIRST EXHIBITION OF GLADIATORS. 4‘5 amount was fully allowed,47 but gold plate was still unusual, and the senate, even in the reign of Tiberius, denounced it as an unbecoming extravagance. But Fabricius, no doubt, disliked the large domain lands held in occupation by Rufinus as much as his ten pounds of silver plate, thinking that great wealth in the hands of private persons, however employed, was injurious to the commonwealth. It must not be forgotten, amongst the other changes of this period, that the consulship of Appius Claudius and M. Fulvius,40 the year which witnessed the final reduction of Volsinii, was marked by the first dit..r6.. A. U. c. 490. exhibition of gladiators ever known at Rome.

Two sons of D. A c 64 Junius Brutus exhibited them, it is recorded, at the funeral of their father. The principle of this, as a part of the funeral solemnity, was very ancient and very universal;49 that the dead should not go on his dark journey alone, but that a train of other departed souls, whether of enemies slain to avenge him, or of followers to do him honor, should accompany him to the unseen world. But the Romans, it is said,5~
borrowed the practice of substituting a combat for a sacrifice, that the victims might die by each other’s swords, immediately from the Etruscans; and when we recollect that the capture of Volsinii took place in this very year, we may conjecture that the gladiators of M. and D. Brutus were Volsinian prisoners, perhaps slaves, who had been accustomed to fight before under the service of their former masters. The spectacle, from the very beginning, excited the liveliest interest at Rome; but for many years it was exhibited only at funerals, as an offering in honor of the dead; the still deeper wickedness of making it a mere sport, and introducing the sufferings and death of human beings as a luxury for the spectators in their seasons of the greatest enjoyment, was reserved for a later period.

The ten years preceding the first Punic war were probably a time of the greatest physical prosperity which the mass of the Roman people ever art..

Great proaperity of the knew. Within twenty years two agrarian laws had been passed Roman people at this on a most extensive scale; and the poorer citizens had received period. besides what may be called a large dividend in money out of the lands which the state had conquered. In addition to this, the farming of the state domains,5’ or of their produce, furnished those who had money with abundant opportunities of profitable adventure, while the accumulation of public business increased the demand for clerks and collectors in every branch of the service of the revenue. And the power of obtaining like advantages in all future wars seemed secured to the people by the Hortensian laws, which enabled them to pass an agrarian law whenever they pleased, in spite of the opposition in the senate. No wonder theii that war was at this time popular, and that the tribes, more than once, resolved on taking up arms, when the senate would have preferred peace from considerations of prudence, and, we may hope, of national faith and justice. But our ” pleasant vices” are ever made “
instruments to scourge us:” and the first Punic war, into which the Roman people forced the senate to enter, not only in its own long course bore most heavily upon the poorer citizens, but from the feelings of enmity which it excited in the breast of Hamilcar, led most surely to 47 Tacitus, Annal. II. 383. rydice at their funeral at zEgue. Diyllus, apud 48

Valerius Maximus, II. 4, 7. Athenaeum, IV. p. 155. Diodorns, XIX. 52. 9

Every one remembers the slaughter of 60 Nicolaus Damascenus, apud Athenmeum, twelve Trojan prisoners over the funeral pile of IV. p. 153.

Patroclus. When the Scythian kings died, 6 See the wellknown passane in Polybius, some of all thsir servants were slain and were where he notices the extent of patronage posburied with them. (Herodotus, IV. 71.) In sessed by the senate. fIoIaXv yap ipyowv oivrov Thrace single combats took place at the funerals 7r)v EK3dollvPov Orb 7rV 7trTrV r elva 7rdraiT’slral;as of the chiefs; and there also, as in India, the EiS reig E7TLUKECvag KaiL KaragtKsIta 7 r)v 7uortoiwv, a’ rTg best beloved of the wives of the deceased was oevK uv 4apLOziaarro )arfiwg, 7roAXXv de rorap#v, killed and buried with her husband. (Herodo-XpVowv, Krlirtiw, yEradXXov, x6pag, avXX4terj6v 6oaa tus, V. 5, 8.) In Spain, too, when Viriathus 7r6Trro0sv r bD rjVl’Pto/aiho)v 56vvaareia, 7rdvra was larnt on his funeral pile, there were single Xetpi;EOara uVIAavlletL I 1rpOEtfpVlP1va dolt Tro -ombats fought around in honor of him. Ap-7rhA0oug, Kaci aXElv, Wis‘7ro; Etlev.,ArdUvr; VddlelOaa pian, de Rebus Hispan. 75. Cassander paid Talc 6vaLs Kai Sais E’pyacaLs rats’K

TOrt6V.-IV. the same honor to Philip Arrhidcus and Eu-17.

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416 HISTORY OF ROME. LCHAP. XXXVIIL that fearful visitation of Hannibal’s sixteen years’ invasion of Italy, which destroyed forever, not indeed the pride of the Roman dominions, but the wellbeing of the Roman people. But that calamitous period was only to come upon the children of the existing c gof C generation, and in the mean time all was going on prosperously.

Tiles used for roofing Another aqueduct was constructed by-M’. Curius,52
when he was censor soon after the retreat of Pyrrhus, by which a supply of water was conveyed to the northern parts of the city from the Anio above Tibur: and tiles53 at this time began to supersede wood as the roofing material for the common houses of Rome. Their victories over Pyrrhus spread the fame of the Romans far and wide; and immediately after his return to Greece, when he was again beEmbassy to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of coming formidable by his victories over Antigonus in Macedonia, Ptolemy Philadelphus,t4 king of Egypt, sent an embassy to Rome to conclude an alliance-with-the Romans. The senate, delighted at such a compliment from so great a king, sent in return ari embassy to Alexandria, consisting of three of the most eminent citizens in the commonwealth, Q. Fabius Gurges, who was then first senator (princeps senatus), Q. Ogulnius, who had gone to Epidaurus to invite zEsculapius to Rome, and Num. Fabius Pictor, the son of that Fabius who had painted the frescoes in the temple of Deliverance from Danger. The ambassadors found Alexandria at the height of its splendor, for these were the most brilliant days of the Greek-Egyptian kingdom; and Ptolemy Philadelphus,55 with a fleet of 1500
ships of war, and a revenue of nearly 15,000 talents, reigned over the whole coast of the Mediterranean, from Cyrene to the Nile, and from the Nile to the Triopian headland at the southwestern extremity of Asia Minor, opposite to Rhodes; while to the south his power extended to the heart of Ethiopia or Abyssinia, and along both shores of the Red Sea. In his capital there met together the wisdom of Greece and of the east and of Egypt itself: Theocritus, Callimachus, and the seven tragedians of the Pleias;56 the Jews who at this time began at Alexandria the translation of the Bible; and Manetho, the famous historian of the ancient dynasties of Egypt.- The Roman ambassadors were honorably entertained and received valuable presents; which on their return home they laid before the senate, but which the senate immediately gave back to them, with permission to do with them as they thought proper. In the year 488,“5 the people of Apollonia, a Greek city on the coast of EpiOutrage to thie ombas. rus, sent an embassy to Rome, with what object we know not, but The offendersf giveni possibly to complainof some of the officers of the Roman governto the Apoloonoan. ment. Two Romans of rank, one of them a senator of the house of Fabius, insulted and beat the ambassadors, and were,’ in consequence of the outrage, given up to the Apollonians; one of the quaest6rs also was sent to escort 2 Frontinus, de Aquseductibus, 6. The aque-copleustes, in the reign of Justin, the father of duct of Curius was known by the name of Justinian. Cosmas copied the inscription into 1” Anio vetus;” its whole length was forty-three his work, which is to be found in Montfaucon’s miles; but, like the older aqueduct of Appius Collectio Nova, &c. Vol. II. p. 142. Some reClaudius, it consisted mostly’ of pipes under nlarkable particulars as to the amount of Ptolground, and was only conducted on an embank-emy’s revenue are preserved by Jerome in his ment above ground for a distance of something Commentary on Daniel, XI. 5. less than a quarter of a mile. - 6 They were called the Pleias from their num63

See Cornelius Nepos quoted by Pliny, as ber, in allusion to the constellation. Different already noticed, Hist. Natur. XVI. ~ 36. lists of them are given (see Fynes Clinton, Fasti 64 Livy, Epitom. XIV. Zonaras, VIII. 6. Hellen.’ Vol. III. year B. c. 259), but none of Dionysius, XX. 4.

Valerius Maximus, IV. 3, them are known to us by any existing works, ~ 9.

if, as Mr. Fox and Niebuhr seem most justly to 6 The extent of Ptolemy Philadelphrus’ do-think, the Lycophron who wrote the Alexandra minion, and the flourishing condition of Egypt is a very different person from the Lycophron during his reign, are described by Theocritus, of the Pleias, and belongs to a later age. See *n eye-witness, in his 17th Idyll, and in that Niebuhr’s Kleine Schrift. p. 438-450. remarkable inscription found at Adulis, on the 67 Zonaras, VIII. 7. iivy, Epitom. XV. western shore of the Red Sea, by Cosmas Indi-Valer. Max. VI. 6, ~ 5.

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CHAP. XXXVIII] DEATHS OF CURIUS AND FABRICIUS. 417 the ambassadors and their prisoners to Brundisium, lest any attempt should be made to rescue them. But the Apollonians, measuring rightly their own utter inability to cope with so great a nation as the Romans, and judging that it would be unwise58 to interpret too closely the sentence of the senate, restored both offenders unhurt. Our notices of the physical history of these times are very scanty. The winter of 484 was one of unusual severity;5” the Tiber was frozen over Physicl history. Se. to a great depth, the snow lay in the Forum for nearly six weeks, vYre winter of 484. the olives and figtrees were generally killed, and many of the cattle perished for want of pasture, as they were dependent, even in winter, on such food as they could find in the fields. This great frost happened about one hundred and thirty years after the frost of 355, and seems to have equalled it in severity. Volcanic phenomena60 are recorded during the two following years, and in 488 we hear of a very destructive pestilence, which lasted for more than two years more, and is described as exceedingly fatal;”, but the language of Augustine is indefinite, and that of Orosius clearly exaggerated, so that we can neither discover the nature and causes of the disease, nor estimate the amount of the mortality. Ten years, as they bring forward into active life a new generation, so they always sweep away some of the last survivors of former times, and bring down to a later period the range of living memory. Ap-itg forward. Death of * at1 * w T1

^rw Curius and Fabricius. pius Claudius and Valerius Corvus, who were both alive when Pyrrhus was in Italy, died soon after his return to Epirus. L.

Papirius Cursor, if he were still living, had yet appeared for the last time in a public station; neither he nor his colleague, Sp. Carvilius, are heard of again after their second censorship in the year 482. M’. Curius had obtained the censorship in that same year, three years after his victory at Beneventum; he employed the money arising from the spoils of his triumph in constructing, as we have seen, the second oldest of the Roman aqueducts; and after his censorship he was named by the senate one62
of two commissioners for completing the work, but he died within a few days after his appointment. Thus one of the most honest and energetic men known to us in the Roman history, a man whose name is associated so closely with the uncorrupted period of the Roman character, was carried off apparently before he had arrived at old age. When Fabricius died we know pot; but he was not heard of again after his censorship in 479, nor do we know any further particulars of him than that he was buried, by a special dispensation, within the city walls;63 a rare honor, which strongly marks the general sense entertained of the purity of his virtue; ” as if,” says Niebuhr, ” his bones could be no defilement to the temples of the heavenly gods, nor his spirit disturb the peace of the living.” So passes away what may be called the spring-time of the Ronitn people.

Wealth, and power, and dominion have brought on the ripened Conclusion.

summer, with more of vigor indeed, but less of freshness. Beginning her career of conquest beyond the limits of Italy, Rome was now entering upon her appointed work, and that work was undoubtedly fraught with good. The conqueror and the martyr are alike God’s instruments; but it is the priv68

They may have remembered the wisdom 6O Orosius, IV. 4. The earthquake which of the ZEginetans in like circumstances, when happened in the Picentian war, just as the Rothe Spartan king, Leutychidas, was given up mans and Picentians were going to engage, to them by his countrymen, as an atonement belongs to the volcanic phenomena of this pefor some wrong which he had done to them. riod. A Spartan had warned them not to take the 61

Augustine, III. 17. Orosius, IV. 5. Spartan government at its word, nor to believe 62 Frontinus, de Aquneduct, 6. that they might really carry the king of Sparta 63 Cicero, de Legibus, II. 28. Thus Brasidas away as their prisoner, and punish him at their was buried within the walls of Amphipolis, as discretion. See Herodotus, VI. 85. having been the deliverer of the city. Thucyd; b9 Zonaras, VIII. 6. Augustine do Civit. V.

11. Dei, II. 17. 27

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418 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIU ilege of his conscious and willing instruments to be doubly and merely blessed; the benefits of their work to others are unalloyed by evil, while to themselves it is the perfecting and not the corrupting of their moral being; when it is done, they are not cast away as instruments sp0llqd and worthless, but partake of the good which they have given, and enjoy forever the love of men, and the bless ing of God. CHAPTER XXXIX, CONSTITUTION AND POWER OF CARTHAGE.

UoAstrdaoSat 6 6oKVorL Kai KaXto76vwot KakrSg.-ARISTOTLE, Plitic. II. THE
name of Carthage has already occurred more than once in the course of Internal condition of this history; and I have already noticed the extent of her doCarthage. minion, and the inherent causes of its unsoundness, inasmuch as the Carthaginians and their African subjects were separated from one another by broad differences of race, language, and institutions; so that they could not blend together into one nation. The isolation of Carthage from all the surrounding people offers a striking contrast to the position of Rome in Italy, where the allies and the Latin name were bound to the Romans and to each other by manifold ties, and the communication of the Roman franchise, or at least the prospect of obtaining it hereafter, was every year effacing the painful memory of the first conquest,r and effecting that consolidation of various elements into one great and united people, in which alone conquest can find its justification. But as the Carthaginians will now occupy no small share of our attention, from the importance and long duration of their contest with the Romans, so it becomes desirable to look at them more closely, and see what was their internal state, and with what excellences and defects in their national character and institutions they encountered the iron strength of Rome. The constitution of Carthage was compared to that of Sparta, as containing in it the elements of monarchy and of aristocracy, and of democracy. Its government was mixed, but predonmi-But in such mixed governments, one element is always predomiatly atotcal nant: first, in the natural course of things, the monarchical, next the aristocratical, and, lastly, the democratical or popular. The predominance of one element by no means implies, however, the total inactivity of the others; and in their common, although not equal action, consists the excellence of such constitutions; not simply that the working of the principal power is checked by the direct legal rights of the other two, but much more because the nation retains by their means those ideas and those points of character which they peculiarly suggest and encourage, and is thus saved from that narrow-minded uniformity of views and of tastes which the exclusive influence of any single element must necessarily occasion. In Carthage there is reason to believe that the monarchical part of the constitution had once the ascendency,’ but during those times in which she is best known to us, the aristocratical element was predominant; the I Aristotle says that Carthage had never suf-by an aristocracy. V. 12. It seems, then, that fered in any serious degree either from faction this tyranny must be understood of the earlier or from a tyrant. Politic. II. 11. Yet in antimes of the Carthaginian history, before that other place he gives Carthage as an instance of constitution existed on which Aristotle comt country where a tyranny had been succeeded ments.

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CHAP. XXXIX.] THE COMMISSIONS OF FIVE. 419 full development of the democratical was prevented by the premature destruction of the whole nation. The Carthaginian aristocracy was partly one of birth, but chiefly, as it should seem, of wealth. Indeed, the older form of a pure aristocracy of The ffete or. dges. birth must necessarily be rare in a colony, where the original settlers must almost always be a mixed body, and yet in their new settlement find themselves on an equality with each other. It appears, however, that nobility of birth was acknowledged in Carthage, and that their two chief magistrates, or judges,2 suffetes, whom the Greeks called kings, were elected only from a certain number of families. How many these were, and what was the origin of their nobility, we are not informed. But wealth, contrary to the practice of the Roman government, was an indispensable qualification for all the highest offices. Nay, we are told that the very suffetes and captainsgeneral of the commonwealth bought their high dignities:3 whether this is to be understood of paying money to obtain votes, or, as is much more probable, that the fees or expenses of entering on an office were purposely made very heavy, to render it inaccessible to any but the rich. The great council, o‘6yxX0,ro, was probably an assembly as numerous as the Roman senate, and, like the senate, was a mixed body, containing The great council, and members of different ages, who, in whatever manner appointed, the council of elders.

were a sort of representation of the general feelings of the aristocracy.

But from this great council there were chosen one hundred members,4 who formed what was called the council of elders, and who in fact were the supreme authority in the state. They were originally appointed as a check upon the power of the captainsgeneral, and were a court before which every general, on his return from a foreign command, had to render an account of his conduct. But by degrees they became not only supreme criminal judges in all cases, bat also a supreme executive council, of which the two suffetes or kings were the presidents. In this capacity they were legally, we may presume, no more than a managing committee for the great council, so they became in ordinary cases its substitute, and in all cases exercised such a control over it, that they are called a power for governing the general council itself.5 The hundred, or the elders, were chosen for life from members of the great council, but not by the votes of the great council at large. On the The commissions or contrary, they were chosen by certain bodies which Aristotle calls boards ofive. -s’vagXol’a, or commissions of five, and which formed so many close corporations, filling up their own vacancies. This is nearly all the information which we possess on the subject; for Aristotle only adds, that these commissions had great and various powers, and that their members remained longer in office than the ordinary magistrates, inasmuch as they exercised an authority both before and after their -regular term of magistracy. The most probable conjecture is, that the more important branches of the public administration were, as we should say, put in commission, and vested in boards of five members; that thus the treasury 2 Aristotle, Politic. II. 11. B1Xrtov 6ie robv Oa-4 Centum ex numero senatorum judices oeXtEgS IpirE KarIT r3 avro coxat ytvor p#rd roro rTo rv-deliguntur,”

says Justin, giving an account of x6e. It is obvious that ” suffes,” or “sufes,” is the origin of this council of elders, XIX. 2. The thle samwe word twitlh tlhe Hebrew’lhli wh~ich~ council of elders, or ytpovufa, is distinguished expressly from the larger council, or senate, was the title of those magistrates whom we call ay1tKXarog. See Polybius, X. 18, and XXXVI. 2. the judges. Now as the judges in the Scripture For the whole subject of the Carthaginian conhistory are distinguished from the kings, and stitution I have been largely indebted to IHeeit was a great change when the Israelites, tired ren’s Historical Researches on the African Naof their judges, or suffetes, desired to have a tions, Vol. I. I have also derived some assistking; so it is probable that the suffetes at ance from Kluge’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Carthage also were so named to show that they account of the Carthaginian constitution, pubwere not kings, and that the Greek writers, in lished in 1824. clling them IaatXekg, have used a term likely to a Livy, XXX. 16. “Sanctius consilium, mislead. Polybius, VI. 56. Aristotle’s account im-maximalue ad ipsum senatun regendum Vis.”

nliope tfhll qnmR. fthino _

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420 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIX would be intrusted to one commission of five, the care of public manners and morals, the censor’s office at Rome, would be given to another commission; the police, perhaps, to another; the navy to another; and so on. Nothing would hinder these commissioners from being members of the great council, and nothing would hinder them, therefore, from electing themselves to fill up vacancies in the council of elders; in fact, we are expressly told6 that the treasurer’s or queestor’s office led regularly to a seat amongst the hundred; and thus the same men being often members at one and the same time of one or perhaps more of these administrative commissions, and of the great council, and also of the council of elders, we can understand what Aristotle means when he says that it was a favorite practice with the Carthaginians to invest the same person with several offices together. All this was sufficiently aristocratical, or rather in the spirit of that worst form Theritoatccubof aristocracy which the Greeks called oligarchy. And what The aristocratical clubs. was thus ordered by law, was to be maintained by feeling; the members of the aristocracy had their clubs,7 where they habitually met at a common mess or public table, with the very object of binding them more closely to each other, and imbuing them entirely with the spirit of their.

order. Under such a constitution the power of the suffetes had been reduced from its imnonofthepooriginally almost kingly prerogatives to the state of the doge erofthesuffete. under the late constitution of Venice.

In earlier times they had been invested with the two great characters of ancient royalty, those of general and of priest;8 but now the first of these was commonly taken from him, and the office of general-in-chief is spoken of by Aristotle as distinct; nor was it even left in the suffetes’

appointment. Still the two kings, as the Greek writers call them, were recognized as an essential branch of the government, and if they differed upon any proposed measure from the council of elders, then the question was referred to the assembly of the people.9 It was thus, no doubt, that an opening was afforded for weakening the power of the aristocracy; for either of the suffetes was thus enabled to introduce the decision of the popular branch on points of government; and it is of the essence of a popular assembly, if called into activity, to become predominant: it may exist and yet be powerless, but only so long as few points are in practice submitted to its decision. But so long as the suffetes and council were agreed, the power of the CarJudicialpower. Court thaginian people was exceedingly small. Nothing, it seems, could ofthehundredandfour. originate with the popular assembly; so that the exercise of its functions did not depend on its own will, but on the accidental disagreement of the other branches of the legislature. And as the mass of the people had so small a share practically in the legislation or in the administration of affairs, so they were destitute of judicial power: there were no juries as in England, nor any large popular courts where hundreds or even thousands of the poorest citizens sat in judgment as at Athens. All causes, civil and criminal, were tried by certain magistrates;1 the highest matters, as we have seen, by the council of Livy, XXXIII. 46.-What is here said of 8 At least Hamilcar, who commanded the the multiplication of offices in the hands of the Carthaginians at the battle of Himera, and who same persons at Carthage, was also the case at was one of the suffetes, is described by HeroVenice. Every member of the supreme criminal dotus as sacrificing during the battle, and pourtribunal of forty had a seat ex-officio in the sen-ing libations with his own hand on the victims. ate; and the three presidents of the Forty sat VII. 167. And although the expression in also in the council of the doge. “L’autorit6 Herodotus is Otero, and not iOvev, yet the same du ligislateur,” says Daru, “celle du juge, expression is applied to the prophet Tisamenus, )‘influence de l’administration et le pouvoir who was with the Greek army at Platxa; and, discr6tionnaire de la police, se trouvaient r6unis unless Hamilcar had been personally engaged dans les m6mes mains.”-Histoire de Venise, in the sacrifice, we can scarcely suppose that he Livre XXXIX. Vol. VI. p. 68, and 146. would have remained in the camp while it was 7 Ta Tvauaira rTYV iratplwv. Aristotle, Politic. going forward, instead of being present with II. 11. It may be mentioned, as a mark of the his soldiers in the action. aristocratical spirit of the Carthaginian govern-9 Aristotle, Politic. II. 11. ment, that the senate and people had different 1’ApLTroKparTKhv, r7 rae diKaS
elad ri)v apXEttss baths.-Valer. Max. IX. 5. Ext. 4. 61Kda&cOar brdaas, al Kapi aPXas rc’ a’AXwv, KaOdarEp

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CHAP. XXXIX.] SYSTEM OF COLONIZATION. 421 elders; but every magistracy seems to have had a judicial power attached to it, and only one court had a popular constitution. This was the court of the hundred and four,” the members of which were elected by the people at large; but public opinion required that they should be men of irreproachable characters; and therefore the election was conducted with care, and no one without merit was likely to be appointed. This court probably exercised jurisdiction especially in civil and mercantile causes; such as would be exceedingly numerous in so great a commercial country as Carthage. Thus excluded in the ordinary course of things from the government, the legislature, and the courts of justice, the Carthaginian commons were Reglar system of colkept for centuries in a state of contented acquiescence with their oztion. country’s constitution, because provision was happily and wisely made for their physical wants. Colonization, as a provision for the poorer citizens, was an habitual resource of the Carthaginian government. And not only did their numerous settlements along the coast of Africa enable them to make grants of land to whole bodies of their people, but individuals‘2
were employed in various offices under the government, as clerks, or as custom-house officers, where opportunities of acquiring money would not be wanting. With such means of relief, iargely offered by fortune and wisely used, the Carthaginian people were saved from that worst cause of revolutions, general distress; and the mass of mankind are so constituted, that so long as their physical wants are satisfied, the cravings of their intellectual and moral nature are rarely vehement. Every one who is accustomed to make history a reality must feel how unsatisfactory are these accounts of mere institutions, which, at the best, Mengreness of our accounts of Carthage from can offer us only a plan, and not a living picture. Was the Cartha-the total wantE of ll ginian aristocracy, with its merchant-nobles, its jealous tribunals, Carthaginian literature. its power abroad and its weakness at home, an older sister of that Venetian republic, whose fall, less shameful than the long stagnation of its half existence, Nemesis has in our own days rejoiced in? Or did the common voice in France speak truly, when it called England the modern Carthage?

Or is Holland the truer parallel; and do the contests of the house of Nassau with the Dutch aristocracy represent the ambition of the house of Barca, and the triumph of the popular!‘arty over the old aristocratical constitution? We cannot answer these questions certainly, because Carthage on the stage of history is to us a dumb actor; no poet, orator, historian, or philosopher, has escaped the wreck of time, to show us how men thought and felt at Carthage. There were Carthaginian AateJaSpaovc. Aristot.

Politic. II. 11. Ildaag tpXat practice of submitting different causes to differrLVeS KpltovaOL rad boga, III. 1. For the statement ent magistrates, but of a more democratical sysin the text these passages are a sufficient war-tern by which not all causes were tried by magisrant; but the first offers, as is well known, trates, as at Carthage, but some by magistrates, much difficulty in itself; and Kluge’s explana-and others by juries; “
some by one authority, tion is not satisfactory. In the latter passage and others by another?” Carthage and Lacedwenon are said to resemble 11 The number of this court is supposed by each other in the aristocratical principle of Niebuhr (Vol. I. note 851) to have reference to vesting the judicial power in magistrates, and the number of weeks in the solar year, as if not in juries taken from the people at large. there were two judges for each week. The This is perfectly clear; but one does not see numbers were elected, says Aristotle, ovx EC rw~v why it should be more aristocratical to give rTUXdVT7v tiX’ Jiptcrtv7eiv. This can only mean that all these magistrates a universal jurisdiction, public opinion required for the office so high a rather than, as at Sparta, to assign civil causes qualification in point of character, that the apto one court, and criminal to another. It is pointment was in the truest sense of the word strange, too, that in one of these passages Sparta aristocratical; whereas at Sparta, a lower standand Carthage should be said to manage their ard being fixed for the characters of the Ephori, courts of justice on the same principle; that persons of very ordinary qualifications were is, on one of an antipopular character, rov airav often chosen, if party feelings recommended Rd rp6rov Kai rcpi KapXsd6va:, if in the other pas-them. sage they are meant to be contrasted with one 12 Aristot. Politic.

VI. 5.‘Act TLva EKC7lr’rXov amother. Is it not possible therefore to refer reS ro-R,1ov rp7r Tag,rpsotKimaS,rouoVtv Eardpov;. the words caOdureup iv AaKeoaipovt to the whole of Kluge understands this passage as I have done; the clause preceding it, rather than to the Heeren objects to this interpretation, and exwords Kati j aXXas iar’ a”XXav, and to under-plains it of colonies sent out in the mass. Atand these last words not of the Lacedaemonian

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422 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XXXIU. writers, we know. Sallust had heard translations of passages in their historical records’;!3 and the Roman senate, when Carthage was destroyed, ordered Mago’s work on agriculture to be translated into Latin.“4 Nor’were geographical accounts of their voyages of discovery wanting; imperfect translations of, or rather extracts from, two of which int6 Greek‘5 and Latin, have descended to our times. But of poets, orators, and philosophers *we hear nothing; nor probably were the writers who were translated to Sallust deserving of the name of historians; at least all that he quotes from them relates to times beyond real historical memory, as if they had but recorded floating popular traditions, without attempting critical or contemporary history.

It was a Greek who gave what may be looked upon as a Carthaginian account‘6 of the first Punic war; and it was to two Greeks” that Hannibal committed the task of recording his own immortal expedition to Italy.

Their language, indeed, shut the Carthaginians out fiom the prevailing civilization of the ancient world-: it was easy for a Roman to learn Greek, which was but a sister language to his own; but neither Greek nor Latin have any near resemblance to Phcenician; nor were there any Carthaginian names or stories which poets and artists had made famous amongst all civilized nations like those of Thebes and Troy. Thus, as I said before, Carthage, not having spoken of what was in her heart, it has passed along with herself into destruction; and we can now only know something of what she did, without understanding what she was. PolybiusT”

has said that during the wars with the Romans, the Carthaginian Growth of the popular constitution became more democratical, and he ascribes the vicicaryBarcaadedbhisfam-tory of the Romans in some measure to the superior wisdom of ily. their aristocratical government, and the instability of popular counsels in Carthage. It is, indeed, evident, that the family of Barca rested on popular support, and were opposed by the party of the aristocracy; and that they could maintain their power so long in spite of such an opposition, shows, undoubtedly, that the popular part of the constitution must have gained far more strength than it possessed in the days of Aristotle. Hamilcar and his family seem to have stood in the position of Pericles at Athens; both have often been taxed with having injured irreparably the constitution of their two countries; and both, perhaps, had the natural weakness of great men, that feeling themselves, to be better than any institutions, they removed too boldly things which to them were hindrances, but to the mediocrity of ordinary men are supports or useful guides; so that when they died, and no single men arose able to fill their place, what they had undone found nothing to succeed to it, and then the overthrow of the older system appeared an irreparable mischief. But the question is amongst the most difficult in political science; Venice shows that no democracy, no tyranny, can be so vile as the dregs of an aristocracy suffered to run out its full course; and with respect to the conduct of a war, the Roman senate is no fair specimen of aristocracies in general; the affairs of Athens and Carthage were S’allust, Bell. Jugurth. 20. means certain that all of what is there given is 14 Pliny, Histor. Natur. XVIII. ~ 22. It ap-genuine Carthaginian. Was Plautus likely to pears from this passage that on the destruction have learnt the language, and for what object of Carthage the Carthaginian libraries were would pure Carthaginian have been introduced given by the senate to ” the princes of Africa,” when apparently the only purpose answered by “regulis Africa;’” that is chiefly, no doubt, to Hanno’s speaking in a foreign language is to Masinissa. And thus the Carthaginian books cause a laugh at Milphio’s burlesque interpretafrom which Sallust quotes were said, he tells tion of it? us, to have belonged to king Hiempsal, Masin- ” Such as a Greek translation of a voyage of issa’s grandson. And further, Mago’s workwas Hanno, published by Hudson in his Geographi committed for translation to persons who under-Minores; and Festus Avienus’ Latin version of stood Carthaginian, of whom the man who knew certain parts of the voyage of Ilimilcon, which it best was a member of the Junian family, D. Heeren has given in the Appendix to his work Silanus. Still a knowledge of Carthaginian on Carthage. must have been a rare accomplishment; which‘6 Philinus of Agrigentum. makes us wonder at the introduction of speeches 17 Sosilus of Lacedaemon, and Silanus or Siin that language upon the Roman stage, as in lenus. Vid. Cornel. Nepot. in Hannibal, 13. tho Pcenulus of Plautus. It seems to me by no I VI. 51.

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CHAP. XXXIX.] WEAKNESS OF THE CARTHAGINIANS. 423 never conducted so ably as when the popular party was most predominant; nor have any governments ever shown in war greater feebleness and vacillation and ignorance than those of Sparta, and, but too often, of England. A great commercial state, where wealth was largely gained and highly valued, was always in danger, according to the opinion of the ancient Enterrisinpiit philosophers, of losing its spirit of enterprise. But in this Car-the Crthnaginian gcvthage resembled the government of British India; necessity at first.made her merchants soldiers; and when she became powerful, then the mere impulse of a great dominion kept up her energy; she had much to maintain, and what she already possessed gave her the power, and with it the temptation, of acquiring more. Besides, it is a very important point in the state of society in the ancient world, that the business of a soldier was nc isolated profession, but mixed up essentially with the ordinary life of every citizen. Hence those who guided the counsels of a state were ready also to conduct its armies; and military glory was a natural object of ambition to many enterprising minds which, in modern Europe, could only hope for distinction in the cabinet or in parliament.

The great families of Carthage, holding amongst them a monopoly of all the highest offices, might safely calculate on obtaining for all their members some opportunity of distinguishing themselves: if the father fell in the service of his country, his son not unfrequently became his successor, and the glory of finishing what he had begun was not left to a stranger.‘Thus the house of Mago for three generations conducted the Carthaginian invasions of Sicily: and thus Hamilcar Barca, according to his own expression,‘9 reared his three sons, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and Mago, as lion’s whelps to prey upon the Romans. History can produce no greater statesmen and generals than some of the members of the Carthaginian aristocracy. But the Carthaginian Inferiority of the Carpeople were wholly unfit to contend with the people of Rome. thaginian peotpl..s.o.lNo military excellence in arms or tactic is ever ascribed to them; in the Carthaginianter nor does it appear that they were regularly trained to war, like ritory, the citizens of Rome and Italy. The Carthaginian armies were composed of Africans and Numidians, of Gauls and Spaniards, but we scarcely hear of any Carthaginian citizens except as generals or officers.

With this deficiency in native soldiers, there was also a remarkable want of fortresses; a point of no small importance at all periods, but especially so in ancient warfare. The walls exist in Italy to this day of many towns whose very names have perished; but we know that, small as they were, they could have delayed the progress of an invader; and how inestimable were the services rendered to the Romans in their greatest danger by the fortifications of Nola and Casilinum! But in the Carthaginian territory aa invader found nothing but a rich and defenceless spoil. Agathocles conquered 200 towns20 with scarcely any opposition; and Hannibal himself, after one defeat in the field, had no resource but submission to the conqueror. Had a French army ever effected a landing in England during the last war, the same want of fortresses would have enabled the enemy to overrun the whole country; and have taught us by fatal experience to appreciate in this respect the improvidence of Carthage. Thus, with abler leaders and a richer treasury, but with a weaker people, an unguarded country, and with subjects far less united and attached Carthage was unequt to her government, Carthage was really unequal to the contest toRoe””. with Rome. And while observing this inequality in the course of our story, we shall have more reason to admire that extraordinary energy and genius of Hamilcar Barca and his family, which so long struggled against it, and even in spite of nature, almost made the weaker party victorious. Valerlus Maximus, IX. 3. 20 Diodorus, XX. 17.

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CHAPTER XL. FIERST PUNIC WAR-THE ROMANS INVADE SICILY-SUBMISSION OF

HIEROTIHE ROMANS CREATE A NAVY-NAVAL VICTORIES OF MYLAE AND

ECNOMUS-EXPEDITION OF M. REGULUS TO AFRICA; HIS SUCCESSES, HIS ARROGANCE

IN VICTORY, HIS DEFEAT AND CAPTIVITY-WAR IN SICILY-SIEGE OF LILYB1EUM AND

NAVAL ACTIONS CONNECTED WITH IT-HAMILCAR BARCA AT EIRCTE AND ERYX-NAVAL

BATTLE OF THE iEGATES-PEACE CONCLUDEDA. U. C. 490 TO 513-A. C. 264 TO 241.

MEXer4o7opcv Kai Il.pt;s v IVniovr xPvy t a vavrooa’, xai graV rlv e’v r’rrr4o7v 4f T r”ov KaraarWaotoAV, r y7 EUdX4h ila f iov iEplrcr6#Sa’ i yap!ois ~O~ov ~6*E& &ya.6gv, KEIvo oI OIC iv 7EVYOTO lro WaX i’ EKEZvoI i7rtorti,, rpoiXOUer, KaatplTrfTov #)lVY iCTi #jEir.-THuICYD. I. 121. THE
first Punic war lasted, without intermission, for more than two-and-twent) A. U. c. 490. A. C. years,’ a longer space of time than the whole period occupied by 264. Introduction to the wars of the French revolution, if we omit to reckon the ninethe history of the first Ponic war. teen months of the peace or rather truce of Amiens. And we have now, for the first time, the guidance of a careful and well-informed historian, who, having been born little more thirty years after the end of the war,a had studied the written accounts given of its events by each of the contending parties, had learned something, no doubt, concerning it, from the mouths both of Romans and Carthaginians, and who judged what he had heard and read with understanding, and for the most part impartially. The actions, then, of this war may be known, and some of them deserve to be described particularly; nor does it indeed seem possible to communicate any interest to history, if it must only record results and not paint actions. But in military matters, especially, much that may and ought to be told at length by a contemporary historian, ought not to be repeated by one who writes after an interval of many centuries: and therefore I must, of necessity, pass over slightly many battles and sieges, in order to relate others in full detail, and yet avoid the fault of too great prolixity. It was the eleventh year after the defeat of Pyrrhus at Beneventum, and ApThe Mamertines of pius Claudius Caudex and M. Fulvius Flaccus were consuls, when moesaidagaips y to Rome a deputation3 arrived at Rome from the Mamertines of Messana, for atd against the Carthaginians and Hiero.

praying that the Romans, the sovereigns of Italy, would not suffer an Italian people to be destroyed by Greeks and Carthaginians. Hiero, king of Syracuse, was their open enemy; the Carthaginians, under pretence of saving them from his vengeance, were trying to get possession of their citadel; but the Mamertines, true to their Italian blood, sought to put themselves under the protection of their own countrymen, and it greatly concerned the Romans not to allow the Carthaginians to become masters of Messana, and to gain a station for their fleets within thirty stadia of the coast of Italy. Six years had not elapsed since the Romans had extirpated the brethren and 1 From the middle, perhaps, of the year 490 be deducted, which extends from October, 1801, to the middle of the year 513; nearly twenty-to May, 1803. three years, if we reckon from the arrival of the 2 The exact year of Polybius’ birth is uncerfirst Mamertine embassy at Rome, to the contain. He was under 30 in 573, but as he was elusion of the definitive treaty. The whole pe-appointed ambassador to Egypt in that year, he riod of the revolution wars, from April, 1792, to could not have been many years younger. See July, 1815, is’but a very little longer, and it be-Fynes Clinton Fasti Hellen. Vol. III. p. 75. comes very much shorter if the interval of peace 3 Polybius, I. 10. Zonaras, VIlI. 8.

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XCP. XL.] C CLAUDIUS CROSSES TO MESSANA. 425 imitators of the Mamertines, who had done to Rhegium what the The s,,cate hestatesto Maamertines had done to Messana; and Hiero, king of Syracuse, grntit. had zealously aided them in the work, and, as it appears,4 was actually at this time their ally. The Mamertines were a horde of adventurers and plunderers, who were the common enemies of mankind, and whose case the Romans had prejudged already by their exemplary punishment of the very same conduct in the Campanians of Rhegium, while Hiero and the Carthaginians were the friends and allies of Rome. The senate, therefore, we are assured,5 after long debates, could not resolve to interfere in such a quarrel. But the consuls, who, if true to the hereditary character of their families, were both of them ambitious men and unscrupulous, brought the petition of the Mamertines before the assembly of the people. The tribes resolve to assist ready topics of aiding the Italian people against foreigners, and of them.

restraining the power of Carthage, whose establishments in Corsica, Sardinia, and the Liparaean islands, were already drawn, like a chain, round the Roman dominion, were, no doubt, urged plausibly; it might have been said too that the Carthaginians had already undertaken to protect the Mamertines, so that they could not reproach the Romans for upholding the very same cause. Besides, the Roman people had a fresh remembrance of the assignations of land, the rich spoil, and lucrative employments which had followed from their late conquests in Italy; the fertility of Sicily was proverbial; and the wellknown riches of Carthage made a war with her as tempting a prospect to the Romans as a war with Spain has been ere now to Englishmen. So the Roman people resolved to protect the Mamertine buccaneers, and to receive them as their friends and allies. The vote of the comitia was, by the actual constitution of Rome, paramount to every other authority except the negative of the tribunes; and c. Cludiu crosses ove? as the tribunes did not interpose, the hesitation of the senate,Mesto Mt.aine..rtinme availed nothing. Accordingly the senate now resolved to assist the aid of Rome. the Mamertines; and Appius Claudius was ordered to carry the resolution into effect. But before he could be ready to act with a consular army, C. Claudius, with a small force, was sent to the spot with orders to communicate as quickly as possible with the Mamertines. In a small boat6 he crossed the strait to Messana, and was introduced before the Mamertine assembly. With the language so invariably repeated afterwards whenever a Roman army appeared in a foreign country, C.

Claudius assured the Mamertines that he was come to give them their freedom, and he called on the Carthaginians either to evacuate the city, for since the Mamertine embassy to Rome they had been put in possession of the citadel by their partisans in Messana, or to explain the grounds on which they occupied it. His address received no answer; upon which he said, ” This silence proves that the Mamertine people are not their own masters, and that the Carthaginians have no just defence of their conduct to offer. For the sake of our common Italian blood, and because our aid has been implored, we will do the Mamertines justice.” But the strait of Messana, guarded by a Carthaginian fleet, was a barrier not easy to surmount. The Romans, since their conquest of Tarentula The Roman fleet, in and their possession of all the coasts of Italy, seem to have given stteritpig to rpulss:eby up their navy altogether, and we hear at this time of no duumviri the Carthaginians. or naval commanders as regular officers of the commonwealth. From the Greek cities in their alliance, Neapolis,1 Velia, and Tarentum, they obtained a few triremes and penteconters; but they had not a single quinquereme, the class of ships which may be called the line-of-battle-ships of that period. Their attempt to cross to Sicily was therefore easily baffled, and some of their triremes,8 with 4 Zonaras, VIII. 8. Dion Cassius, Fragm. 7 Polybius, I.

20. Vatican. LVIII. 8 Dion Cassius, Fragm. Vatic. LIX. Zonars, 5 Polybius, I. 11. VIII. 8. 6 Zsnmaras, VIII. 8. Dion Cassius, Fragm. Vatican. LVIII.

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126 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XL the soldiers whom they were transporting, fell into the hands of the Cartha. ginians. Hanno, the Carthaginian governor of Messana, sent back the ships and the Claudius again croeses prisoners to the Romans, calling upon them not to break the peace tho.leCn.t.ang invithe with Carthage, nor to venture again on the hopeless attempt of ernor toconference crossing the strait in defiance of his naval superiority.9 C. Claudius rejected his overtures, and repeated his determination to deliver Messana. Hanno exclaimed, that since they were so arrogant, he would not suffer the Romans to meddle with the sea so much as to wash their hands in it. Yet his vigilance did not justify this language, for Claudius with a few men effected his passage, apparently in a single ship, and finding the Mamnertines assembled at the harbor to receive him, he again proceeded to address them, professed his wish to leave their choice of protectors to their own free decision, and urged that Hanno should be invited to come down from the citadel, that the Roman and Carthaginian commanders might each plead the claim of his own country to be received as the ally and defender of Messana. With this proposal Hanno’~ was induced to comply, as overscrupulous, it seems, to remove every ground of suspicion against the good faith The governor is trea-clerously seized, and of Carthage as Claudius was unscrupulous in serving the ambition surrenders the citadel to purchase his free-of Rome. When the Carthaginian governor appeared, the discusdon. sion began; neither party would yield, and at last Claudius ordered his soldiers to seize Hanno and detain him as a prisqner. The Mamertines applauded the act, and Hanno, to procure his liberty, engaged to withdraw his garrison from the citadel, and to leave Messana in the hands of the Romans. The Carthaginian council of elders,”’ always severe in its judgments upon milison. in beraiged by tary commanders, ordered Hanno forth to be crucified; and disthe joint force of Car-patched another officer of the same name with a fleet and army thage and of Syracuso. to Sicily. Hiero, provoked by the treachery of the Romans, concluded an alliance with Carthage against them, and the two allied powers jointly blockaded Messana. Hiero lay encamped on the south side of the town, Hanno stationed himself on the north, and his fleet lay close by, at the headland of Pelorus, where the strait is narrowest, to prevent the Romans from reinforcing their garrison. Things were in this state’ when Appius Claudius, with his consular army arAppius Clanudius crosses rived at Rhegium. After some fruitless attempts at negotiation, tla atrit with a ondefts he prepared to force his passage. We want here a consistent the Syracuasnl. account of the details; but negligence there must have been on the part of the Carthaginians,‘3 to allow an army of twenty thousand men to be embarked, conveyed over the strait, and landed on the coast of Sicily, without loss or serious interruption. The landing was effected at night, and on the south of Messana, near the camp of the Syracusans. Appius immediately led his sol, diers to attack Hiero, who, confounded at the appearance of the Romans, and believing that the Carthaginians must have betrayed the passage, still marched out to meet the enemy. The.Syracusan cavalry supported its old renown, and obtained some advantage, but the infantry were never much esteemed, and on this occasion they were, probably, inferior in numbers.

Hiero was defeated and driven to his camp, and the very next night, suspecting his allies, and perceiving g Zonaras, VIII. 9. Dion Cassius, Fragm. alo-aXNaraTa. It is not easy to ascertain the exVatic. LIX. act meaning of Zonaras’ Greek, but I believe 10 Zonaras, VIII. 9. Dion Cassius Fragm. that Kara 7r sp6oav e,1ropeia does not mlean “unVatic. LX. der pretence of trafficking,” but when “they ~ Zonaras, VIII. 9. Polybius, I.

11. Dio-had an occasion of trafficking.” Compare in dorus, Fragm.

Hoeschel. XXIII. 2. Thucydides, VII. 13, ir’ aburopoeNag ripodacet. 12

Polybius, I. 11. Diodorus, Fragm. Hoe-It would seem then that the Carthaginian sailschel. XXIII. 2. 4. Zonaras, VIII. 9. ors were trafficking in the port of Messana when 13, Zonaras says of Appius,;s evpe auvxvos they ought to have been at sea, watching tihe atrov voX1)axx Kara wrparto’v 4lrropiag EXXMyevi-movemelnts of the Romanais. ~oyras, 4qerdrlrtUf atag icrao Sd~tO0l rrv ropOlpbv

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CHAP. XL.] SECOND CAMPAIGN IN SICILY. 427 that he had ventured on an ill-advised contest, he raised the siege and retreated to Syracuse. Thus delivered from one enemy, Appius next attacked the Carthaginians.‘4 Their position was strong, and he was repulsed; but this success lie defeats the Cartha. tempted them to meet him on equal ground, and they were then giniane,.aies thle siege defeatedw~~.,w~ l~ss~ s. i of lMess[neS, anlo d pllSu les defeated with loss. Messana was now completely relieved; tile Hliro under t.hewalls Carthaginian army retreated, and was divided into detachments to ofSyracuse. garrison the towns of the Carthaginian part of the island. Appius overran the open country in every direction, and the soldiers, no doubt, congratulated themselves on their decision in the comitia at Rome, which, in so short a time, had enriched them with the plunder of Sicily. But an attempt to take Egesta was repulsed with considerable slaughter, and when Appius advanced even to the very walls of Syracuse, and pretended to besiege the city, he found that he could not always be successful; his men suffered from the summer and autumn fevers of the marsh plain of the Anapus, and he retreated to Messana, with the Syracusan army pressing upon his rear. The Syracusans, however, long accustomed to regard the Carthaginians as their worst enemies, were unwilling to support the evils of war in their cause; the Syracusan advanced posts held frequent communications with the Romans, and although Hiero could not yet consent to make peace with the protectors of the Mamertines, yet the manifest disposition of his subjects was not to be resisted, and the Romans reached Messana in safety,. Appius left a garrison there, and returned with the rest of his army to Rome; the strait was now clear of the enemy’s ships, for in ancient warfare a fleet was dependent upon land cooperation,‘5 and could not act without great difficulty upon a coast which was wholly in the possession of an enemy.

When Appius returned to Rome, he found that the war with Volsinii was at an end, for his colleague, M. Fulvius Flaccus, triumphed for his victories over the Volsinians on the first of November.l6 The Sicily Hiero mnake peace with Rome. whole force of Rome was therefore now at liberty, and as the Car-A. u c. 49i. A. C. thaginians seem to have despaired of defending the straits of Mes-a63 sana, two consular armies,‘7 amounting to about 35,000 men, crossed over into Sicily in the spring of 491. All opposition was overborne, and Hiero, after having lost sixty-seven towns,‘8 was glad to obtain peace on condition of restoring all the Roman prisoners without ransom, of paying a large sum of money, and of becoming the ally of the Roman people. He had the wisdom to maintain this alliance unbroken to the hour of his death, having found that the,. friendship of Rome would secure him from all other enemies, whereas the, allies of Carthage were exposed to suffer from her tyranny, but could not depend on her! protection. Hiero retained nearly the same extent of territory which had belonged to Syracuse in old times, before the tyranny of the first Dionysius; but all the rest of his dominion was ceded to the Romans. Having now only one enemy to deal with,‘9 and having the whole power of Syracuse transferred from the Carthaginian scale to their own, the Roman generals went on prosperously. Many towns were taken from the Carthaginians, and unlaras, VIII. 9. Polybins, I. 12. Dio-land forces solely, after they had effected their dorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXIII. 4. landing in safety.‘5 The failure of Pompey’s fleet in either pre-16 Fasti Capitolini. venting Caesar from crossing the Ionian sea 17 Polybius, I. 16. from Brundusium, or in effectually cutting off 1 Diocorus, Fragm. Ioesohel. XXIII. 5. -The his communications with Italy afterwards, is terms of the peace with Hiero are variously reone of the most striking instances of the defects ported.

Diodorus says that he obtained a peace of the ancient naval service. But with respect for fifteen years on giving up his Roman p-isto the invasion of Sicily from Italy, we must re-oners without ransom, and on paying 150,000 member that not even the British naval force, drachmwe; Polybius makes the sum 100 talents, while every point in Sicily was in our posses-and says nothing of atiy term when the peace sion, could prevent the French from throwing was to expire; Zonaras:names no specific-sumi across a division of about 3000 men, in Septem-and Orosius andiEutropius set it at:200 talents. ber, 1810, whose defeat was effected by our‘9 Polybius, I.

17-20.

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428 HISTORY OF ROME. LCHAP. XL Third and fourth cnm. in the following year; 492, Agrigentum20 was reduced after a long paigsn. Siege of Agri-and obstinate siege, and all the inhabitants sold for slaves. The gentum.

The Romans As. Ulv to b2il. A eet. consuls of the year 493 were no less successful, but the Cartha262,261. ginians had at last begun to exert their naval power effectually; many towns on the Sicilian coastsl’ which had yielded to the Roman armies were recovered by the Carthaginian fleets; the coasts of Italy were often ravaged, so that the Romans found it necessary to encounter their enemy on his own element: they resolved to dispute with the Carthaginians their dominion of the sea. Immediately at the close of the year 493, they began to fell their timber. But no Italian shipwright knew how to build the line-of-battle ships of They find a model for their ships, and traiheir build was so different their seamen. from that of the triremes, that the one would not serve as a model for the other. Shipwrights might have been procured from the king of Egypt, but to send thither would have caused too great a delay. It happened that a Carthaginian quinouereme22 had run ashore on the Bruttian coast when Appius Claudius was first crossing over to Sicily, and it was noted as a curious circumstance that the Roman soldiers had taken a ship of war. This quinquereme, which had probably been sent to Rome as a trophy, was now made the shipwright’s model, and a hundred ships were built after her pattern, and launched in two months after the first felling of the timber.23 The seamen, partly Roman proletarians, or citizens of the poorest class, partly Etruscans, or Greeks from the maritime states of Italy, were all unaccustomed to row in quinqueremes, and the Romans had, perhaps, never handled an oar of any sort. While the ships were building, therefore, to lose no time, the future crew of each quinquereme24 were arranged upon benches ashore, in the same order, that to us undiscoverable problem, in which they were hereafter to sit on board; the keleustes, whose voice or call regulated the stroke in the ancient galleys, stood in the midst of them, and at his signal they went through their movements, and learned to keep time together, as if they had been actually afloat.

With such ships and such crews the Romans put to sea early in the spring, to seek an engagement with the fleet of the first naval power in the world. An English reader is tempted here either to suspect extreme exaggeration in Defeats in the aneiesat the accounts of the Roman inexperience in naval matters, or to naval service. entertain great contempt for the fleets and sailors of the ancient world altogether. There are no braver men than the Austrians, but there would be something ludicrous in the idea of an Austrian fleet, manned chiefly by peasants from the inland provinces of the empire, and commanded by officers of the land srrvice, venturing a general action with an English or American squadron. But Wile accounts of these events are trustworthy; and had the Romans encountered the Athenian navy in the days of its greatness instead of the Carthaginian, the result, in the first years of the war at least, would probably have been different. However, there is no doubt that the naval service of the ancient nations was out of all proportion inferior to their land service; the seamen were altogether an inferior class, and the many improvements which had been made in the military art on shore seemed never to have reached naval warfare. Ships worked with oars were still exclusively used as ships of war; and although the use of engines, well deserving the name of artillery, was familiar in sieges, yet it had never been adopted in sea-fights,25 and the old method of attempting to sink 20

Polybius, I. 18, 19. Orosius, IV. 7. Zo-locked up in the ice, and the French cavalry naras, VIII. 10. took them without any resistance. 25

Polybius, I. 20. 22 Pliny, Histor. Natur. XVI. ~ 192. Florus, 22 Polybiis, I. 20. Auctor de Viris Illustrib. II. 2. in Appio. Claud. Caudic. “
quinqueremem hos-24 Polybius, I. 21. tillnt copis pedestribus cepit.” So in the inva-26 Vegetius, writing in the fourth century sion of Holland in 1795, the French triumphed after the Christian era, speaks of the use of argreatly in the capture of some Dutch ships of tillery in sea-fights as a thing of common pracwar by a party of their cavalry: the ships were tice; but I do not recollect any mention of it as early as the Punic wars.

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Ciar. XL:] INGENUITY OF THE ROMANS. 429 or disable an enemy’s vessel by piercing her just below the water with the brazen beak affixed to every ship’s bows, was still universally practised. The system of fighting, therefore, necessarily brought the ships close to one another; and if the fighting men on one side were clearly superior to those on the other, boarding, if it could be effected, would insure victory. The fighting men in the ancient ships, as is well known, were quite distinct from their rowers or seamen, and their proportion to these varied, as boarding was more or less preferred to manceuvring. In the Ionian revolt, about 500 B.

c., we find forty soldiers26 employed on each of the China ships out of a crew of 200; the Corinthians and Corcyrweans, about seventy years afterwards, had nearly as many,21 but the Athenians, in the most flourishing state of their navy, had commonly no more than ten. In the quinqueremes now used, we find the Romans employing on one occasion 300
seamen and 120 soldiers; this, however, was perhaps something above their usual proportion; but there can be no doubt that the soldiers on board of each ship were numerous, and if they could board the enemy their victory over what Niebuhr justly calls the mere rabble of an African crew was perfectly certain. The object of the Romans was therefore to enable their men, in every case, to decide the battle by boarding. For this purpose they contrived Ma,,ine invented by in each ship what may be called a long drawbridge, thirty-six feet them Rto bnardthenble long, by four wide, with a low parapet on each side of it. This “y bridge was attached by a hole at one end of it to a mast twenty-four feet high, erected on the ship’s prow, and the hole was large and oblong, so that the bridge not only played freely all around the mast, but could be drawn up-so as to lie close and almost parallel to it, the end of it being hoisted by a rope passing through a block at the mast-head, just as our cutters’ booms are hoisted by what is called the topping lift. The bridge was attached to the mast at the height of about twelve feet from the deck, and it had a continuation of itself reaching down to the deck, moving, I suppose, on hinges,28 and serving as a ladder by which it might be ascended. Playing freely round the mast, and steered by the rope above-mentioned, the bridge was let fall upon an enemy’s ship, on whatever quarter she approached; and as a ship’s beak was commonly her only weapon, an enemy ventured without fear close to her broadside or her stem, as if she were there defenceless. When the bridge fell, a strong iron spike, fixed at the bottom of it, was driven home by the mere weight of the fall into the deck of the enemy’s ship, and held it fast; and then the soldiers, in two files, rushed along it by an inclined plane down upon the deck of the enemy, their large shields and 28

Herodotus, VI. 15. fixed on the enemy’s ship I can only suppose, 27

Thucydides, I. 49. He says that the ships then, that what Polybius:lls “
the first twelve had many heavyarmed soldiers on board, and feet of the ladder” served as a permanent ascent many’archers and dartmen, after the ancient from the deck to the end of the bridge, where fashion. That the number of fighting men on it went round the mast, and that it was so far board the Athenian ships in the most flourish-distinct from the bridge, that it remained in its ing state of their navy was no more than ten, own place when the bridge was lowered, alappears from a comparison of several passages though, when the bridge was hoisted up to lie in Thucydides, II.

92, 102. III. 95, and IV. 76, close to the mast, both it and the bridge seemed 101. to be a continuation of each other. 28 This is the difficult part of Polybius’ de-Folard’s engraving and description of this scription, I. 22, which he by no means makes machine are altogether erroneous: but he menvery intelligible. ” The ladder, or bridge, was tions a story which well illustrates the object put round the mast after the first twelve feet of of attaching the bridge to the mast at a height its own length:” the object being apparently to of twelve feet above the deck.

” The Maltese attach it to the mast at such a height above the seamen,” he says, ” have been known to mount deck, as to make it form an inclined plane down on the main-yard preparatory to boarding, and to the deck of the enemy. But unless the lower when the ship runs on board of the enemy, one end of the ladder had been fixed to the deck, yard-arm is lowered, and the men are thus the men could not have ascended by it; and dropped one after another on the enemy’s had it been all one piece with the upper part, deck.” I will not answer for the truth of the the moment the bridge was lowered to fall on story, but it evidently contains the same notion the enemy’s deck, the lower part must imme-of boarding by an inclined plane, which appears diately have gone up into the air. And, of to have suggested to the Romans the arrangecourse, it is absurd to suppose that the men ment of their bridge. bould have gone upon the bridge before it was

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430 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XL, the parapet of the bridge together completely sheltering their flanks from the enemy’s missiles, while the two file leaders held their shields in front of them, and so covered the bridge lengthways. So with these bridges drawn up to their masts, and exhibiting a strange appearance, as the regular masts were always lowered previously to going into action, the Roman fleet put to sea in quest of their enemy. It was commanded by one of the consuls, Cn. Cornelius Scipio,29 but as he. Doili commnds allowed himself to be taken with seventeen ships, in an ill-advised C. Duilius commands the Roman fleet.

Sea-attempt on the Liparoean islands, his colleague, C. Duilius, the descendant probably of that upright and moderate tribune who took so great a part in the overthrow of the decemvirs’ tyranny, was sent for from his army to conduct the fleet. He found the Carthaginian fleet under the command of Hannibal, the same officer who had defended Agrigentum in the late siege, ravaging the coast of Mylae, the modern Melazzo, on the north coast of Sicily, not far from the strait of Messana. The Carthaginians advanced in the full confidence of victory, and though surprised at the masts and tackle on the. rows of the Roman ships, they yet commenced the action boldly. But the thirty ships which formed their advanced squadron, including that of Hannibal himself, were immediately grappled by the Roman bridges, boarded and taken. Hannibal escaped in his boat to his main battle, which was rapidly advancing; but the disaster of their first division startled them, and when they found, that even if they approached the Roman ships on their broadside or on their stern, still these formidable bridges were wheeled round and lowered upon them, they were seized with a panic and fled. Their whole loss, including that of the advanced squadron,30 amounted to about fifty ships sunk or taken, and in men to three thousand killed and seven thousand prisoners. The direct consequence of this victory was the raising of the siege of Egesta,3’

Results of the battle, which the Carthaginians had well-nigh reduced to extremity, and Din.lihn The Doilia, the taking of Macella by assault. But its moral results were far column. greater, inasmuch as the Romans were now confident of success v*y sea as well as on shore, and forned designs of wresting from the Carthaginians all their island possessions, Sardinia and Corsica no less than Sicily. Duilius, as was to be expected, obtained a triumph, and he was allowed32 for the rest of his life to be escorted home with torches borne before him, and music playing whenever he went out to supper, an honor which he enjoyed for many years afterwards. A pillar also was set up in the Forum to commemorate his victory, with an inscription recording the amount of the spoil which he had taken; and an ancient copy of this inscription,33 retaining the old forms of the words, is still preserved, though in part illegible. The events of the three next years may be passed over briefly. Towns were Indecisive war i Sicily.

taken and retaken in Sicily, much plunder was gained, enormous Corsicn anped Srdinia havoc made, and many brave actions34 performed, but with no conspiracy at Rome. decisive result. Hamilcar, one of the Carthaginian generals, de2Y Polybius, I. 21.‘O Polybius, I. 23. temple had been begun by him, and was only 31 Polybius, I. 24. completed by his successor. 32

Cicero, de Senectute, 13. It appears that. Such as that noble act of a military tribune this continuation of his triumph during his in the army of the consul A. Atilius Calatinus, whole life was his own act, and that it was in the year 4906, who sacrificed himself and a thright right and proper, as he had done such cohort of 400 men to cover the retreat of the good service; ” que sibi nullo exemplo privatus army out of a dangerous defile in which they sumpserat.: tantumlicentim dabatgloria.” This had been surprised by the enemy. Cato comno doubt is more correct than those other state-plained of the injustice of fortune which had ments which represent it as an honor specially given so scanty a share of fame to this tribune, conferred upon him by the senate or people. while Leonidas for an act of no greater heroism 98 A temple of Janus, built by C. Dullius at had acquired such undying glory. In fact, the this time, was restored in the early part of the tribune’s very name is uncertain, for we find reign of the Emperor Tiberius. (Tacitus, An-the action ascribed to three different persons. nal. II. 49.) It is possible that the column and See A. Gellius, III. 7, who quotes at lerngth the its inscription may have been restored in the passage of the Origines in which Cato describes reign of Augustus; for the restoration of the the action.

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CnhAP. XL.] ROMAN EXPEDITION TO AFRICA. 431 stroyed the town of Eryx and removed its inhabitants to Drepanum, a place on the sea-side close beneath the mountain where the’ had lived before, and provided with an excellent harbor.35 It was not far from Lilybueum, and these two posts both being strongly fortified were intended to be the strongholds of the Carthaginian power in Sicily. On the other hand, the Romans invaded’ Sardinia and Corsica36 and carried off great numbers of prisoners. But as they extended their naval operations they unavoidably became acquainted with the violence of the Mediterranean storms; and the terrors of the sea were very dreadful to the inland people of Italy, who were forced to furnish seamen to man:the Roman fleets, a service utterly foreign to the habits of their lives. Thus in the year 495i3 some Samnites, who were waiting in Rome till the fleet should be ready for sea, entered into a conspiracy with some slaves who had been lately carried off as captives from Sardinia and Corsica, to make themselves masters of the city. The seamen, however, of the ancient world were always chosen from the poorest classes of freemen, and their making common cause with the slaves showed at once that their attempt had nothing of the character of a national revolt. In fact, their own Samnite commander informed the Roman government of their conspiracy, which was thus prevented and punished. The higher classes in the allied states, who served as soldiers, liked the war probably as much as the Romans did; and with one doubtful exception,38 we read of no symptoms of disaffection to Rome during the whole course of the war. Besides their expeditions to Sardinia and Corsica, and their naval cooperation with the consular armies engaged in Sicily, the Romans gained an Naval action off the advantage over the Carthaginian fleet in the year 497, off the Li-Liparan islands. paraean islands,39 for which the Consul C. Atilius obtained, like Duilius, a naval triumph. This success, although in itself very indecisive, yet encouraged the Romans to attempt operations on a far grander scale, and to carry the war r.at armamnt of tho into Africa. Great efforts were made during the winter, and a R.o.an. a fleet of 330 ships was prepared,40 manned by nearly 300,000 seamen, exclusive of soldiers or fighting men. This vast number could scarcely A.C A. c.. ct have been furnished either by Rome itself or its Italian allies; but They prepareto invaad the thousands of captives carried off from Corsica and Sardinia, Africa or from the cities of Sicily, no doubt were largely employed as galley-slaves; and if they worked in chains, as is most probable, the free rowers who were in the ships with them would be a sufficient guard to deter them from mutiny. The two consuls for the ensuing year were L.

Manlius Vulso and Q. Cmdicius; but Q. Cmdi;ius died soon after he came into office, and was succeeded M. Atilius Regulus. The two consular armies had apparently wintered in Sicily; for the fleet sailed through the strait of Messana, doubled Cape Pachynus,41 and took the legions on board at Ecnomus, a small place on the southern coast, between‘6 Diodorus, Fragm.

IIoeschel. XXIII. Zona-in gratitude for his escape from destruction. ras, VII. 11. This is noticed in his epitaph, ” Dedit tempesta6a Zonaras, VIII.

11. Polybius, I. 24. -The tibus cede merito,” and also by Ovid in his Fasti Capitolini record L. Scipio’s triumph over Fasti. the Sardinians and Corsicans in the year 494, i9 Polybius says that in 495 or 496, the allies that is, according to the common reckoning, quarrelled with the IRomans in Sicily, complain495; and they record also a triumph of C. Sul-ing that their services in the field were not sufpicius over the Sardinians in the year follow-ficiently acknowledged, and that. they conseing. The Lucius Scipio who triumphed over quently encamped apart from the Romans, and the Corsicans was the son of L. Scipio who was were attacked in their separate position by the defeated by the Gauls in the third Sarmnite war.

Carthaginian general, and cut to pieces, I. 24. His epitaph has been preserved, as well as his But it does not appear that these were the Italfather’s, and it tells of him, how “he won Cor-ian allies of Rome, and it is possible that they sica and the city of Aleria.” Aleria is the Ala-may have been the Mamertines. lia of Herodotus, an old Greek colony founded 39 Polybius, I. 25. Fasti Capitolini. Zonaras, by the Phocmeans when they fled from the gen-VIII. 12. erals of Cyrus. 40 Polybius, I. 25.

Each Roman ship had on 97 Zonaras, VIII. 11. Scipio onhis returnfrom board 300 rowers and 120 fighting men. Corsica in 495 had encountered a violent storm,’ 1 Polybius, I. 25. and built a temple to the powers of the weather

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432 HISTORY OF ROME. [CAMP. XI G(ela and Agrigentum. Forty thousand men were here embarked, and the Carthaginians, who had assembled a still larger fleet of three hundred and fifty ships, had already crossed over to Lilybaeum, and from thence, advancing eastward along the Sicilian coast, were arrived at Heraclea Minoa, and were ready to give the Romans battle.

Both consuls were on board the Roman fleet; the Carthaginians were commanded by Hanno, who had been defeated at Agrigentum during the siege of that town, and by Hamilcar, who had so lately founded Drepanum. The Roman fleet at Ecnomus contained 140,000 men, while less than 20,000

Battle of Ecnomus. De-British seamen were engaged at Trafalgar. Yet it is not only in ian fleet off tho aouth our generation, when Trafalgar and its consequences are fresh in constofSicily. our memory, that its fame will surpass a hundred-fold the fame of the battle of Ecnomus. For the twenty-seven ships which Nelson commanded at Trafalgar, by crushing the naval force of France, changed the destiny of all Europe; whilst the three hundred and thirty ships which fought at Ecnomus produced only a brief result, which within five years was no more perceivable. A fleet that could be built in a few-months was no irreparable loss if destroyed; and the poor slaves who worked at the oar might be replaced by the plunder of the next campaign. The battle of Ecnomus was obstinately contested, but at last the Romans were completely victorious. They lost twenty-four ships,42
in which not more than 2880 soldiers could have perished, if we suppose, what rarely happened, that not a man was picked up by the other ships; but they destroyed thirty of the enemy’s fleet, and took sixty-four with all their crews. The Carthaginians with the rest of their ships made all speed to reach Carthage, that they might be still in time to defend their country against the expected invasion. The way to Africa was now open, and the consuls,43 after having victualled their The consuls cross over ships with more than their usual supplies, as they knew not what pto Afriabegin cpyto Cy port would next receive them, prepared to leave the coast of Sicily waste the country. and to cross the open sea to an. unknown world.

The soldiers and even one of the military tribunes murmured;44 they had been kept fiom home during one whole winter, and now they were to be carried to a strange country, into the very stronghold of their enemy’s power, to a land of scorching heat, and infested with noisome beasts and monstrous serpents,45 such as all stories of Africa had told them of.

Regulus, it is said, threatened the tribune with death, and forced the men on board. The fleet did not keep together, and thirty ships reached the African shore unsupported,46 and might have been destroyed before the arrival of the rest; had not the Carthaginians in their confusion neglected their opportunity. When the whole fleet was reassembled under the headland of Hermes, Cape Bon, they stood to the southward along the coast, and disembarked the legions near the place called Aspis or Clypea,47 in English, shield-a fortress built by Agathocles about fifty years before, and deriving its name from its walls forming a circle upon the top of a conical hill. They immediately drew their ships up on the beach, after the ancient manner, and secured them with a ditch and rampart; and having taken Clypea, and dispatched mes42 Polybius, I. 27, 28. creatures besides.” IV. 191. This description 43 Polybius, I. 29. is very remarkable, following, as it does, a de44 Florus, II. 2. tailed and most exact account not only of all the 45,” Libya to the west of the lake Tritonis,” African tribes on the coast from Egypt to the that is, the present pashalik of Tunis, the an-lesser Syrtis, but also of those in the interior. cient territory of Carthage, “is very hilly,” But the Carthaginian territory was rendered so says Herodotus, ” and overgrown with woods, inaccessible to foreigners, that all sorts of exagand full of wild beasts. For here are the mon-gerations and fables were circulated respecting strous serpents, and the lions, and the elephants, it.

Herodotus seems to have known nothing and the bears, and the asps, and the asses with of its fertility, but only of its. woods and its wild horns, and the dog-heads, and the creatures beasts, the terrors of which the Carthaginians with no heads, whose eyes are in their breasts, no doubt purposely magnified. at least as the Libyans say, and the wild men 4

Diodorus, Fragm. Vatican. XXIII. 8. and the wild women, and a great many other 47 Polybius, 1. 29. Strabo, XVII. p. 884.

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CHAP. XL.] DESCRIPTION OF THE COUNTRY. 433 sengers to Rome with the news of their success, and to ask for further instructions, they began to march into the country; and the ravages of forty thousand men were spread far and wide over that district which, for its richness and flourishing condition, was unmatched probably in the world. From Cape Bon, the Hermean headland, the African coast runs nearly north and south for as much as three degrees of latitude as far as the Description of the counbottom of the lesser Syrtis. This was the most highly prized trysouth of Carthage.

*Oe consul returns country of the Carthaginian dominion, filled with their, towns, and e omo.. Regulusis left covered with the villas of their wealthier citizens. In their old inAfigcommercial treaties48 with Rome no Roman vessel was allowed to approach this coast; they wished to keep it hidden from every foreigner, that its surpassing richness might not tempt the spoiler. Here grew those figs which Cato the censor showed in the Roman senate, to prove how the fruits of Italy were outdone by those of Africa; and here grew those enormous harvests of corn which in later times49 constantly fed the people of Rome. But now the aspect of the country resembled the approach to Genoa, or the neighborhood of Geneva, or even the most ornamented parts of the valley of the Thames above London.

Everywhere were to be seen single houses5~ standing in the midst of vineyards, and olive-grounds, and pastures; for as in Judea in its golden days, every drop of rain was carefully preserved in tanks or cisterns on the high grounds, and a plentiful irrigation spread life and freshness on every side, even under the burning sun of Africa. On such a land the hungry soldiers of the Roman army were now let loose without restraint.

Villas were ransacked and burnt, cattle and horses were driven off in vast numbers, and twenty thousand persons,. many of them doubtless of the highest condition, and bred up in all the enjoyments of domestic peace and affluence, were carried away as slaves. This havoc continued for several weeks, till the messengers sent from Rome returned with the senate’s orders. One of the consuls,5’ with one consular army and forty ships, was to remain in Africa; the other was to return home with the second consular army, the fleet, and the plunder. L. Manlius accordingly embarked, and arrived safely at Rome with his division of the army, and with the spoil.

M. Regulus, Wvith 15,000 foot and 500 horse, was left in Africa. The defenceless state of the country, and the apparent helplessness of the Carthaginian government, seem to have encouraged the Roman senate to hope that a single consular army might at any rate be able gini..s, and fixes his to maintain its ground and harass the enemy, even if it could not -quarters t nes. force them:. submission. And the example of Agathocles, who, during four years, had set’he power of Carthage at defiance, no doubt increased their con. fidence. The incapacity of the Carthaginian government and generals was enough indeed to embolden the Romans. Their army, strong in cavalry and elephants, kept on the hills52 where neither could act, and were attacked and defeated, and their camp taken by the Romans. Regulus then overran the whole country without opposition; the Romans53 boasted that he took and plundered more than three hundred walled villages or towns, but none of these deserved the name of a fortified place; and even Tunes54 itself, within twenty miles of Carthage, fell into their hands with little resistance. Here Regulus established his headquarters, and here he seems to have remained through the winter.55 48

See Polybins, III. 22, 23. times, but still the soil is described as extreme49 Horace’s expressions are well known, ly fertile. Sir G. Temple counted ninety-seven “Frumenti Quantum metit Africa,” “quicquid shoots or stalks on a single plant of barley, de Libycis verritur areis,” &c. See also Taci-which was by no means one of the largest in tus, Annal. XII.

43. the field; he was assured that plants were often 50 See the description of this country as it seen with three hundred. Excursions in the appeared to the soldiers of Agathocles.‘Diodo-Mediterranean, Vol. II.

p. 108. res, XX. 8. The irrigation is especially no-51 Polybius, I. 29.

52 Polybius, I. 30. ticed, roXXisv Wdrov d3wXereevp’vWV Kasi rdvra rrrov 3

Florus, II. 2. 9pd&v6Svrwv. It is the neglect of this which has so 54

Polybius, I. 30. reduced the productiveness of Africa in modern 65

Zonaras, VIII. 13. 28

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434 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XL. Meanwhile, to increase the distress of the Carthaginians, the Numidians,56 or A. c. 498, 499. A. c. the roving tribes of the interior, then as now always ready to attack 256, 257. TheNumid and plunder the civilized settlers of the seacoast, joined the Roinn tribes joined him. an Diatreas of Carthage. mans, and, like the Cossacks, being most expert in such desultory and plundering warfare, they outdid the Romans in their devastations. From all quarters fugitives from the country crowded into Carthage, and it was feared that the city was unable to feed so great a multitude as were now confined within its walls. Alarm and distress prevailed, and the council of elders sent three of its own members to the Roman consul to sue for peace. Regulus, like Fabricius and Curius, was in his own country a poor man; it is Regulus imposes intol-a wellknown story57 that he complained of the loss which his small erCabl teri on thO portion of land must sustain from his absence, and that the senate come to sue for peace. promised to maintain his wife and children till his return. Such a man’s head could not but be turned by his present position, when the plunder of Africa had given him the power of acquiring riches beyond all his conceptions, and when the noblest citizens of the wealthiest state in the world came as suppliants to his headquarters. He treated them with the insolence shown by some of the French generals during the revolution to the ambassadors of the old sovereigns of Europe.

Carthage5s must evacuate Sicily and Sardinia, ransom all her own prisoners, and give up without ransom all those whom she had taken from the Romans; must make good all the expenses of the war, and pay a yearly contribution besides; above all, she must follow wherever the Romans should lead, and make neither alliance nor war without their consent; she must not send to sea more than a single ship of war on her own account, but if the Romans required her aid she must send them a fleet of fifty ships. The Carthaginian ambassadors protested against terms so extravagant. “Men who are good for any thing,” replied Regulus, ” should either conquer or submit to their betters.“59 And with threatening and insolent expressions to the ambassadors personally, he ordered them to begone with all speed from the Roman camp. The council of the elders called together the great council on this emergency;6( and the whole body of the aristocracy of Carthage with one voice rejected conditions so intolerable. But great was the danger, and great the general alarm. The gods were to be propitiated by no common sac-‘ rifices, and those horrid offerings to Moloch, which had been made when Agathoeles was threatening Carthage with ruin, were now again repeated. The figure of the god stood with outstretched arms to receive his victims; young children of the noblest families were placed in the hands of the image, and from thence rolled off into a furnace which burnt before him. Nor were there wanting those who with something of a better apirit threw themselves into the fire, willing to pay with their own lives the atonement for their country.

In the midst of this distress, an officer returned”’ who had been sent to Greece to engage Greek soldiers of fortune in the Carthaginian service.

Xanthippus, a Spartan sold.e.. arrives. at Among others he brought with him a Spartan named Xanthippus, Carthage, and directs the operations of the a man who had been trained in his country’s discipline, and had Carthagmianl. added to it much of actual military experience. He might have 66 Polybius, I. 31. Diodorus, Fragm. Vat-of the human sacrifices offered in such emergenican. XXIII. 4. cies, see Diodorus, XX. 14. 5-Auctor de Viris Illustrib. in Regul. Valer.,1 Polybius, I. 32. Some years afterwards, Maxim. IV. 4, 6. when Ptolemy Euergetes overran the whole 6) Dion Cassius, Fragm. Ursin. CXLVIII. kingdom of Seleucus Callinicus, he committed Regulus was so elated by his successes, that he his conquests beyond the Enphrates to the care wrote home to the senate to say that’; he had of “Xantippus, one of his two generals-in-chief.” sealed up the gates of Carthage by the terror of Jerome, in Daniel, XI. 9. Could this Xantippua his arms.” Zonaras, VIII. 13. or Xanthippus be the conqueror of Rlegulus,‘o Diodorus. Fragm. Vatican. XXIII. 4. whose glory in Africa recommended him to the’o Polybius, I. 31. Diodorus, Fragnm. Vati-notice of the king of Egypt after his return N, XXIII, 4. And for a particular description from Carthage, so that he became a general in the Egyptian armies.

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CHAP. XL.] TOTAL DEFEAT OF THE ROMANS. 435 fought with Acrotatus against Pyrrhus in that gallant defence of Sparta; and in all likelihood he had followed king Areust2 to Athens to save the city from the dominion of Antigonus, when Sparta and Athens fought for the last time side by side in defence of the independence of Greece. Xanthippus63 condemned the conduct of the Carthaginian generals in the strongest terms; his reputation gave weight to his words; the government sent for him, and he so justified his tpinion and explained so clearly the causes of their defeats, that they intrusted him with the direction of their forces. Hope was already rekindled; but when he reviewed the soldiers without the walls, and made them go through the movements which were best fitted to meet the peculiar tactic of the Romans, loud shouts burst from the ranks, and there was a universal cry to be led out to battle. The generals of the commonwealth did not hesitate to comply, and although they had no more than 12,000
foot, yet relying on their cavalry, four thousand in number, and on their elephants, amounting to no fewer than a hundred, they boldly marched out, and no longer keeping the high grounds, encamped in the open plain, and thus checked at once the devastation of the country. Regulus was obliged to risk a battle,G4 for as soon as he ceased to be master of the field, his men would be destitute of provisions. He encamped He pereto give batwithin little more than a mile of the enemy, and the sight of the tle to t e Roans. Roman legions, so long victorious, made the resolution of the Carthaginian generals waver. But the soldiers were clamorous for battle, and Xanthippus urged the generals not to lose the precious opportunity. They yielded, and requested him to form the army on his own plan. Accordingly, he placed his cavalry on the flanks, together with some of the lightarmed mercenaries, slingers perhaps from the Balearian islands, and archers from Crete. The heavyarmed mercenaries, we know not of what nation, whether Gauls, or Spaniards, or Greeks, or a mixed band of all, were on the right in the line of battle; the Africans, with some Carthaginian citizens, were on the left and centre; the whole line being covered by the elephants, which formed a single rank at some distance in advance. The Romans were in their usual order, their cavalry on the wings, and their velites or lightarmed troops in advance of the heavyarmed soldiers; but their line was formed of a greater depth than usual, to resist the elephants’ charge. When the signal was given, the Carthaginian cavalry and elephants immediately advanced, and the Romans, clashing their pila against the iron rims of their shields and cheering loudly, rushed on to meet them. Regolus is tro them. The left wing, passing by the right of the line of elephants, ken prisoner. attacked the Carthaginian mercenaries and routed them; Xanthippus rode up to rally them,65 threw himself from his horse, and fought amongst them as a common soldier. Meantime his cavalry had swept the Roman and Italian horse from the field, and then charged the legions on the rear; while the elephants, driving the velites before them into the intervals of the maniples, broke into the Roman main battle, and with irresistible weight and strength and fury trampled under foot and beat down and dispersed the bravest. If any forced their way forwards through the elephants’ line, they were received by the Carthaginian infantry, who, being fresh and in unbroken order, presently cut them to pieces. Two thousand men of the left of the Roman army escaped after they had driven the mercenaries to their camp, and found that all was lost behind them. Regulus himself, with 500 more, fled also from the rout, but was pursued, overtaken, and made prisoner. The rest of the Roman army was destroyed to a man on the field of battle. The few fugitives from the left wing made their escape to Clypea; Tunes, it seems, was lost immediately, and, except Clypea, the Romans did not re-ejo tain a foot of ground in Africa. We have no Carthaginian histo6~ See Justin, XXVI. 2.

Pausanias, III. 6, 64 Polybinis I. 33. 8s. 65 Diodorus, Fragm. Vatic.

XXIII. 5. es Polybius, I. 32.

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436 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAPr. XL rian to describe the triumphant return of the victorious army to Carthage; how the Roman prisoners and Regulus, lately so insolent, were led through the streets bound and half naked; how the bands of noble citizens met at their public tables, sworn companions and brethren to each other in peace and war, and remembered with joyful tears their comrades who had fallen; how the whole city was full of festivity,66 and every temple was crowded by wives and mothers offering their thanksgivings for this great deliverance. The feasting, after the Carthaginian manner, continued deep into the night; but other sounds and other fires than those of revelry and rejoicing were to be seen and heard amid the darkness; the fires of Moloch again were blazing, and some of the bravest of the prisoners were burnt alive as a thankoffering. Xanthippus, crowned with glory,67 and no doubt richly rewarded, returned to U C 499.

A. C Greece soon after his victory, before admiration and gratitude had 255. The Romans send time to be changed to envy. Clypea was besieged, but the Roa fleet to bring off the remains of their army man garrison held out desperately, and the senate no sooner learned frem Africa. the disaster of their army, than they sent a fleet to bring off the survivors. The Carthaginians, dreading a second invasion, raised a fleet to meet the enemy at sea, but the number of their ships was greatly inferior, and they were completely defeated. The Romans, however, had no intention of landing again in Africa; so total a destruction of their whole army impressed them with a dread of the enemy’s elephants, which they could not for a long time shake off: they contented themselves with taking on board the garrison of Clypea, and sailed back to Sicily. The Romans had now for five years sent fleets to sea, and had as yet had litT:he fleet is wreckedon tle experience of its terrors. This increased their natural confiits return off the south dence, and they thought that Romans68 might sail at any season, coast of Italy. and that it was only cowardice which was restrained by pretended signs of bad weather. So, in the month of July, in spite of tHe warnings of their pilots, they persisted in coasting homewards along the southern coasts of Sicily, at the very time when violent gales from the south and southwest make that coast especially perilous. The fleet was off Camarina when the storm came on, and taught the Romans that fair-weather seamen may mistake ignorant presumption for courage. Above 260 ships were wrecked, which must have had on board 78,000
seamen, without counting the soldiers, who were probably at least as many as 25,000, and the whole coast from Camarina to Pachynus was covered with wrecks and bodies. The men69 who escaped to shore -were most kindly relieved by Hiero, who fed and clothed them, and conveyed them to Messana.

This great disaster encouraged the Carthaginians to redouble their efforts in ar i Siily. Agri Sicily. Carthalo, an able and active officer,”~
immediately recovgentum recovered by ered Agrigentum, and Hasdrubal was sent over with 140 elephants, -hor tia. anro Tr to take the chief command of all the Carthaginian forces in the u~”’ island. But the Romans, with indomitable spirit, fitted out a new fleet of 220 ships in the space of three months; and the consuls of the following e6 Polvbius, I. 36. For the description of the were consuls when they were sent out to bl’ lg Carthaginian human sacrifices after a victory, off the garrison of Clypea, and we can hardly see Diodorus, XX. 65. extend the operations of Regulus in Africa to a 67 Polybius, I. 36. Niebuhr supposes that period of a year and a half. Regulus was defeated towards the end of the 68 Polybius, I.

37. consular year 499, so that the sea-fight off Cly-69 Diodorus, Fragm.

Hoeschel. XXIII. 14. pea took place early in the consulship of Cn. The language of these fragments must surely Cornelius and A. Atilius, that is, in the consular be very modern, for in this passage the writer year 500.

He thinks that Ser. Fulvius and M. says that along the whole coast, br vctpara Kas.EEmilius were already proconsuls when they r7l ai’oya Kai ri vavdyla EKELrro’ ri eDoya must obtained their victory, because it appears from here mean “the horses,” which is the common the Fasti Capitolini that they were proconsuls meaning of the word in modern Greek, but no when they obtained their triumph. But it is writer of the Augustan age would have so used si;c.re probable that they were both employed it. as proconsuls in Sicily for a whole year after 0 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXIII. 14.

their consulship, and thus that their triumph Polybius, I. 38. was delayed. Zonaras says expressly that they

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CeIu. XL.] THE ROMAN FLEETS WRECKED. 431 year, A. Atilius and Cn.

Cornelius, crossing over to Messana, and A. U. C. 493. A. C. there being joined by the remnant of the other fleet which had 261. escaped the storm, sailed along the northern coast of Sicily, took Cephalcedium, and although obliged by Carthalo to raise the siege of Drepanum, yet they besieged and took the important town of Panormus, obtained a sum of nearly 470 talents from those of the inhabitants who could afford to pay the stipulated ransom, and sold 13,000 of the poorer class as slaves. A garrison was left in Panormus, and several other smaller places revolted also to the Romans.

For this service Cn. Cornelius justly obtained a triumph.7’ But we are surprised to find the same honor bestowed on one of his successors, A.U.

501.A.C. 54. C. Sempronius Blhesus. For Sempronius and his colleague, Cn.

Another Roman fle.et i wrecked between Pa. Servilius Cmpio,72 having carried their fleet over to the coast of normu eand the consto Africa, made some descents and plundered the country near the taly. sea, but were able to effect nothing of importance; and after having been obliged to throw all their plunder overboard to enable their ships to float over the shallows of the Lesser Syrtis, they were finally, when sailing across from Panormus to the Lucanian coast, overtaken by another storm, which wrecked more than 150 of their ships. Upon this the Romans resolved to attempt the sea no more, and to keep only a fleet of sixty ships, to supply their armies with provisions, and to protect the coasts of Italy. The two following years were full of discouragement to the Romans. Their armies remained in Sicily, but did little to advance the conquest A. U.. C02. A.

C. of the island; because the terror of the elephants was so great ~‘2”

A. U. c. 503. that their generals were afraid to risk a general action.

Such a a bad statc of discistate of things is very injurious to the discipline of an army, and pline. we find that the service was so unpopular that 400 of the Roman horsemen,73 all of them men of birth and fortune, refused to obey the consul, C. Aurelius Cotta, when he ordered them to work at some fortifications, and were by him reported to the censors, who degraded them all from their rank, and deprived them of their franchise of voting. And on other occasions Cotta ordered two of his officers to be scourged publicly by his lictors for misconduct;74 one of them a kinsman of his own, and the other a military tribune, and a patrician of the noble name and house of the Valerii. Yet with the aid of some ships which he procured from Hiero, he attacked and reduced the island of Lipara, the largest of the Lipareans;75 and for this and the capture of Therma, which had risen up on the site of the ancient Himera, he obtained after all a triumph. In the spring of the third year, when C.

Atilius Regulus and L. Manlius Vulso were chosen each for the second time consuls, the Romans resolved A. U. C. 504. A. C. somewhat to extend their naval operations, and to build fifty new 250. ships.t6 But before the consuls left Rome, the tidings came of a most complete victory in Sicily, and of the total destruction of the dreaded Carthaginian elephants.

Resuming then all their former confidence, the Romans increased their fleet to two hundred ships,7 and sent out both consuls with two consular armies to form at once the siege of Lilybseum, the strongest and almost the only place still held by the Carthaginians in Sicily. This most brilliant and seasonable victory had been won by L. Caecilius Metellus, who had been consul in the preceding year; and when his Battle of Panormus colleague, C. Furius, had gone home at the end of the campaign, ye a.

vMteteill, btove Metellus78 was left in Sicily with his own army as proconsul. It tHairbele. Thet Car appears that Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian general, was taunted for take. 71 Fasti Capitolini. 76 Diodorus, Fragm.

Hoeschel. XXIII. 15. 72 Polybius, I. 39. Zonaras, VIII. 14. Oro-Zonaras, VIII. 14. Polybius, I. 39. siust IV. 9. I7 Polybius, I. 39. 73 Valerius Maximus, II. 9, ~ 7. Frontinus, 77 Polybius I. 41. Strategem. IV. 1, ~ 22.

78 Zonaras, VIII. 14. Polyb. 1. 40, 74 Frontinus, Strategem. IV. 1, ~ 30, 31. Val. ar_ TTt

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438 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XL his inactivity;79 and relying, besides, too much on the terror of his elephants, he crossed the mountains from Selinus, and descended into the plain of Panormus. Metellus kept close within the walls of the town, till Hasdrubal, not content with having laid waste the open country, advanced towards Panormus, and drew out his army in order of battle, as if in defiance. Then the proconsul”” keeping his regular infantry within one of the gates on the left of the enemy, so that by a timely sally he could attack them in flank, scattered his light troops in great numbers over the ground immediately in front of them, with orders, it hard pressed, to leap down into the ditch fcr refuge. Meantime all the idle hands in the town were employed in throwing down fresh supplies of missile weapons at the foot of the wall within the ditch, that the light troops might not exhaust their weapons. The elephants charged, drove the enemy before them, and advanced to the edge of the counterscarp, or outer side of the ditch. Here they were overwhelmed with missiles of all sizes; some fell into the ditch, and were there dispatched by thrusts of pikes; the rest turned about, and, becoming ungovernable, broke into the ranks of their own army, which was advancing behind them, and threw it into great confusion. Philinus,8’ who favored the Carthaginians, said that the Gauls in their army had indulged so freely in the wines which foreign traders sent to Sicily to tempt the soldiers to traffic with their plunder, as to be incapable of doing their duty. But there was no need of drunkenness to increase the disorder, when more than a hundred elephants, driven to fury by their wounds, were running wild amidst the Carthaginian ranks. Then Metellus sallied, attacked the enemy in flank, and completely defeated them. Ten elephants were taken with their drivers still mounted on them;82 the rest had thrown off their drivers, and the Romans knew not how to take them alive, till Mletellus made proclamation that any prisoner who should secure an elephant should be set at liberty. This induced the drivers to. exert, themselves, and in the end all the elephants were secured, and conveyed safely to Rome,83 to be exhibited in the conqueror’s triumph. And the device of an elephant, which is frequent on the coins of the Caecilian family, shows the lasting sense entertained by the Mietelli in aftertimes of the glory of their ancestor’s victory. The battle of Panormus was fought about midsummer, and Metellus returned to Rome with his army and his trophies, and triumphed on the qontconot of Metel-seventh of September.84 The captured elephants were exhibited in the circus maximus,85 and hunted up and down it by men armed onry with pointless spears, to teach the people not to be afraid of them; after vq’ic’ they were shot at with real weapons and destroyed. Metellus must have lived for nearly fifty years after his triumph,86 full of honors and glory. He was a second time chosen consul, he was appointed once master of the horse, and once dictator, and he was alsq created pontifex maximus, in which last office he acquired a new glory, by rescuing the sacred palladium from the temple of Vesta when it was on fire, at the risk of his life, and to the actual loss of his sight. For this act of piety he was allowed ever after to be drawn to the senate in a chariot, an extraordinary honor, as the chariot was accounted one of the marks of kingly state, and therefore not to be used by the citizen of a commonwealth. Thirteen noble Carthaginianst1 had been taken at Panormus, and had been led ” Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXIII. 15. Strategem. I. 7, 1. Pliny, Hist. Natur. VIII. w’ Polybius, I. 40. 16. 81 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXIII. 15. b’ Fasti Capitolini. 02 Polybius, I. 40.

Zonaras, VIII. 14. 5 Pliny, Histor. Natur. VIII. ~ 17. 83 They were carried across the straits on 8 He lived to the age of a hundred years rafts composed of a number of casks lashed to- (Pliny, Histor. Natur. VII.

~ 157), and we can gether, with a sort of flooring fastened together scarcely suppose him to have been much more upon them. The flooring or deck was fenced than fifty when he obtained his first consulship. in with high bulwarks, and covered over with For his other honors see Pliny, Hist.

Nat. VII. earth, so that the elephants were not aware ~ 139. He was appointed dictator just after the of their situation, and were conveyed over the Gaulish invasion of 529. See Fasti Capitolini. sea quietly.

Zonaras, VIII. 14. Frontinus, 87 Livy, Epitom. XIX. Zonara’s, V1III. 1.

Orosius, IV. 10.

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CIAr. XL.J SIEGE OF LILfYBEUM. 439 in the triumphal procession of the conqueror. The Carthaginians, wishing to recover these and others of their citizens, sent an em-tlageBto proposean OcX change of prisoners. bassy to Rome to propose an exchange of prisoners, and M. Regu-Reguls aes fccponies it. His magnahie-oun tus was allowed to accompany the ambassadors, upon his promise cotolun mRg…eturn to given to return with them to Carthage if the negotiation failed. Carthage anddeth. Pyrrhus had given a similar permission to his Roman prisoners, with the hope, no doubt, that in order to avoid returning to captivity, they would use their influence to procure the acceptance of his terms. But Regulus, thinking that the proposed exchange would be to the advantage of the Carthaginians, nobly dissuaded the senate from consenting to it; he himself would be ill-exchanged, he said, for a Carthaginian general in full health and strength, for the Carthaginians, he believed, had given him a secret poison,88 and he felt that he could not live long. The exchange was refused; Regulus returned to Carthage, and soon after died. His springs of life had been poisoned, not by the deliberate crime of the Carthaginians, but by mortification, shame, a pining after his country, and the common miseries of a prisoner’s condition, at a period when the courtesies of war were unknown. Afterwards the story prevailed, that the Carthaginians, in their disappointment, had put him to a death cf lingering torment; whilst the Carthaginians told a similar story of the cruel treatment of two noble Carthaginian prisoners89 by the wife and sons of Regulus, into whose hands they had been given as hostages, and Regulus’ natural death was made, according to the story, the pretext for wreaking their cruelty upon the unfortunate Carthaginians in their power. We may hope that these stories are both untrue; but even if the Carthaginians had exercised towards Regulus the full severity of the ancient laws of war, it ill became the Romans to complain of it, when their habitual: treatment, even of generous and magnanimous enemies, was such as we have seen it exemplified in the execution of the Samnite, C. Pontius. Never had the prospects of the Romans been fairer than when, in the autumn of the fifteenth year of the war, the consuls, C. Atilius and L. Man-Tle Ro..ms form the lius, began the siege of Lilybaeum. This place and Drepanum were siege of Lilybaum.

the only two-points in Sicily still retained by the Carthaginians; and here they concentrated all their efforts, destroying even Selinus,9~ their earliest conquest from the Greeks, and removing to Lilybmeum its inhabitants and its garrison. But from this time forward. to the very end of the war the victories of the Romans ceased, and during a period of eight successive years the Fasti record not a single triumph, a blank not to be paralleled in any other part of the Roman annals. Lilybaeum and Drepanum remained unconquered to the last, after the former had sustained a siege which for its length and the efforts made both by besiegers and besieged is not to be surpassed in history. The general difficulty of ascertaining precisely the position of the ancient towns and harbors is felt particuliwly when we attempt to fix the topog-Situation of Lilybaeum raphy of Lilybueum. It seems that the ancient city, covering eapl tys ot both sides more ground than the modern town of Marsala, must have occu-in the siege. pied the extreme point of Sicily, now called Cape Boeo; and to have had two sea fronts, one looking N. w. and the other s. w., while on the land side the wall ran across the point from sea to sea, facing eastwards, and forming the base of a triangle, of which the two sea fronts meeting at the point of Cape Boeo formed the sides. Polybius speaks of the harbors of Lilybueum, as if there were more than one; and as the ancient harbors were almost always basins closed by artificial moles, it is probable that there would be one at each’sea front of the town. But the principal harbor looked towards Africa, on the s. w. side of Lilybmeum, and its entrance was very narrow, because at a little distance9’ from the shore 88 A. Gellius, VI. 4. Zonaras, VIII. 15. 91 See Captain Smyth’s Hfydro.oraphical Re9 Diodorus, Fragm. de Virtut. et Vitiis, marks on the coast of Sicily, p. xxvi., and his XXIV. A. Gellius, II. 4. plan of the anchorages and shoals in the neigh; Il Diodorus, Fragmn. Hoeschel. XXIV.

1. torhood of Trapani, in his Sicilian Atlas.

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440 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XL there extends a line of shoals nearly rising in some places to the water’s edge, and running parallel to the coast, and the passages through these shoals, or round their extremity, were exceedingly narrow and intricate. The land side was fortified by a wall with towers at intervals,92 and covered by a ditch ninety feet wide and sixty deep. The garrison consisted at first of ten thousand regular soldiers besides the inhabitants, and the governor Himilcon was an able and active officer, equal to the need. The Romans employed in the siege two consular armies, and the seamen of a fleet of two hundred ships of war, and a great multitude of small craft; so that as the seamen worked regularly at the trenches, the besieging force may well have amounted to 110,000 men.93 The Romans attacked the land front of the town in form:94
they carried mounds across the ditch, and battered the towers in succession; whilst a mans totop up the en-formidable artillery covered their operations, and played upon the tr tot * harbor. defenders of the walls. On the sea side they endeavored to block up the harbor by sinkinking stone ships in the channels through the shoals, but a violent storm”9 raised such a sea that every thing was swept away, and the harbor still remained open. But material fortifications, however strong, must yied.d at last to a persevering nd nemy. The real strength of Lilybaeum lay in the courage and emipts of the Cartha-ability which the long war had at last enkindled among the Carginiarn naval officers to throw succors into the thaginian officers; so that now all was energy and wisdom, in place. complete contrast to the weakness and timidity of former generals.

Himilcon was defending Lilybmeum with the utmost ability and vigor; Adherbal, a man no less brave and able, had the command at Drepanum, and had with him a worthy associate in Carthalo; while Hannibal, one of his intimate friends, was sent from Carthage to carry succors to Himilcon. And here, for the first time, the Carthaginians displayed the conmbined skill and coolness of true seamen. Hannibal sailed from Carthage96 with fifty ships, and lay waitin g his time at the small zEgusan islands which lie to the north of Lilybeeum. At length the wind blew fresh from the north, setting full into the harbor’s mouth; Hannibal placed his soldiers on the decks ready for battle, hoisted every sail, and knowing the channels well, he ran down before the wind to the entrance between the shoals, dashed through the narrow passage, whilst the Romans in astonrshment and awkwardness did not put out a single ship to stop him, and amidst the,;eers and shouts of the whole garrison and people of Lilybaeum, who had crowded to the walls to watch the event, he landed ten thousand men in safety within the harbor. Other officers of single ships passed several times backwards and forwards with equal success,97 acquainting the Carthaginian government with Diodorus, Fragm. Hoesch. XXIV. 1. Po-would be glad to know the exact spot at which lybius, I. 42. these stones were weighed up; but Captain 93 The amount given by Diodorus, XXIV. 1. Smyth does not mention it. See his Survey of‘94 Diodorus, Fragin. Hoeschel.

XXIV. 1. Sicily, p. 234. Polybius, 1. 42. 9’ Polybius, I. 44. It is not easy to ascertain 95 Diodorus, Fragm. Iloeschel. XXIV. 1, whether Hannibal ran into the harbor on the copying, probably, from Philinus. Polybius N.

w. front of Lilyboeum, or into that on the ascribes the failure of the work to the depth of s. w. front. Probably it was the latter, so that the sea and the force of the current in the nar-he passed between Cape Boeo and the shoals row channels. But for more than amile off the which lie a little off the landcl and so ran on in land the water is shallow, nowhere excecding a direction parallel to the line of the coast till he four lathorts, and it is inconceivable that in came to the actual entrance between the moles fair weather such a depth of water could have in the harbor. been a serious impediment to a people like the n7 Polybius, I. 46, 4Z. There is a passage in Romans, when they had at their command the this description which, if we could discover the labor of a hundred thousand men. According line of the ancient walls of Lilybeum, might to Captain Smyth, some of the stones thrown in determine the position of the harbor.

The way by the Romans in this siege have been weighed to enter the harbor, says Polybius, was ” to apby an English wine merchant residing near proach it from the side towards Italy, and to Marsala, and have been used by him to build a bring the tower on the sea-shore in a line with very respectable mole opposite to his own es-all the towers of the wall looking towards Aft.blishment, nearly at what must have been the rica, so as to cover them all.” I. 47. The southeast corner of the ancient townl.

One “tower on the sea-shore” must mean the towey

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CluA. XL] SUFFERINGS OF THE ROMANS. 441 every particular of the siege, and confounding the Romans by their absolute command, as it seemed, of the winds and waves. But the courage of the Roman soldiers was as firm as ever. Immediately after Hannibal’s arrival, Himilcon made a general sally98 to destroy ally of he garrison. the works of the besiegers, but the Romans maintained their ground They btrn the Roman and he was iepulsed with loss. The land wall of the town was carried,99 but Himilcon, meanwhile, had raised a second wall within, parallel to the first; sothat when the first was taken the Romans had to begin all their approaches over again; and a second attempt“‘0 to burn the workls, being favored by a strong wind, was completely successful. All the Roman engines, their covered galleries, and towers, were burnt to ashes, and the consuls, in despair, turned the siege into a blockade. During the winter the sufferings of the Romans were very great. Thousands of men had perished in the course of the siege,~0’ and the loss of Sfferi f the Rseamen had been so great, as they, it seems, were chiefly employed mans during the winin the works, that the fleet was useless for want of hands to work ter. it.

Besides, the troops were ill-supplied with corn, and were obliged to subsist chiefly on meat;‘02 a change of diet most unwelcome and hurtful to the Romans, who were accustomed then as now to live almost wholly on their polenta and on vegetables. Fevers broke out amongst them, and were very fatal; but Hiero again came to their assistance, and supplied them with corn. But no progress was made with the siege, when the following summer brought the new consul, P. Claudius, to Sicily to take the command. P.

Claudius was the son of Appius Claudius, the famous censor, and he inherited, even in over measure, the pride and overbearing temper of A. U.

c. 5o5. A. C. 249. his family. He loudly reproached the former consuls for their inac-P. Cla:diu tales the tivity;l03 and complaining that the discipline of the army was gone Hmesals to attaik Ad. to ruin, he exercised the greatest severities on all under his corn-HisRobst.a.. andp mand, whether Romans or Italians. He renewed with equal ill-suc-.neness cess the attempt to block up the entrance to the harbor, and being impatient to distinguish himself, he no sooner received a reinforcement of 10,000 seamen from Rome than he resolved to put to sea and attack Adherbal, who was lying with the Carthaginian fleet in the harbor of Drepanum. It seems that his own officersl’ foreboded the failure of his attempt, but none could hope to move a Claudius from his purpose. The consul’s pride disdained alike the warnings of gods and men; as he was going to sail it was reported to him that the omens were unfavorable, for the sacred chickens refused to eat. “Then they shall drink,” was Claudius’

answer, and he ordered them immediately to be thrown into the sea.

Adherbal did not expect the attack;‘l5 but so great was his promptitude, that on the first sight of the enemy he manned all his ships with his sea-Bttle of Drepanum. men and soldiers, and keeping close under the land, stood out of brltiover tloe Roman the harbor while the enemy were actually entering it. Claudius, fleet under P.Claudius. confounded at this, ordered his ships to put about and stand out to sea again. Some ran foul of each other in doing this, but at last he got clear of the harbor nearest to the extreme point of Cape Boeo, but 102 KpEwflopoirs pv6ov sis r’v vWaov a6rrreo. whether the line of towers looking towards Af-Diodorus, Fragm.

Hoeschel. XXIV. 1. We rica followed the line of the coast, so that to may compare the distress of Caesar’s soldiers on bring them into a line with the ” tower on the the coast of Epirus, when, although they had sea side,”

a vessel must advance in a course meat in plenty, yet they wanted corn, and nonearly s. E., or whether they ran due eastward thing could make up to them for the loss of from Cape Boeo, in the direction of the modern their bread. Caesar, Bell. Civil. III. 40. Marsala, and therefore did not follow the line of 113 Diodorus, Fragm. de Virtut. et Vitiis, the coast, can hardly be ascertained without a fur-XXIV. Fratgm. Hoeschel. XXIV. 1.

Polybius, ther and more careful examination of the ground. I. 49. Y9

Polyhius, I. 45. 104 Cicero de Nat. Deor. II.. Vale. les. Maxim. 99

Didlorus, Fragnm. Hoeschel. XXIV. 1. I. 4, ~ 3. 100 olybius, I. 48. 105

Polybius, I. 49-51. Orosius, IV. 10. Diom10 Diodorus, Fragm. Hoeschel.

XXIV.‘1. dorus, Fragm. Hoeschel. XXIV. 1. Polvbius, I. 49.

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442 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XIA and formed his fleet under the land, with the ships’ heads turned to the sea. Adherbal, who had brought his own fleet safely into the open sea, now formed his line of battle and attacked the Romans. We hear no more of Duilius’ bridges for boarding; whether the Carthaginians had discovered some means of baffling them, or whether the practised soldiers now on board the Carthaginian ships rendered such a contrivance no longer formidable. Adherbal’s victory was complete; Claudius escaped with only thirty ships, and the rest, amounting to ninetythree, were taken; with a loss in men, although some escaped to land, of not fewer than 8000 killed and 20,000 prisoners. The conquerors did not lose a single ship, and the number of their killed and wounded was very inconsiderable. They followed up their victory with vigor.‘06 Thirty ships sailed to Panormus, Te Ctaginians fol and carried off from thence the Roman magazines of corn, which The Carthaginians follo.N uh their success were sent to supply the garrison of Lilybaum. Carthalo arrived ~vi vigor, with seventy ships from Carthage, and being reinforced by Adherbal, attacked the remains of the Roman fleet which had been drawn up on shore at Lilybreum under the protection of the army, carried off five ships and destroyed others. Meanwhile the other consul, L. Junius Pullus, had sailed from Rome with a large fleet of ships laden with corn and other supplies for the army at Lilybaeum, which he convoyed with a hundred and twenty ships of war. Being himself detained at Syracuse to wait for some of the ships of his convoy, and to collect corn from some of the districts in the interior of the island, he intrusted about four hundred of the corn-ships with some of his ships of war to his quaestors, and sent them on to Lilybmeum, where the want of corn was severely felt. Carthalo was lying at Heraclea, near Agrigentum, looking out for the Roman fleet; and when he heard of their approach he put out to sea to intercept them. The quaestors being in no condition to fight, fled to the: small bay of Phintias, not far from Ecnomus, the scene of the great naval battle seven years before, and there mooring their ships at the bottom of the bay, and mounting the artillery of the town on the cliffs on each side of them, they waited for the enemy’s attack. Carthalo was disappointed to find them so well prepared, and as their resistance was obstinate, he only carried off a few of the corn-ships, and returned to Heraclea, watching for the time when they should venture to continue their voyage. He had not waited long when his lookout ships10M announced that the rearTwo Roman fleets.re division of the Roman fleet under the consul in person had doubled totallywrecked.

Cape Pachynus, and was advancing along the southern coast of Sicily.

Wishing to meet these ships before they could join their other division in the bay of Phintias, he sailed in pursuit of them with all speed. The consul made for the shore near Camarina, dreading an open and rocky coast, and the danger of the southwest gales, less than an engagement with an enemy so superior. Carthalo, not choosing to attack him in this situation, stationed his fleet off a headland between Phintias and Camarina, and there lay, watching the movements of both the Roman divisions. Meanwhile it began to blow hard from the south, and there were signs of a coming storm which were not lost, on the experienced Carthaginian pilots, who urged Carthalo to run in time for shelter. With great exertions he got around Cape Pachynus, and there lay safely in smooth water. But the storm burst with all its fury on the Romans, and overwhelmed both their fleets with such utter destruction, that all the corn-ships, amounting to nearly 800, and 105 ships of war, were dashed to pieces. With two ships of war only did the unfortunate consul arrive at Lilybaeum. These accumulated disasters broke the resolution of the Romans. P. Claudius was recalled to Rome,‘s and required to name a dictator, that he P. Claudius is recalled, and a dictator appoint might himself be brought to trial for misconduct.

He named one ed. of his own clerks, M. Claudius Glicia, as if he delighted to express 3S Diodorus, Fragm. HIoeschel. XXIV. 1. 07’ Diodorus, Fragm.

Hoeschel. XXIV. 1 Folybius, I. 52, 53. P6lybius, I. 538, 54. 1o Livy, Epitom. XIX. Zonaras, VIII. 15.

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CHAr. XL.] TRIAL OF P. CLAUDIUS. 443 his scorn of his country when it no longer held him in honor. The senate obliged Glicia to resign his office immediately, and appointed by their own authority, as in ancient times, A.

Atilius Calatinus. Atilius named L. Metellus his master of horse, and they both set out without delay to take the command in Sicily. P. Claudius was tried before the people for his profane contempt of the auspices; but, according to the most probable account,‘09 the trial was A U. 505, 506. A.

broken off by a sudden storm, which if noticed by any one present c. 249, 24s. Tri.a oi obliged the comitia to separate. It was done, in all likelihood, on P’ Claudius an Understanding that the accused would by his own act satisfy the justice of the people; and the Romans at this period shrank from shedding noble blood by the hands of the executioner. We only know that three years afterwards P. Claudius was no longer alive; for his sister, being pressed by the crow i of spectators as she was going home from the circus, said aloud that she wished her brother could come to life, and command another fleet, that he might make the streets less crowded. For this speech she was impeached”’ by the zediles, and heavily fined: and this trial is recorded to have taken place three years after the defeat at Drepanum. L. Junius”’ was not more fortunate than his colleague, although he had on shore endeavored to make up for his disasters at sea, and had andofhicolleagu, stormed and occupied the mountain and town of Eryx, immediately J”nius” above Drepanum. He too was tried for having put to sea in defiance of the auspices, and finding his condemnation certain he killed himself. It was about this period of the contest that Hamilcar Barca,“2 the father of the great Hannibal, was appointed to command the Cartha-A. U. C. 07. A. C. ginian forces in Sicily. The Romans had resigned the sea to their a47. 1,m1l~ca Bares enemy, but their superiority by land was at present irresistible; the iolld iln Sicily. kIle terror of the elephants had vanished, and Sicily, in general, is not eystemofwarfare. a country peculiarly suited to the action of cavalry. It was Hamilcar’s object, which he pursued steadily to the end of his life, to form an infantry which should be a match for the Roman legions; and this could only be done by avoiding for the present all pitched battles, and at the same time carrying on an incessant warfare of posts, in which his soldiers would be constantly trained, and learn to feel confidence in their general and in each other. This was the method by which alone Pompey could have resisted Cmesar’s veterans; but Pompey, although he saw what was right, had not the firmness to persevere in it, and Pharsalia was the reward of his weakness. Hamilcar possessed patience equal to his ability, and his influence with the government enabled him to turn both to the best advantage. During six years, therefore, Hamilecar made Sicily a training school for the Carthaginian soldiers, as he afterwards made Spain. He first oc-A.U. C. 501-1. A. cupied the summit of a table-mountain near Panormus,“13 now C. 2s4-243. called Monte Pellegrino, rising immediately above the sea, with the table-mount tai…net precipitous cliffs on every side, and with a level surface of consid-and of Eyx. erable extent on the summit, and abundant springs of water. A steep descent led to a little cove where ships could be drawn upon the beach with safety;114 and here he kept a light fleet always at hand, with which he made repeated plundering descents on the coasts of Italy, while by land he was continually breaking out and making inroads into the territory of the Roman allies, even as far as the eastern coast of the island.‘15 Year after year the consuls were emlOD Valer. Maximus, VIII. 1, ~ 4. Rosolia’s bones were said to have been found SW0 A. Gellius, X. 6. in 1624, and where a church has since been I Polybius, I. 55.

Cicero, de Natur. Deor. built in her honor. II. 8.‘A 114 Apparently the small bay of Mondello, be. 12 Polybius, I. 56. 11amilcar seems to have tween Capo di Gallo and Molte Pellegrino. succeeded Carthalo. Zonaras, VIII. 16. 15 A fragment of Diodorous speaks of Hamil ”’ Polybius, I. 56.

Monte Pellegrino is fa-car as making war in the neighborhood of C&/ mous in modern times for the cave in which Sta. tana. Fragm. Hoeschel. XXIV..

2.

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444 HISTORY OF ROME. [CtIAP. XIL ployed against him, but they never could gain any pretence for claiming a triumph. During the latter part of this remarkable warfare Hamilcar recovered, and fixed his headquarters at the town of Eryx,‘16 although the summit of the mountain above him was occupied by the Romans, and a Roman army lay also below him, nominally engaged in blockading Drepanum. It appears that the Romans still continued also to blockade or rather to be encamped before Lilybaeum; but as the sea was perfectly open, their presence produced no effect on the garrison. We wish in vain to catch any glimpses of the internal state of Rome after Internal state ofRome. twenty years of such destructive warfare. If the varying numbers Depreociationoftheeop. of the MSS. of Livy’s epitomes can be trusted, the Roman citizens at. the end of the war were fewer by one-sixth part than they had been ten years before: the census sank from 297,797 to 251,222,111 and the decrease amongst the Latins and Italian allies must have been at least equal. We find also that the As towards the end of the war was reduced five-eighths of its original weight; from having weighed twelve ounces it was brought down to two;118 and although it is certain that this reduction was gradual, inasmuch as Ases of several intermediate weights are still in existence, yet Pliny may be so far correct that the As, having weighed a full pound, or nearly so, down to the beginning of the first Punic war, was reduced to two ounces before the end of it. No rise in the value of copper could possibly have justified such a reduction, which could only have been one of the ordinary tricks of distressed governments; it is clear also that the silver denarii coined a few years before must have vanished out of circulation, as otherwise, if the general payments of the government were made in silver, they would have gained nothing by the depreciation of the copper coinage. Besides, the constant employment of such immense armaments in Sicily must have drained Italy of its silver, as even the Sicilian states, and much more the foreign merchants, who always gathered in numbers where war was going on on a large scale, would have been unwilling to take the Roman copper money. And this great scarcity of money would perhaps explain the very low reported prices of provisions at Rome1‘9 on one or two occasions during the war, if those prices were indeed to be depended on; for if the government did not want to make purchases of corn for its armies, a plentiful harvest would create a great glut of it in the market: the actual war, and the general jealousy of the anc.ient world on that point, making it alike impossible to dispose of it by exportation. Twenty years before, the Roman people, we are told, had voted for engaging Heavy taxation. Foun-in the war with Carthage, while the senate sat hesitating; and the ctofi oifne af geeatwoa plunder of Sicily, in the first campaigns, made them doubtless resignation of lands. joice in their decision. At a later period, something was occasionally gained by the soldiers in the same way, but from the beginning of the siege of Lilybaeum it ceased altogether, and the warfare with Hamilcar was as unprofitable to the Roman armies as it was laborious and dangerous. Meanwhile the taxation must have been very heavy; for the building of such large fleets, though not to be measured by the cost of our ships of war, was still expensive, and armaments of a hundred thousand men, including soldiers and seamen together, such as were often sent out in the course of the war, must have greatly 16 Polybius, I. 58. Diodorus, Fragm. Hoe-understand the As before its depreciation, or schel. XXIV. 2. rather that the reckoning was made according 11 Livy, Epitom. XVIII. XIX. to the old standard and not the later and re118 Pliny, Hist. Nat. XXXIII. ~ 44. duced one. It is very strange, however, that in “1I Pliny, Hist. Natur. XVIII. ~ 17, quoting the very winter after this season of plenty, the Prom Varro, says that at the titne of L. Metellus’ Romans should have been in such great distress triumph, the modius or peck of corn sold for for corn at Lilybneum. See p.

441. The low a single As, and that the congius of wine, and prices at the time of Metellus’ triumph were twelve pounds of meat, were sold also at the not probably market prices, but merely the same price. Some accident must have occa-rate at which he made distributions of corn and sioned these prices, unless indeed we are to wine to the people in honor of his success.

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CnAP. XL.] INTERNAL STATE OF ROME. 442 drained the treasury. To all this was to be added, since the disasters of the Roman fleets, the ravage of the coast of Italy by the enemy; for Haimilcar, from his stronghold near Panormus, more than once put to sea with his ships of war, and wasted not only the Bruttian and Lucanian coasts, but the shores of the gulf of Salernum, and even of the bay of Naples as far as Cumae.‘20 On the other hand, private citizens were allowed to fit out the government ships of war on their own account,‘2 and some plunder was thus taken, but very insufficient to make up for the losses of the war. Two or three colonies were planted, such as Alsium and Fregenae on the Etruscan coast near the mouth of the Tiber, and Brundisium; but these were more for public objects, the two in Etruria being founded probably as outposts to check the descents of the Carthaginian fleet, than for the relief of the poorer citizens. An accidental notice in Pliny‘22 informs us that t. Metellus was in the course of his life appointed one of fifteen commissioners for granting out lands; a larger number of commissioners than we find on any other occasion named for that purpose. It would be important to fix the date of this appointment, but this can only be done by conjecture; it could scarcely, however, have been as early as the great assignation of lands made after the fourth Samnite war, for that was twenty years before Metellus obtained his first consulship; nor could it have been much later thsn the period of Hamilcar’s warfare in Sicily, for in the beginning of the last year“‘2 of the war he was already pontifex maximus, and in the year following he lost his sight in saving the palladium. The probability is, therefore, that an assignment of lands on the largest scale took place about the close of the war, either to the poorer citizens generally, or, as after the second Punic war, to the old soldiers who had undergone such hard and unprofitable service in Sicily. On the other side, Carthage maintained no large fleets since the Romans had laid aside theirs, purposely to avoid so great an expense.’ Hamil-Effects of the war oe car’s army could not have been very large, and the agriculture Carthage.

and internal trade of Africa suffered little or nothing from the war. But the contest was tedious and wearing, and in Sicily it was almost wholly defensive, which in itself is apt to sicken a nation of continuing it; nor were ordinary minds likely to enter into the views of Hamilcar, and await patiently the result of his system of creating an effective army. Besides, the unsoundness of the Carthaginian power in Africa was always felt in seasons of pressure; and at this very time hostilities‘24 were going on against some of the African people, which, however successful, were necessarily an expense and a distraction to the government. It seemed, therefore, that in spite of Hamilcar’s ability, the possession of Lilybmeum and Drepanum was held but by a thread, which a single unfortunate event might sever. The Roman government at last, in the twenty-fourth year of the war, roused itself for one more decisive effort.

But so exhausted was the A. U. C. 512. A. C. treasury, that a fleet could only be raised by a patriotic loan; that 4ove To he.nd.a.the is to say, one, two, or three wealthy persons, according to their fleet toea. means, advanced money to build a quinquereme, which was to be repaid to them in better times.‘25 In this way two hundred ships were constructed; and the Romans had an excellent model in one of the best sailing of the Carthaginian ships, which had been taken some years before off Lilybwaum.

The consuls of the year were C. Lutatius Catulus and A. Postumius Albinus.

Lutatius was the founder of the nobility of his house, and a man worthy to have been the ancestor of that Q. Catulus whose pure virtue bore the hardest of trials, the triumph of his own party. Postumius belonged to a family scarcely second to the Claudii in overbearing pride; and it was perhaps not without some suspicion of his 20 Polybius, I. 56.‘12 Diodorus, Fragm. de Virtut. et Vitiis, 121 Zonaras, VIII. 16. XXIV. Polybius, I. 73.

mn VII. ~ 139. ” Polybius, I. 59. “t Valerius Maximus, 1. 12 ~ 2.

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446 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XL following the example of P. Claudius at Drepanum, that the pontifex maximus,126 Metellus, forbade him to take any foreign command, because, as he was flamen of Mars, his religious duties required his constant presence at Rome. The fleet therefore was intrusted to C. Lutatius. The anxiety for the success of this enterprise was naturally great. On such Anxiety for its success. occasions omens and prophecies were never wanting; and the consul himself longed to discover his future fate, and wished to consult the famous lots kept in the temple of Fortune at Prseneste.‘2 But the senate forbade him, resolving that the consul of the Roman people should go forth with no auspices but those vouchsafed to him by the gods of Rome. Theleet sailed at an unusual season; for if Eutropius’ date of the battle be c. Lottiu Catulun ar-correct, the ships must have left the Tiber as early as the month rives with the fleet nt of February. Lutatius, accordingly, found that the Carthaginian Drepanum. ships had all gone back to Carthage‘28 for the winter, so that he occupied the harbor of Drepanum without opposition, and began vigorously to besiege the town. As Q. Valerius, the prmetor, accompanied him to Sicily, it is probable that two consular armies were employed, and so large a force obliged Hamilcar to remain quiet in Eryx, and made it certain that Drepanum must fall, unless relieved by a fleet from Carthage. Lutatius, expecting to be attacked by sea,‘29 was indefatigable in exercising his A Cnrthginian fleet in seamen both in rowing and in manceuvring, and he attended caresent verfromAfricato fully to their food and manner of living, that they might be in the best possible condition. The Carthaginians, on their part, equipped a fleet with all haste, and appointed Hanno to command it, an officer who had acquired distinction by his services against the Africans. But they had lately so neglected their navy that their seamen and soldiers on board were alike, for the most part, without experience; and the ships, besides, were heavily laden with provisions and other stores for the relief of Drepanum. Hanno first put in at the small island of Hiera,‘30 which lies some miles out to Catulus is anxious to sea off the western point of Sicily. His hope was to dash over Lterceptthemn. unperceived to the coast of Drepanum, to land his stores, and to take Hamilcar and his veterans on board from Eryx; which being effected, he would not fear to encounter the Romans. This Catulus was above all things anxious to hinder, and he resolved to bring on the action, if possible, before the enemy could communicate with Hamilcar. He had himself been badly wounded a little before in some skirmish with the garrison of Drepanum, and was unable to leave his bed; but Q. Valerius, the praetor, was ready to take the command, and kept earnestly watching for the enemy. It was the morning of the 10th of March;3”’ the Roman fleet having taken on Bttle of gu…f board picked soldiers from the legions, had sailed on the precedBtttle of A~gus e or ofi n the fegates. Grentvie-ing evening tothe island of., gusa, which lies between Hiera and.ory oef the en.ns. thle Sicilian coast, and had there spent the night. When day broke, the wind was blowing fresh from the west, and rolling a heavy sea in upon the land; the Carthaginians took advantage of it, hoisted their sails, and ran down before the wind towards Drepanum. The Roman fleet, notwithstanding the heavy sea and the -adverse wind, worked out to intercept them, and formed in line of battle with their heads to windward, cutting off the enemy’s passage. Then the Carthaginians lowered their masts and sails, and prepared of necessity to fight. But their heavy ships and raw seamen and soldiers were too unequal to the contest, and the fortune of the day was soon decided. Fifty ships were sunk, and seventy taken; the rest fled, and the wind, happily for them, shifting just in time, they again hoisted their sails, and escaped to Hiera. 126 Valerius Maxim. I. 1, 4.‘90 Polybius, I. 60. Zonaras, VIII. 17. Valer. 127 Cicero, de Divinat. II. 41. Maxim. II. 8, 2. 12s Polybius, I. 59. 231 Eutropius, II. Polybius, I. 60. m29 Polybius, I. 59, 60.

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CHAP. XL.] CONCLUSION. 447 To continue the war was now impossible, and orders were sent to Hamilcar to negotiate for peace.132 Lutatius, whose consulship was on the The Carthaginians sue point of expiring, readily received his overtures; but he required Tohrpe.ae. Tems sof that Hamilcar’s army should give up their arms, and all the Ro-the treaty man deserters who had fled to them, as the price for being allowed to return to Carthage. This demand was rejected by Hamilcar with indignation: “

Never,” he replied, “would he surrender to the Romans the arms which his country had given him to use against them;” and he declared that sooner than submit to such terms, he would defend Eryx to the last extremity.

Lutatius thought of Regulus, and of the vengeance which had punished his abuse of victory, and he withdrew his demand. It was then agreed, “that the Carthaginians should evacuate Sicily, and make no war upon Hiero or his allies; that they should release all Roman prisoners without ransom; and pay to the Romans in twenty years 2200 Euboic talents.” These were the preliminaries, which were subject to the approval of the Roman government; the senate and people would not, however, ratify them, but sent over ten commissioners with full powers to conclude a treaty.133 These plenipotentiaries required that the money to be paid should be increased to 3200 talents, and the term of years reduced to ten; and they insisted that the Carthaginians should also give up all the islands between Sicily and Italy. This clause was intended apparently to prevent their forming any establishments on the Liparman Islands, which, although not at present in their power, they might after the peace have attempted to reoccupy, as some of them were uninhabited, and none possibly had been as yet formally occupied by the Romans. Hamilcar would not break off the negotiation on such points as these. His views were now turned to Spain, a wide field of enterprise which Hamilr.varea.ta si. might amply compensate for the loss of Sicily. And he wished t-y. to see his country relieved from the burden of the war with Rome, and enabled to repair and consolidate its resources.

The peace, therefore, was concluded: Hamilcar evacuated Eryx,‘34 and his troops were embarked at Lilybaeum for Carthage. But their unseasonable and bloody rebellion which immediately followed, and which for more than three years involved-the Carthaginians in a war far more destructive than that with the Romans, deranged all his plans, and delayed probably for many years the renewal of the contest between the two rival nations. Such was the end of the first Punic war, in which, although the contest was long and wearisome, yet both parties fought as it were at arm’s length, and if we except the short expedition of Regulus, neither struck a blow at any vital part of his enemy. But the next struggle was sure to be of a more deadly character, to be fought, not so much for dominion as for life and death. In this new contest, the genius of Hamilcar and of his son de termined that in the mortal assault Carthage should anticipate her rival; and Italy for fifteen years was laid waste by a foreign invader. The state of the Roman supremacy in Italy, when it was exposed to this searching trial, the fate of the several Italian nations under the Roman dominion, and their dispositions, whether of attachment or of hatred, will form, therefore, the fit beginning of the succeeding portion of this history, which will embrace the third period of the Roman commonwealth; the period of its foreign conquests, before Rome, “-whom mighty kingdoms curtsied to, Like a forlorn and desperate castaway, Did shameful execution on herself.“‘s1 Polybius, I. 62. Diodorus, Fragm. Vatican. 1I9 Polybius, I.

63. XXIV. 4. Cornel. NLopos in Hamilcar, 1. 184 Polybius, I. 66.

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CHAPTER XLI,. STArE OF ITALY AFTER THE ROMAN CONQUEST-POLITICAL RELATIONS

Oi TIHE INHABITANTS, AND DIFFERENT TENURES OF LAND-LATIN COLONIES. Imc y7ap i-breX6vrTES,-IvaL vaVS Ka1’rrovrs Kat pey7,17 iXo0vatL of O;SdleVoL
brEEVEYKEiVt oUrF bcK boXn rTEa. rTt pEralIoXeS ro tdofopov airos, 0
rpo’riyovvro e v, ovir’ EK rapaaetevis iroXW) KpicraouS,vrcs, aaXad6

UIeVOt U’ 7a 7rXEdi, ,r6dpovv.-THUCYD. VII. 55. THE first and second Punic wars were separated by an interval of two-andtwenty years; and the first Punic war, as we have seen, had Roman dominion over lasted for a period of exactly the same duration. The end of Italy. the fourth Samnite war, and the final submission of the Samnites, Lucanians, and Bruttians, took place’ eight years before the beginning of the contest with Carthage; and the treaty which permanently settled the relations of Rome with the Etrurians was concluded eight years earlier still.2 Thus, when Hannibal, in the spring of the year 537, invaded Etruria, few living Etrurians had seen their country independent, except in their childhood or earliest youth; and all who were still in the vigor of manhood had been born since it had become the dependent ally of Rome. And when, after his victory at the lake Thrasymenus, he marched into Samnium, and encouraged the Samnites to take up arms once more in their old national quarrel, fifty-five years had passed since the Samnites, abandoned by Pyrrhus, and having tried fortune and hope to the uttermost, had submitted to the consul Sp.

Carvilius Maximus. So in Samnium, as well as in Etruria, the existing generation had grown up in peace and alliance with the Romans; and many a Samnite may have been enriched by the plunder of Sicily, and must have shared with the Romans in the memorable vicissitudes of the first Punic war; in the defeat of Drepanum, and the disastrous shipwrecks which followed it; in the, five years of incessant fighting with Hannibal’s father at Eryx and by Panormus; in the long and painful siege of Lilybmeum; in the brilliant victory of S. Metellus, and in the final triumph of C. Lutatius at the lEgates. It is true, that fifty-five years of constrained alliance had not extinguished the old feelings of hatred and rivalry; and the Samnites joined Hannibal, as a hundred and fifty years afterwards they joined the younger Marius, against the same enemy, the dominion of the Roman aristocracy. But that their rising was not universal,3 nor persisted in with more desperate resolution; that Etruria, with some doubtful exceptions,4 offered no encouragement to the Carthaginian general; that the fidelity of Picenum, of Umbria, of the Vestinians, Maarsians, Pelignians, Marrucinians, and Sabines never wavered; that the ” Latin name” remained true to a man; and that even in Campania the fidelity of Nola and of Cuma was as marked as the desertion of Capua;-all this is to be attributed mainly to the system of government which the Romans had established after their conquest of Italy, and which, so far as it can be traced, we must now proceed to examine in its complicated details. Not that we should by any means regard this system of government as a constitution founded upon justice, In 482 A. U. C. See chap. XXXVIII. p. 410. guished himself on the Roman side, in an acIn 474

A. U. c. See chap. XXXVIII. p. 401. tion fought by M. Minucius against Hannibal, a The Pentrian Samnites, that is to say, the in the year preceding the battle of Cannse. Samnnites on the north of the Matese, in whose Livy, XXII. 24. territory Asernia had formerly been, and who 4 Such as the alleged disaffection of the peostill held Bovianum, did not revolt from Rome pie of Arretium in the eleventh year of the secat all. See Livy, XXII. 61. A wealthy Sam-ond Punic war, which however displayed itself nite of Bovianum, Numerius Decimius, distin-in no overt acts. Livy, XXVII. 21, 24.

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CHAP. XLI.] CONDITION OF THE ALLIES. 449 and granting to all whom it embraced within its range the benefits of equal law. Its praise is rather, that it secured the Roman dominion, without adopting the extreme measures of tyranny; that its policy was admirable, its iniquity and oppression not intolerable. And so small a portion of justice has usually been dealt to the mass of mankind, that their highest hopes have commonly aspired to nothing more than an escape from extravagant tyranny. If life, and property, and female honor, and domestic, national, and “religious feelings, have not been constantly and capriciously invaded and outraged, lesser evils have been contentedly endured. Political servitude, a severe conscription, and a heavy taxation, habitual arrogance on the part of the governors, and occasional outbreaks of insolence and cruelty, have been considered no less incident to the condition of humanity, than the visitations of poverty, disease, and death.. The dominion of the Romans over the people of Italy, therefore, as it allowed the ordinary enjoyment of many rights, and conferred some positive advantages, was viewed by its subjects, notwithstanding its constant absoluteness and occasional tyranny, as a condition quite as likely, if overthrown, to be changed for thie worse as for the better. “The Lacedoemonians,” says Thucydides,5

“maintained their supremacy over their allies, by taking care that an oligarchy such as suited their own interests should be everywhere their allies’ form of govern-of the Roman acvment.” This also was one of the means by which the Romans ereignty. secured their dominion in Italy. They universally supported6 the aristocratical party, and thus made the principal inhabitants of every city willing instruments to uphold their sovereignty; a fact which alone would prove, if the point were otherwise doubtful, that the constitution of Rome itself, even since the passing of the Hortensian laws, was much more an aristocracy than a democracy. I have said that the Roman dominion in Italy allowed its subjects the ordinary enjoyment of many rights, and conferred on them some positive It advantages advantages. Moreover, it held out to them hopes more or less definite of rising to a higher political condition hereafter. These three points will give us the fair side of the Roman sovereignty, and they shall now be considered in order. I. According to the general practice of the ancient world, the relation between Rome and her Italian subjects was nominally that of alliance; and Ancient righta retained the very term alliance implies something of distinctness; for the under it. members of the same commonwealth cannot be each other’s allies. Thus it is understood at once, that most of the Italian states retained their municipal independence: they had their own magistrates; they could pass laws for their internal government; and their ancient’ laws of inheritance, and marriage, as well as their criminal law, were still preserved -in full force. But this applies only to single states, or to the separate parts of a nation; for every thing like a national council or diet was carefully prohibited. Arretium, Perusia, and Volaterre, might each legislate for themselves; but we hear no more of any general congress of the Lucumones, or chiefs of the whole Etruscan nation, at the temple of Voltumna. Nay, in some recorded instances,s and probably in many others not 5 I. 19, 76, 144. lating to marriage, till they obtained the WulY o In the second Punic war, Livy says, “unus Roman franchise after the great Italian war in velut morbus invaserat omnes Italiae civitates, the middle of the seventh century. A. Gellius, it plebes ab optimatibus disentirent; senatis IV. 4.

And their law of interest, being differRomanis faveret, plebs ad Pcenos rem traheret.”’ ent from that of Rome, enabled Roman creditXXIV. 2. So it was at Nola; Livy, XXIII. ors to evade their own law, by nominally trans15. But we have the same thing already exist-ferring their debts to a Latin, who, according to ing in the Samnite wars: where some of the his law, might exact a greater rate of interest Ausonian aristocracy betray their cities to the than was permitted at Rome. Livy, XXXV. 7 Romans, and the L-Lcanian aristocracy is at-8 As in the case of the Latins after the great tached to the Roman alliance while the popu-Latin war, Livy, VIII.

14; of the Hernicans, lar party favor the Samnites. See page 269 after their revolt in the second Samnite war; of this history. Livy, IX. 43; and of the Macedonians, after the 7 The Latins retained some peculiar laws re-battle of Pydna, Livy, XLV. 29. 29

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450 HISTORY OF ROME. [Oa&c. XLL recorded, the several states or districts of the same nation were so isolated from each other, that the citizens of one could neither intermarry with, nor inherit, nor purchase land, from those of another. Thus the allies were left in possession of their municipal independence; but all free national action amongst them was totally destroyed. II. Besides the benefits which the Roman dominion did not take away from its subjects, there were some others which it conferred upon them, Benefits conferred by it. and which they could not have enjoyed without it. The first and greatest of these was the extinction of internal war. From the Rubicon to the straits of Messana, there were no more of the intolerable miseries of a plundering border warfare, no more wasting of lands, driving away of cattle, burning of houses, and carrying off the inhabitants into slavery. Those cities which had survived the Roman conquest, were thenceforward secure from-destruction; their gods would be still worshipped in their old temples; their houses were no longer liable to be laid in ruins by a victorius enemy; their people would not be massacred, made slaves, or scattered over the face of the earth, and their very name and memory extinguished. The Americans feel truly that, whatever may be the inconveniences of their federal union, it has still the inestimable advantage of banishing war from the whole of their vast continent; and this blessing was conferred on ancient Italy by the Roman dominion, and was so far even more valuable, as wars between independent states in the ancient world were far more frequent than now, and produced a far greater amount of human misery. Again, the allies of Rome, while they escaped the worst miseries of war, were enabled by the great power of their confederacy to reap largely its advantages. In the plunder of Sicily the Italian allies and the Roman legions shared equally; and after the fourth Samnite war the Campanians received as their share of the spoil a large portion of the coast9 of the Gulf of Salerno, which had formerly belonged to the Samnites. Individuals also amongst the allied states might enjoy the benefits of an occupation of the Roman domain land; a privilege which would naturally bind many of the wealthiest families throughout Italy to the Roman interest, some already possessing it, and others hoping to obtain it. III. With these actual benefits the Roman dominion also held out hopes to its Hoes hld outby it. subjects of rising sooner or later to a higher political condition. The regular steps appear to have been, that an allied state should first receive the Roman franchise without the right of voting; and after the lapse of years these imperfect citizens gradually gained the full franchise, and were either formed into one or more new tribes, or were admitted into one of the tribes already existing. It is true that the first step in this process was generally an unwelcome one; because it involved, under ordinary circumstances, the forfeiture of all municipal independence, and the entire adoption of a foreign system of law. But there were cases in which it was stripped of these degradations, and became, as far as appears, a mere benefit: such seems to have been the condition of a large portion of the Campanians at the beginning of the second Punic war. Capua at: that time was, beyond all doubt, municipally independent: it had its own laws and magistrates, and its own domain lands:0 yet it is no less-certain that -the Campanian aristocracy, at any rate, were Roman citizens in all respects, except in the right of suffrage.” Other allied states might expect the same reward of their continued fidelity; and from this condition the advance to the full franchise was alwavs to be looked for in the course of tinle; and would, in all probability, have been the reward of Capua itself, had the Campanians devoted This appears from the statement, that the nites, we may conclude that the Campanians Roman colonies of Salernum and Buxentum, obtained it as their share of the spoil after the founded after the second Punic war, were set-third or fourth Samlnite war. tled on land which had belonged to Capua. lO Livy, XXIII. 3, foll. XXVIII. 46. Livy, XXXIV. 45.

As the coast of the Gulf of 1’ Livy, VIII. 14. See Niebuhr, Vol. II. note Salernum had originally belonged to the Sam-136.

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Caur. XLI.] CONDITION OF THE ALLIES. 45‘1 their whole strength to the support of Rome after the battle of Canne, instead of opening their gates to Hannibal. Living in such a state, with so much not taken from them, with so much given to them, and with the hope of one day obtaining so much more; and being further bound to their sovereigns by geographical posi-.ItO tion in all cases, and in most by something of an acknowledged affinity in race and language, the Roman allies had many inducements to acquiesce in their actual condition, and to regard themselves as united indissolubly with Rome, whether for better or for worse. But they had also much to bear; nor can we wonder if the descendants of C. Pontius, or Gellius Egnatius, or Stimius Statilius, or of the C’alavii of Capua, should have thought life intolerable under the absolute dominion of that people, against wtom their fathers had fought in equal rivalry. England, for many generations, upheld a system of domestic slavery in her colonies, while her own law so abhorred it, that any slave landed upon English ground became immediately a freeman. What the four seas were to England, that the line running round the city at the distance of a mile from the walls, was to Rome: it was the boundary between law and despotism. Within this precinct the sentences of the magistrates were the sentence of the law (legitima judicia); and their power was controlled by the sacred interposition of the tribunes. But without this limit all was absolute dominion, imperium: there the magistrate wielded the sword with full sovereignty; and judicial sentences were held to proceed not from the law, but from his personal power, so that their validity lasted in strictness no longer than the duration of his authority. Even Roman citizens had no present protection from this tyranny; they had only the resource of seeking for redress afterwards from the courts of Rome. But the allies had not even this relief, except in cases of extraordinary atrocity: for the imperium of the Roman magistrates conferred a plenitude of dominion over the persons and property of the subjects of Rome: any thing might be done on the plea of the service of the Roman people, or of maintaining the dignity of its officers; and the least opposition was held to be rebellion. Therefore, although barefaced robberies of private property were as yet mostly restrained by public opinion, which would not allow a magistrate to use his power for purposes of personal plunder; yet acts of insolence and cruelty, far more galling than any mere spoliations of property, were no doubt frequent from the very beginning of the Roman dominion over Italy, and arose partly out of the very position of the Roman officers with respect to the allies, and partly out of the inherent coarseness and arrogance of the Roman national character. Thus far we have considered the subjects or allies of Rome, in their relations to Rome generally, without noticing any differences in their condi-Differences in the contior. which distinguished them more or less from each other; in-ditto ofthe aie. deea, in that distant view of the sixth century of Rome, which is all that we are permitted to enjoy, these differences are scarcely perceptible; greatly-as they must have affected the internal state of the Italian people, yet in their recorded outward movements we see scarcely any thing but the equal working of the Roman power, which all were alike obliged to obey. The treaties which fixed the relationis of the several allied states with Rome, varied considerably in their conditions.

Camerinum, in Umbria, and Heraclea, on the Ionian Sea, are noticed as having treated with the Romans on almost equal terms;12 and Etruria, making peace at the very moment when Pyrrhus was advancing victoriously upon Rome, must surely have secured more favorable conditions than could be obtained by the exhausted Samnites and Lucanians, when in utter helplessness they submitted to their triumphant enemy. But we neither know what these differences were, nor, if we did, would the knowledge be of much importance, without much fuller 12 Livy, XXVIII. 46. Camnertcs, quum -quo ftedere cum RomLanis essent. On Heraclea, see Cicero pro Arch. c. 4.

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452 HISTORY OF ROME. [(CHAP. XL1 information on the other points than we can now ever recover. One great distinction, however, claims the attention of the most general history,-that which separated all the other Italian allies from those of the Latin name. When Mago brought to Carthage the tidings of the victory of Cannue, and told the council how, not only the Bruttians and Apulians, but even some of the Lucanians and Samnites, and above all, the great city of Capua itself, had in consequence of it joined the Carthaginians, the leader of the party opposed to Hannibal is represented as asking, whether a single people of the Latin name had revolted, or a single citizen of the thirtyfive tribes deserted to the enemy?13 Unfaithfulness to Rome was thought to be not more impossible in her very citizens than in her Latin allies: Samnium and Capua might revolt; but the fidelity of the Latin name was never to be shaken. What, then, were the ties which bound the two nations together so indissolubly?

In order to answer this question, we must first explain what was meant in the The Latin name. sixth century of Rome by the ” Latin name.” Now, if we remember that almost all the cities of ancient Latium were long since become Roman, so that scarcely any except Tibur and Prmeneste could any longer be included under the name of allies, we may wonderhow the Latin name could still be spoken of as so powerful, or where could be found those eighty-five thousand Latins, who were returned as able to bear arms in the census of the great Gaulish war.‘4 The answer is, that the Latin name was now extended far beyond its old geographIts extent. ical limits, and was represented by a multitude of flourishing cities scattered over the whole of Italy, from the frontier of Cisalpine Gaul to the southern extremity of Apulia. The people of the Latin name in the sixth century of Rome were not the Tiburtines merely and the Proenestines,‘5 but the inhabitants of Circeii and Ardea on the old coast of Latium, of Cora and Norba on the edge of the Volscian highlands, of Fregellke and Interamna in the valley of the Liris, of Sutrium and Nepete under the Ciminian hills, of Cales, Suessa Aurunca, and Saticula on the edge of the Campanian plain, of Alba in the country of the Marsians, of Esernia and Beneventum in the heart of Samnium, of Narnia and Spoletum in Umbria, of Luceria and Venusia in or close to the frontiers of Apulia, of Hadria and Firmum in Picenum, and finally of Brundisium, far to the south, where the Adriatic opens into the Ionian Sea, and of Ariminum on the frontiers of the Cisalpine Gauls, where the Apennines first leave the shores of the Adriatic, and make room for the vast plain of northern Italy.‘6 All these states, with others which I have not noticed, formed the Latin name in the sixth century; not that they were Latins in their origin, or connected with the cities of the old Latium: on the contrary, they were by extraction Romans; they were colonies founded by the Roman people, and consisting of Roman citizens: but the Roman government had resolved, that in their political relations they should be considered, not as Romans, but as Latins; and the Roman settlers, in consideration of the advantages which they enjoyed as colonists, were content to descend politically to a lower condition than that which they had received as their birthright. The states of the Latin name, whether cities of old Latium or Roman colonies, Prvileges belongingto all enjoyed their own laws and municipal government, like the it. other allies; and all were, like the other allies, subject to the sovereign dominion of the Romans. They were also so much regarded as foreigners, that they could not buy or inherit land from Roman citizens; nor had they generally the right of intermarriage with Romans. But they had two peculiar privileges: one, that any Latin who left behind him a son in his own city, to perpetuate his family there, might remove to Rome, and acquire the Roman franchise; the other, that every person who had held any magistracy or distinguished LI:,ivv, XXIII. 12,s Livy, XXVII. 9, 10.

Savigny, on the JuF 4 Polybius, II. 24 Latii, in the Philological Museum.

I. 56.

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~CHAr. XLI., THE LATIN COLONIES. 453 office in a Latin state, might become at once a Roman citizen. So that in this manner all the principal families in the Latin cities had a definite prospect assured to them of arriving in time at the rights of citizens of Rome. Yet it is remarkable that when twelve of the Latin colonies, in the middle ol the second Punic war, renounced the sovereignty of Rome, the Itrelati toR consuls, in their remonstrance with them, are represented as appealing, not to their peculiar political privileges, but to their sense of duty and gratitude towards their mother-country. “They were originally Romans, settled on lands conquered by the Roman arms for the very purpose of rearing sons to do their country service; and whatever duties children owed to their parents, were owed by them to the commonwealth of Rome.“‘7 And as no age made a son, according to the Roman law, independent of his father, but entire obedience was ever due to him, without any respect of the greater or less benefits which the son might have received from his kindness, so the Romans thought that the allegiance of their colonies was not to depend on a sense of the advantages which their connection with Rome gave to them, but was a plain matter of duty. When they called on the Campanians not to desert them after the battle of Cannee, they appealed to their gratitude for the boon of political or social privileges: ” TWVe gave you,” they said, “the enjoyment of your own laws, and to a great proportion of your people we communicated the rights of our own franchise.’” How different is this language from the simple admonition of the Latin colonies, ” that they were the children of Rome, and should render to their parent a child’s obedience!” Yet the sense of filial duty might have been quickened in the Latin colonies by a recollection of what they owed to Rome, and how much of their Condition of the Latin political existence depended on her protection. The colonists of colonies.

Beneventum and AEsernia, of Luceria and Spoletum, were not the only inhabitants of those cities: they had not been sent as settlers into a wilderness, where every work of man around them was to be their own creation. According to the Roman notions of a colony, they had been sent to occupy cities already built and inhabited, to enter into the possession of lands which man’s labor had long since made prodtctive. They were to be the masters and citizens of their new city and its territory, while the old inhabitants were to be their subjects, and strangers, as it were, in their own land. And as long as they remained true to their duties as Roman colonies, the power of Rome would maintain their dominion: but if Rome no longer upheld them, there was no slight danger of their being expelled by the old population of the colony, aided, as the latter would soon be, by their countrymen in the neighboring cities; and Beneventumn and _Esernia would then no longer be Latin colonies, but return to their old condition of independent states of Samnium. It may be asked, however, why the Romans refused to their own colonies the private rights, at any rate, of Roman citizens; and as in some instances colonies of Roman citizens were founded, why was not this made the general rule, and why were the great majority of the colonies obliged to content themselves with the name and franchise of Latins? I do not believe that any existing ancient writer has/ answered this question directly; and the uncertain history of the early times of Rome embarrasses our conjectures. But it is probable that colonies founded during the equal alliance between Rome and Latium, such as Norba and Ardea, were properly Latin cities, to which the Latins sent colonists equally with the Romans; so that they did not belong exclusively to Rome. It is more difficult to understand why Sutrium and Nepete, colonies planted on the Etrurian frontier, and at a period when the old Latin alliance was virtually at an end, still received the Latin franchise, and not the Roman; and why Cales, and the other colonies founded after the great Latin war, were colonies, not of the Roman, but Livy, XXVII. 9.‘BLivy, XMIL~ 5.

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454 HISTORY OF ROME. [CiAP. XL1 of the Latin name. We may suppose, perhaps, that in all these settlements the population of the colony was mixed from the beginning-colonists from Latin cities, some of which were always friendly to Rome, being amongst the original settlers; and after the Latin war, we may conceive that there were many Latins, whom, either as a reward or a precaution, the Romans may have been glad to establish in a colony out of their own country. We may understand also, that as the Roman colonists were often taken, not only from the class of poorer citizens, but also from the freedmen, the government would be glad to get them off from the roll of Roman citizens, which could only be done by their consenting to join a Latin colony, in consideration of its providing them with a grant of land. And generally, as the country of a Greek or a Roman was essentially a single city, it was natural that men leaving that city, and settling in another at a distance, should, in the common course of things, cease to be citizens of their old country. In the Greek colonies the connection was broken off altogether: but, as this would have defeated the very purpose for which Rome founded hers, it was not entirely severed, but exchanged for the relation of subject and sovereign, or, in the Roman language, of child and parent. Besides the allies and the Latin name, there was yet a third class of Roman subjects, those who were Romans in their private rights, but not Subjects of Rome enjoying the lower fran. in their political, who possessed the rights of intermarriage, and hlse of the city under the jnrisdietio” ofp-e. of inheritance, or purchase of land by mancipation, connubium and commercium, but had no vote in the comitia, and were ineligible to all public offices of authority. This condition, although it was often a preparatory step to receiving the full Roman franchise, was yet in itself considered far inferior to that of the allies or of the Latin name,.inasmuch as it implied the complete forfeiture of all a nation’s laws and institutions, and a complete adoption of the laws and customs of Rome. It was a natural consequence of this state, that it did away all municipal government. A people thus become subject to Rome had properly no magistrates of its own; such public officers as it still retained had merely an honorary office: they were to superintend the sacrifices, preside at festivals, and direct other matters of pageantry and ceremonial. The administration of justice was vested in the hands of a praefect sent from Rome; and districts so governed were properly called prmfectures. These praefectures were probably very numerous all over Italy; for the magistrates of the cities had no jurisdiction beyond the city walls; and even in the territories of the colonies themselves the country district was called a prefecture, although in these cases the proefect was not sent from Rome, but appointed by the colony. It is possible that this may explain what otherwise seems so puzzling, the application of the terms praefectura and municipium to the same places, and that too in cases where municipium undoubtedly expresses the existence of a municipal government, as at Cumae, Fundi, and Formiae.19 In these instances the towns were municipia, and had their own magistrates; but the country around them may have been a prwefecture; and the priefect was not appointed, as in the colonies, by the government of what may be called its local capital, but was sent immediately from Rome.

This intermixture of different kinds of government, within the same geographiioustenuresofland. cal limits, may lead us to consider another point of some importance: the variety of the tenures of land which the Roman conquest had introduced into every part of Italy; so that in each separate country, for instance in Etruria, Umbria, Samnium, or Lucania, as there were great differences of political condition, so also was there the greatest diversity in the tenures of property. There might be found everywhere three sorts of land, lst, Land held by the old inhabitants, whether it had never been forfeited, or, if forfeited at the period of their conquest, formally restored to them by the Roman 19 Festus, v.

Prnefecturm.

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CHAP. XLI.] TENURES OF LAND. 455 government; 2dly, Land held by a Roman or Latin colony, by grant from the Roman people; and 3dly, Land still held by the Roman people as domain, whether it was let or farmed by the government, or was in the occupation of individuals, whether Romans, Latins, or Italians of other nations. We have no Domesdaybook of Italy remaining, which would enable us to determine the relative proportion of these three kinds of land; but the amount of the third kind, or domain land, was absolutely enormous; for the Roman people retained their full right of property, as we have seen before, in all land occupied (possessus) by individuals; whereas a large proportion of the manors which Domesdaybook records as belonging to the crown, when granted, as they soon were, to private persons, ceased to be domain, and became to all intents and purposes private property. Thus in England, and in other countries of modern Europe, the domain lands have become gradually less and less extensive; but as at Rome nothing could alienate them except a regular assignation, and as various circumstances from time to time added to their amount, on the whole their extent went on increasing rather than diminishing; and we are astonished at the vast proportion of domain land belonging to the commonwealth, even at the end of the seventh century, all of which would have come within the disposal of a, general agrarian law.

The later effects of these enormous tracts of domain land are well known, and will require our notice hereafter. But from the beginning they Effot of the domain must have greatly injured the spirit and life of Italy. The whole land on the state of spring of social and civil activity in -the ancient world lay in I its cities; and domain land and cities could not exist together. Towns, therefore, which had been taken at the first conquest of the country, and their inhabitants massacred or sold for slaves, becoming in many instances the domain of the conqueror, were condemned to perpetual desolation. Their old population was dispersed or destroyed; and the wealthy Roman, who became the occupant of their territory, allowed a large part of it perhaps to lie waste, and settled the slaves whom he employed in cultivating the remainder, rather in farm buildings or workhouses in the country, than in the houses of the old town. Thus a scanty and scattered slave population succeeded in the place of those numerous free cities, which, small as they were, yet well answered the great object of civil society, in bringing out at once the faculties and affections of mankind; while by the frequent interposition of these large and blank districts, the free towns which were left became more isolated, and their resources diminished, because they too had lost a part of their territory to the conqueror. The larger cities had in many instances become Latin colonies, and were lost to their old nation: and thus, when the Samnites joined Hannibal, it was like the insurrection of a peasantry, where all the fortresses are in possession of the enemy.

Beneventum and.iEserina, the principal cities remaining in Samnium, were Latin colonies, or in other words Roman garrisons; the Samnite towns were all inconsiderable; and as soon as Hannibal’s protection was withdrawn, the first Roman army which invaded the country recovered them almost without resistance. Many questions might be asked concerning the state of Italy, to which the above sketch contains no answer. Many, indeed, I could not answer satisfactorily; and the discussion of doubtful points of law or antiquities, where the.reatest men have been unable to arrive at any certain conclusions, seems to me to encumber history, rather than illustrate it. Some points I have forborne to notice at present, because their bearing on the general course of the story is not yet manifest. I have wished, not to write an essay on the condition of ancient Italy in the abstract, but to connect my notices of it with the history of the period, that this chapter may catch some portion of the interest attached to Hannibal’s great invasion; whilst it may render the narrative of that invasion more intelligible, and may enable me to pursue it with fewer interruptions. Meantime we must follow the course of events abroad and at home, througl the two-and-twenty years which still separate us from the beginning of the ex, pedition of Hannibal.

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CHAPTER XLII. G;ENERAL HISTORY FROM THE FIRST TO THE SECOND PUNIC

\WAR-ILLYRIAN WAR-GREAT GAULISH INVASION-MUSTER OF THE FORCES OF ALL

ITALYDEFEAT OF THE GAULS-ROMAN INVASIONS OF CISALPINE GAUL-M. MARCELLUS

AND C. FLAMINIUS. A. U. C. 513 TO 535. A. C. 241 TO 219. ALREADY at the end of the first Punic war some eminent Romans were in their EminentRomans.of this full manhood, whose names are enduringly associated with the period. events of the second. Q. Fabius Maximus, the great dictator, “who by his caution saved the Roman state,” was consul eight years after the conclusion of the treaty with Carthage; Q. Fulvius Flaccus, the conqueror and butcher of Capua, obtained his first consulship four years earlier, in the year 517; and M. Claudius Marcellus, the conqueror of Syracuse, must have been thirty years old at the end of the first Punic war, had already won honors by his personal prowess as a soldier in Sicily, and had held the office of curule aedile. The earliest Roman historians, C. Fabius Pictor, and L. Cincius Alimentus, must have been at this time old enough to retain some impression of things around them; Nievius, the earliest known Roman poet, had served in the last war in Sicily; Livius Andronicus, the oldest dramatist, brought his first piece upon the stage in the very year after the conclusion of the war.

Hannibal himA.U.C. 53..c.24. self, whose genius was to be the mover and controller of the future invasion of Italy, was already born; but he was as yet an innocent child, only six years old, playing in his father’s house at Carthage. The transition from war to peace, which we remember five or six and twenty StteofRome afterthe years ago, after a contest of very nearly the same length as the wa. first Punic war, brought rather an increase than an abatement of embarrassment. A great stimulant was withdrawn; but a great burden remained to be borne; and the end is not yet manifest. But no sooner do the marks of battles pass away from the fields where they were fought, than the effects even of an exhausting war were shaken off in ancient times by nations not yet fallen into decline; because wars in those days were not maintained at the expense of posterity. The sole debt which Rome had contracted had been incurred for the building of her last fleet; and this could be paid off immediately by the Carthaginian contributions. Population repairs its losses with wonderful rapidity; and to the dominions which the Romans had possessed before the war, was now added the greatest portion of Sicily. Q. Lutatius, the brother and successor of the consuw who had won the decisive victory of the AEgates, passed the whole summer of his consulship in Sicily after the conclusion of the peace, and settled the future condition of the Roman part of the island.’ Sicily was the earliest Roman province; and in it was first exhibited that remarkable system of provincial government, which was gradually extended over so large a part of the ancient world. The peculiar character of this system did not consist in the absolute dominion of the Roman magistrates; for their power was no less uncontrolled in Italy itself, everywhere beyond the immediate precinct of Rome, than it could be in the provinces. But the nations of Italy, like the allies of Lacedmemon, aided the sovereign state with their arms, and paid no tribute; while the provinces were disarmed, like the allies of Athens, and served their sovereign with their money, and not with their men. Hence the perpetual difference in Roman law between land in Italy and land in the provinces; that the former’Zonaras, VIII. 17.

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CHAP. XLIi.J THE PUBLICANI. 457 might be held by individuals as their freehold, and was liable to no payments of tithe or land tax; while the property of the latter was vested solely in the Roman people. When we hear that a Sicilian state had its forfeited lands restored to it,2 this means only that they were restored subjected to the sovereign rights of the conqueror; and therefore they were still burdened with the payment of tithes, as an acknowledgment that they were not held by their possessors in full property. No sooner was the provincial system established in Sicily, than the moneyed men of Rome, the famous Publicani, began to flock over to the Sources of wealth open. island to farm the tithes and the various other revenues which ed to thefar era of tho came in from a province to the Roman people. Then were opened r all those sources of acquiring wealth at the expense of the provincials, which rich or influential Roman citizens drained so unsparingly. Many Sicilian states were hindered from buying land in each other’s territories;’ but the Roman could purchase everywhere; and competition being thus restricted, he was enabled to purchase at greater advantage. If any state, or any individual in it, had sustained losses which disabled them from paying what they owed to the government at the appointed time, a wealthy Roman was always ready to lend them money; and as the Roman law of interest did not extend to the:rovinces, he lent it on his own terms, and availed himself of the necessities of the borrower to the utmost. Even in common commercial transactions the Roman merchant in the provinces came into the market with great advantages. If he wished to -buy, a provincial would often be afraid to bid against him: if he sold at a high price, the provincial dealers in the same commodity would be afraid to undersell him. The money thus gained by Roman citizens in the provinces gave them influence at Rome; and this again made their friendship or enmity of importance to the Roman provincial governors. Thus they were armed not only with the general authority of the Roman name, but with the direct countenance and support of the Roman magistrates; and those magistrates held the lives and properties of the provincials at their absolute disposal. While the wealthy had these means afforded them of becoming more wealthy, the end of a long war seemed a fit season for rewarding the faith-rwoew tribes, raising ful services of some Af the poorer citizens, and of the subjects of #o….nb.ebr to thirtythe commonwealth I have already noticed the large assignation of lands which tooK place somewhere about this period, and for the direction of which no fewer than fifteen commissioners were appointed.

And the censors of the year 513 created two new tribes of Roman citizens, the Quirinian and the Velinian,4 containing, as the names show, the Sabines of the neighborhood of Cures and of the valley of the Velinus, and the people possibly of some other towns and districts also. These new tribes raised the whole number of tribes to thirtyfive: and none were ever added afterwards. Nearly sixty years had elapsed since the last creation of two tribes, the Aniensian and Terentine, between the second and third Samnite wars. But before another period of sixty years could elapse, Hannibal’s invasion had so changed the state of Italy and of the Roman people, that the old practice was never again repeated: and thus the Roman tribes remained fixed at the number of thirtyfive, rather from accident, as I believe, than from deliberate design. But the remedy in human affairs is seldom commensurate with the evil. Neither the assignation of lands by the fifteen commissioners, nor Detruction of agrioulthe grant of the full Roman franchise to a portion of the Sabine turlat iborera supplied people, could compensate to Italy for the wide destruction of the by s.o.es. poorest classes of free citizens occasioned by the naval losses of the first Punic war. “The Romans,” says Polybius,’

“lost in battle and by shipwreck, in the course of the war, no fewer than 700 quinqueremes.” They lost besides, at one’ Cicero in Verrem, III. 6. 4

Livy, Epitom. XIX.’ Cicero in Verrein, II. 50, III. 40. 5 I. 63.

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458 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLII time, nearly 800 corn ships in the great storm which wrecked the two fleets o! L. Junius, on the south coast of Sicily, in the year 505. Now the seamen, as is well known, were taken exclusively from the poorest class of freemen; from those who, in many instances no doubt, like the corresponding class in Greece, lived only by their labor; who in Etruria, especially, and elsewhere, resembled the Coloni, so well known from the law books of the latter empire, a class of men humble and dependent, but not slaves. As the war drained this class more and more, it had at the same time supplied the slave market beyond all former example. Nor did the supply cease with the war against Carthage; for several years afterwards we read of expeditions against the Ligurians, Sardinians, oi Corsicans:6 and every expedition brought off slaves as a part of its plunder. ” Sardinians for sale”’ became a proverb to express any thing of the least possible value; and the Corsicans were a race so brutish, according to the judgment of the slave dealers of the Augustan age, that they would fetch only the smallest price in the market.8 These poor wretches therefore would not pay the expense of carrying them td the distant markets of Greece or Asia: they must be sold at home; and their purchasers would commonly be the holders of large estates of domain land, who employed them there in the place of free laborers. Thus began that general use of slave labor in Italy, which in the course of a hundred years had in some places almost extirpated the free population. At the end of the summer of 513, the consul Q. Lutatius returned home from War with the Falis-the settlement of Sicily: but before he went out of office in the eans. following spring, both he and his colleague, A. Manlius, were obliged to employ the whole force of the commonwealth against an enemy scarcely thirty miles distant from the walls of Rome. These enemies were the Faliscans, or people of Falerii:9 a name which has not been heard of in Roman history for more than a hundred and fifty years; when it is said that the four new tribes created after the recovery of Rome from the Gauls, in the year 368, were composed partly out of the inhabitants of the territory of Falerii. What could tempt a single city to brave the power of Rome at a period when there was no foreign war to make a diversion in its favor, we know not, and can scarcely conjecture. But the Romans thought the example so dangerous, that they exerted their whole force to put an immediate stop to it; and in six days the Faliscans, after a desperate resistance, were obliged to submit at discretion. They were forced to surrender all their arms, horses, and movable property, and half of their domain land: their city was destroyed; and they were removed to another spot less strongly situated; a condition similar to that which had been imposed on the people of Volsinii, four-and-twenty years earlier. For this conquest both consuls obtained a triumph. With the exception of this six days’ war, the three years which followed the Employments during treaty with Carthage were to Rome a period of perfect peace. three years of peace. While the Carthaginians in Africa were struggling for their existence against their revolted subjects and their rebellious mercenary soldiers, the Roman annals record nothing but friendly embassies, works of internal improvement, new festivals, and new kinds of amusement. Ambassadors were sent to Ptolemy Euergetes, king of Egypt, to offer him the aid of Rome against the king of Syria;“0 but it was declined with thanks, as the war was already at an end. A carriage road was made to the top of the Aventine by the aediles, L. and M.

Publicius, with the fines which they had recovered from persons convicted of pasturing their cattle illegally on the domains of the commonwealth: with another portion of these same fines was defrayed the expense of the games of 8 Zonaras, VIII. 18. ” Strabo, V. p. 224. Sardi venales. Aurelius Victor, de Vir. Ill. Livy, Epitom. XIX. Zonaras, VIII. 18. c. LVII.

attributes the origin of this saying to Polybius, I. 65. Eutropius, II.

28. Orosius, the time of the conquest of Sardinia by Tiberius IV. 11.

Gracchus. “o AEutropius, III. 1.

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CHAP. XLIL.] NEW DISPUTES. 459 Flora,’ now for the first time instituted, and celebrated from henceforward every year, beginning on the 28th of April: and in 514, as I have already mentioned, the first regular drama was exhibited at Rome by L. Livius Andronicus.‘2 It may be noticed as a curious coincidence, that the next year, 515, witnessed the birth of Q.

Ennius, who may be called the father of the existing poetry of the Latin language. This season of peace appears to have infused a spirit of unwonted moderation and honesty into the Roman councils. Some Italian ves-Friendy relations with sels carrying corn to the African rebels were interrupted by the Carthage. Carthaginians, and the crews thrown into prison.‘3 The Romans sent an er.mbassy to require their liberation, which the Carthaginians granted; and this ready compliance so gratified the Roman government, that they released without ransom all the Carthaginian prisoners still left in their hands, permitted supplies of all kinds to be carried to Africa for the use of the Carthaginians, while they strictly forbade all traffic with the rebels; and even, it is said, allowed the Carthaginians to levy soldiers in their dominions; that is, to enlist, as they had been wont in times long past, Lucanian, or Samnite, or Bruttian mercenaries. Nor was this all; for when the mercenaries in Sardinia revolted from Carthage, and called in the Romans to their aid, their request was not listened to; and when the people of Utica, dreading the vengeance of the Carthaginians, offered to give themselves up to Rome, the Romans rejected this offer also. But when Hamilcar’s genius had delivered his country from its extreme peril, when the rebel mercenaries were destroyed, and when Utica and Beginning of new din. the other revolted towns and people of Africa had been obliged puto.to submit at discretion, when perhaps also rumors were already abroad of Hamil. car’s intended expedition to Spain, then the jealousy of the Romans seems to have revived, and their whole conduct towards Carthage underwent a total change. The mercenaries of Sardinia, after having revolted from Carthage, and applied at that time vainly for the aid of the Romans, were overpowered by the natives and obliged to fly from the island.‘4 They took refuge in Italy, and had probably never ceased soliciting the Roman government to espouse their quarrel, and take possession of Sardinia for themselves. But now the Romans began to listen to them; and it was resolved to send over a fleet to Sardinia to restore them. The Carthaginians meanwhile, having recovered their dominion in Africa, were proceeding to reduce the revolted islands; and an armament was prepared to attack Sardinia. Then the Romans complained that the Carthaginians, while employing their fleet to prevent the African rebels from receiving supplies by sea, had committed many outrages upon Roman subjects sailing to and from Africa; that this had manifested their hostile feeling towards Rome; and that the armament, prepared ostensibly for the recovery of Sardinia, was intended to attack Italy. Accordingly, the senate and people passed a resolution for war with Carthage. The Carthaginians, utterly unable to engage in a new contest, offered any terms for the sake of peace; and the Romans not only obliged them to make a formal cession of Sardinia, but required them to pay 1200 talents, in addition to the sum stipulated by the last treaty, as a compensation for the injuries sustained by the Roman merchants, and a penalty for their meditated aggression.5 Hamilcar advised compliance with these demands; but he hastened, no doubt, with tenfold eagerness, the preparations for his expedition to Spain. When all was ready, the general performed a solemn sacrifice, to propitiate the gods for the success of his enterprise.‘6 The omens were declared favorable; Hamilcar had poured the libation on the victim, which H n’ Ovid, Fast. V. 279-294. Festus, v. Pub-14 Polybius, I.

29. licius. 15 Polybius, I. 88. Appian de Reb. Punic. c. 5. ” Cicero, Tusc. Quaest. I. 1. Brut. 18.‘6 Polybius, III. 11., Polybius, I. 83.

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460 HISTORY OF ROME. [CCP. XLIL was duly offered on the altar, when on a sudden he desired all his officers, and the ministers of the sacrifice, to step aside to a little distance, and then called his son Hannibal.

Hannibal, a boy of nine years old, went up to his father, and Hamilcar asked him kindly, if he would like to go with him to the war. The boy eagerly caught at the offer, and with a child’s earnestness implored his father to take him. Then Hamilcar took him by the hand, and led him up to the altar, and bade him, if he wished to follow his father, lay his hand upon the sacrifice, and swear ” that he would never be the friend of the Romans.” Hannibal swore, and never to his latest hour forgot his vow. He went forth devoted to his country’s gods as the appointed enemy and destroyer of their enemies; and the thought of his high calling dwelt ever on his mind, directing and coneentrating the spirit and enthusiasm of his youth, and mingling with it the forecast, the great purposes, and the deep and unwavering resolution of the maturest manhood. This story of his solemn vow was told by Hannibal himself many years afterRene.we, disputes with wards to Antiochus, king of Syria; but, at the time, it was heard by no other ears than his father’s; and when he sailed with Hamilcar to Spain, none knew that he went with any feelings beyond the common light-hearted curiosity of a child. But the Romans viewed Hamilcar’s expedition with alarm, and were probably well aware that he would brook his country’s humiliation only so long as he was unable to avenge it. More than once they renewed their complaints that the Carthaginians annoyed their merchants at sea, and that they were intriguing with the Sardinians, to excite them to revolt from Rome. A fresh sum of money was paid by Carthage; but the complaints still continued; and the Romans, for the second time it is said, passed a resolution for A. U. c. 519. A. C. war.

Embassy after embassy was sent to Rome by the Cartha235. ginian government, to deprecate a renewal of the contest;17 and at last ten of the principal members of the council of elders were appointed ambassadors, if perhaps their rank and dignity might at once move the Romans to pity, and inspire confidence in the peaceful intentions of Carthage. Still the Romans were for a long time inexorable; till Hanno, the youngest of the ambassadors, and, if he was, as is probable, the famous opponent of Hannibal, himself sincerely inclined to maintain the peace, remonstrated with the senate plainly and boldly. ” If you will not have peace with us,”

he said, “then give us back Sardinia and Sicily; for we yielded them to you, not to purchase a brief truce, but your lasting friendship.“‘8 Then the Romans were persuaded; and the treaty of peace was again renewed and ratified. This was in the year of Rome 519, in the consulship of T.

Manlius Torquatus and C. Atilius Bulbus. It was, apparently, to assure the Carthaginians that the peace thus ratified was to be sincere and lasting, that the old ceremony of shutting the gates of Janus was now performed;19
for the first time, it was said, since the reign of King Numa; for the last time also until they were closed by Augustus after his conquest of Egypt. But in this very year, as well as for several years before and after it, the RoA. U. C. 521. A. C. man arms found employment against barbarian enemies in Sardinia, 233. Divers wars. in Corsica, in Liguria, and in Cisalpine Gaul.20 These wars served to exercise the citizens in arms, to furnish the consuls with an occasion of triumphs, and to bring fresh multitudes of slaves into Italy. Q. Fabius Maximus, afterwards so famous, was consul for the first time in 521, and obtained a triumph for his victories over the Ligurians.2’ Twelve years after the end of the first Punic war, and six after the solemn confirmation of the treaty, a Roman army was sent, for the first time, across the Ionian 7 Zonaras, VIII. 18. Orosius, IV. 12. Maximus, VI. 3, ~ 3; Eutropius, III. 3. For ttnL s8 Dion Cassius, Fragm. Ursin. CL. war in Liguria, Dion Cassius, Fragm. Peiresc. ” Eutropius, III. 3. Orosius, IV. 12. XLV.; and for that in Cisalpine Gaul, Polybius, 20 For the wars in Corsica and Sardinia, see II. 21. Zonaras, VIII. 28; Livy, Epit. XX.; Valerius l1 Plutarch, Fabius, 2.

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CHAr. XLII.] THE ILLYRIANS. 461 gulf. More than forty years had now passed since the death of The Romans cross th Pyrrhus; his family in the second generation had become ex-Adlriatic. tinct; and the Epirots were governing themselves without a king. But their power had sunk almost to nothing; and the only name now dreaded in those parts was that of the Illyrians. The various tribes of the Illyrian nation occupied the whole eastern coast of the Adriatic, from its most northern extremity to its mouth. Their extent inland can scarcely be determined: in the later Roman geography, the name of Illyricum was applied to the whole country between Macedonia and the Danube,22 while the early Greek writers distinguished the Illyrians from the Peeonians or Pannonians, and appear to have confined the Illyrian name to the tract of country more or less narrow where the streams flow into the Adriatic; and placed other nations, the Triballians, Poeonians, and Thracians, in the country beyond the watershed, where the streams run northward to the Danube. In truth, all these nations were probably connected with each other; and their language, if it belonged, as seems likely, to the Sclavonic branch of the great Indo-Germanic family, was not wholly foreign either to the Hellenic, spoken on their southern borders, or to the various dialects of Italy, from which they are so little distant on their western frontier. The Illyrians on the Adriatic coast, and on the western border of Upper Macedonia,’ were held by the Greeks in great respect for their courage; but, like most barbarians, they loved to maintain themselves by plunder instead of labor; and the innumerable harbors along their coast tempted them to plunder by sea rather than by land. Seventy years before this, they were already formidable to all who navigated the Adriatic: but now, since the fall of the Epirot power, the coast to the southward lay unprotected; and their vessels made frequent plundering descents, not only on Epirus, but even on the western shores of Peloponnesus, on Elis, and on Messenia. This brought them more in the way of the merchant ships of Italy, which were engaged in traffic with Greece and the East; and complaints of the Illyrian piracies had been frequently brought before the Roman government. A. U. C. 525. A. C. These were for a time neglected, but at last they became more 229. numerous and pressing; and they were further supported by the people of the island of Issa, a Greek colony, who, being attacked by the Illyrians, sent to implore the protection of the Romans. The senate accordingly sent, as was its custom, three ambassadors to Illyria, to learn the state of the Illyrian power,23
and to find out what Ambassadors sent,onfriends the Romans would be likely to have within the country lyria put to death. itself, if they should have occasion to declare war. The ambassadors found the king of the Illyrians dead; and his widow, Teuta, as the Illyrian law permitted, was governing in the name of her step-son, Pinnes, who was still a child. At the moment when the ambassadors arrived, the Illyrian queen was besieging Issa, and was highly elated with the recent success of her fleet, which had returned loaded with spoil from a plundering expedition against Epirus. She was in no mood therefore to brook the peremptory language always used by Roman ambassadors; and one of the three so offended her, that she sent one of her ships after them on their return home, to seize them. Two of them were killed, and the third was brought to the queen, and thrown into prison.24

The Romans, without delay, declared war against the Illyrians, and both consuls, Cn. Fulvius Centumalus and L. Postumius Albinus, were sent across the Adriatic with a fleet and army such as had rarely withththeIuyss been seen in those parts. As usual, they found allies within the country; Deme2

Zonaras, VIII. 19. Appian, Illyr. I. Pliny, XXXIV. 11, says that statues (tripedanece) 23 Polybius, II. 8. Dion, Fraom. Ursin. CLI. were raised by the republic to P. Junius and Zonaras, VIII. 19. Titus Coruncancius, who were killed by Teuta, ” Polybius, II. 8, gives Cains and Lucius queen of the Illyrians. ” Hoc a republica tribnu Voruncancius as the names of the ambassadors. solebat injuria ceesis.”

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462 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIL trius, a Greek of the island of Pharos, who was holding Corcyra for the Illyrian queen, surrendered it at once to the Roman fleet,25 and guided the consuls in all their subsequent operations. A Roman fleet of two hundred quinqueremes, and a regular consular army of 22,000 men, were, as opposed to the piratical barks and robber soldiery of Queen Teuta, like a giant amongst pigmies. Town after town, and tribe after tribe, yielded to them, and Teuta, having taken refuge in Rhizon, which was almost her last remaining stronghold, was glad to obtain peace on the conqueror’s terms. The greater part of her former dominion was bestowed on Demetrius; she was to pay a fixed tribute to the Romans, and was never to allow more than two of her ships together, and these not armed vessels, to sail to the south of the port of Lissus, the last place in the Illyrian dominions.“26 In the course of this short war, not only Corcyra, but Apollonia also, and Epidamnus, submitted to the Romans at discretion, and received their liberty, as was afterwards the fate of all Greece, as a gift from the Roman people. The Illyrian war having been settled rather by the Roman fleet than by the Roman embassies into army, Cn. Fabius, who had commanded the fleet, returned home Greece.

alone to obtain a triumph; while his colleague, L. Postumius, was left, with a small force at Corcyra. He sent ambassadors to the iEtolimns and the Archman league, to explain the grounds on which the Romans had crossed the sea, and to read the treaty which had been concluded with the Illyrians. As all the Greeks had suffered from or dreaded the Illyrian piracies, the Roman ambassadors had met with a most friendly reception, and were welcomed as the benefactors of Greece. Soon afterwards the Romans sent other embassies to Corinth and to Athens, with no other object, so far as appears, than of introducing themselves to some of the most illustrious states of the Greek name, which many of the Romans had already learnt to admire. At Corinth they received the solemn thanks of the Corinthians for the services they had rendered to the Greek nation; and the Romans were allowed to take part in the Isthmian games, as if they were acknowledged to have some connection with the Hellenian race.27 The Athenians, it is said, went further, granted to the Roman people the honorary franchise of Athenian citizens, and admitted them to the Eleusinian mysteries. That this honor was not despised by the highest Roman nobility may be concluded from the fact, that A. Manlius Torquatus, who was censor in 506, and consul in 509 and 512, has the surname of Atticus, in the Capitoline Fasti, a name borne, so far as we know, by no other member of his family, either before or afterwards. Nearly about the time when the consuls, Cn. Fulvius and L. Postumius, left Rome on their expedition to Illyria, the Romans must have heard the tidings of the death of Hamilcar. From his first landing in Spain he had advanced with uninterrupted success, training his army in this constant warfare with the’bravest of barbarians, and gaining fresh popularity and influence both at home and with his soldiers, by his free distribution of his spoils; spoils not to be estimated by the common poverty of barbarians, but rich in silver and gold, the produce of the still abundant mines of Spain. In the ninth year of his command he had reached the Tagus, when he was killed in a battle with the Vettonians, a tribe who dwelt between the Tagus and the Douro, and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Hasdrubal.28 The work which Hamilcar had begun by the sword, was continued and consoliHasdrubal’s progress dated by the policy of his successor.

Hasdrubal was one of those kin Spain. Measres men who are especially fitted to exercise an ascendency over the to chleclkih R.minds of barbarians;29 his personal appearance was engaging; he understood the habits and feelings of the Spaniards, and spared no pains to ” Polybius, II. 11. 29 Polybius, II. 1. Zonaras, VIII. 19. No. 5 Polybias, II. 12.

pos, Diodor. Eel. lib. XXV.’ Polybius, II. 12. Zonaras, VIII. 19. 29

Polybius, II. 13, 36. Appian, VI. 4, 6.

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CAPr. XLII.] THREATENED INVASION. 463 accommodate himself to them. Thus the native princes, far and noear, sought his friendship, and were eager to become the allies of Carthage; A. U C. 526. A. C. while by the foundation of New Carthage, or Carthagena, a place 228. possessing one of the best harbors in the Mediterranean, and naturally strong on the land side, he was enabled to command the heart of Spain, from a position close at hand, instead of beginning his operations from a distant corner of the country, like Gades. The Romans observed his progress with no small alarm; but their dread of an approaching Gaulish invasion made them unwilling to provoke a war at this moment with Carthage. They endeavored therefore to secure themselves by treaty, and concluded a convention with Hasdrubal, by which he bound himself not to extend his conquests to the north of the Iberus or Ebro 30 By this stipulation the Romans hoped to keep him at a sufficient distance, not from Italy only, but from their old allies, the people of Massalia, some of whose colonies had been founded south of the Pyrenees, along the coast of what is now Catalonia. Nor were they abandoning to him the whole country southward of the Iberus; for they had lately formed an alliance with the Saguntines, a people partly of Greek, or at any rate not of Spanish extraction, who lived near the coast between the Iberus and the Sucro, and who, in their fear of the Carthaginian power, had put themselves under the protection of Rome.31 The treaty concluded with Hamilcar, at the end of the first Punic war, had contained a clause forbidding either of the contracting parties to molest the allies of the other;“2 Saguntum, therefore, was safe from attack; and the Romans hoped, no doubt, to secure their footing in Spain through its means, and from thence, so soon as the Gaulish war was over, to sap the newly formed dominion of Carthage, by offering their aid to all the native tribes who might wish to escape from it. But these hopes and fears for their dominion in Spain were overpowered at present by a nearer anxiety, the dread of a Gaulish invasion. The Threatenings of on inCisalpine Gauls had for the last ten years resumed their old hos-vasion by the Gauh l tile dispositions, which before that time had slumbered for nearly fortyfive years, since their great defeat by the consul Q. IEmilius Papus, two years before the invasion of Pyrrhus.33 In that interval they had seen two Roman colonies founded on the land which had formerly been theirs; Sena, immediately after the war,34 and Ariminum, about fourteen years afterwards, or four years before the beginning of the war with Carthage.

But neither of these occupations of what they must have considered their own land, provoked them, as it seems, to attack the Romans; and they remained quiet through the whole of the first Punic war, when the Romans, engaged year after year in Sicily, would have resisted them at the greatest disadvantage. But three years after the peace with Carthage, we find the Roman consuls invading the territory of the Gauls. It is difficult to believe that these renewed hostilities were wholly owing, as Polybius says,35 to the innate restlessness of the Gaulish character, and to the rising up of a new generation who had forgotten the defeats of their fathers. But this new generation must have been ready for war at least ten years earlier; and their impatience would scarcely have waited so long only to break forth at last when the favorable opportunity was over. The Cisalpine Gauls called in their brethren from beyond the Alps to aid them; but these new-comers excited jealousies; and on one occa-Preparations of the sion there was a regular battle fought between them and the Cis-Gault for ar. alpine Gauls, with such slaughter on both sides as relieved the Romans from all present danger.” But afterwards, in the year 521, when Fabius Maximus was for the first time consul, an agrarian law was proposed and carried by C. Flaa0 Polybius, II. 13. III. 27, 9. s A. U. C. 472. Chap. XXXVII. p. 890 of 3’ Polybius, III. 15, 21, 30. this history.’ Polybius, III. 21. 24 Polybius, II. 19. 95 II. 21. s6 Polybius, II. 21.

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464 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIL minius, one of the tribunes, for a general assignation of the land between Ariminum and Sena,37 a measure which not only ejected, perhaps, many of the old Gaulish inhabitants, who had still been suffered to enjoy their former possessions, but seemed an earnest of the intention of the Romans to extirpate the Gauls altoA. U. C.

528. A. C. gether from every portion of Gaulish territory which the fortune 226. of war might hereafter give them. Accordingly, there was now a unanimous cry amongst the Gauls for war, and for obtaining the aid of their Transalpine countrymen. Their preparations were made with unusual patience; there was no premature movement; but they endeavored to provide themselves with money, of which they had none of their own, by selling various commodities, wool and hides, and, above all, captive slaves, to merchants who would pay for them in gold and silver.28 Thus they were enabled to engage the services of a large body of Transalpine Gauls, whom they tempted besides with the prospect of a permanent settlement in Italy; whilst the Romans, knowing full well that the storm was gathering, yet unwilling to provoke it by commencing hostilities, were kept year after year in a state of anxious preparation, till the invasion at last, as it seems, actually burst upon them unexpectedly. In this state of suspense, superstitious terrors possessed men’s minds readily. The Capitol was struck with lightning, an unwonted prodigy; and Superstitious terrors b C_, the Sibylline books were consulted in consequence. The books said, “

When the lightning shall strike the Capitol and the temple of Apollo, then must thou, O Roman, beware of the Gauls.“39 And another prophecy said that a time should come “when the race of the Greeks and the race of the Gauls should occupy the Forum of Rome.” It is characteristic of superstition to transfer to its idols that mockery of truth which itself so delights in, and to believe that they care not for wickedness, if it be done to promote their service. A man and woman of the Gaulish race, with a Greek man and woman, were buried alive in the Forum Boarium, that the prophecy might be fulfilled in word, and might, so the Romans hoped, be proved to be in spirit a lie.39 It was the spring of the year 529, and the consuls chosen were L. ~Emilius Papus and C. Atilius Regulus, son of that Regulus who had been so Raevolt of Sardini. famous in the first Punic war. The Transalpine Gauls had not yet crossed the Alps; and, on the other hand, tidings arrived that the Sardinians, impatient of the dominion of a Roman preetor, to which they had now, for the first time, been made regularly subject, had broken out into a general revolt. Accordingly, C. Regulus, with one consular army, was sent over to Sardinia to put down the revolt.40 He was already arrived in his province, when the Transalpine Gauls, on the Preparations for the first melting of the snows, crossed the Alps; and the Cisalpine great tGaulsh war. Gauls, joining them with all their own disposable forces, the invasion of Italy was no longer delayed. The alarm was given at Rome; and then was seen with what vast power and energy the Roman government could meet an emergency of real danger. The whole free population of Italy, of an age to bear arms, was reported to Rome in the returns of the census of the several A. U. c. 527. A. C. states; and in a contest with barbarians such as the Gauls, every 227. state and every man could be depended on; for no evil could equal the victory of such an enemy. Thus knowing the whole extent of its resources, the government prepared accordingly its active armies, and its armies of reserve, while every important city was duly provisioned, and provided with S7 Cicero, De Senectute, c. 4 places this law when Fabius was consul along with M’.

Pomin 526, when Q. Fabius, consul iterum, C. Fla-ponius Matho. minio quoad potuit, restitit, agrum Picentem 38 Zonaras, VIII. 19. et Gallicum viritim contra senatus auctoritatem Y9 See the fragments of Dion, published by dividenti. But from Polybius, II. 21, it ap-Mai, p. 185.

pears that the law was carried into effect by MN. 99 Orosius, IV. 13.

Plutarch, Marcell. 3. ZoLepidus, who was consul in 523; so that it naras, VIII. 19. must have been passed in the previous year, 40 Polybius, II. 23.

Zonaras, VIII. 10

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CuAP. XLII.] POSITION OF THE ROMAN ARMIES. 465 large magazines of arms, and the system being never forgotten of securing allies to act on the enemy’s flank or rear, the friendship of the Cenomanians and Venetians was timely obtained, whose country, lying along the lower, part of the course of the Po, and on the shores of the Adriatic, was in direct communication with the Romans at Ariminum, and commanded the whole eastern frontier of the hostile Gauls, so as to threaten their territory with invasion, as soon as their army should begin to march southwards. In fact, this desertion of the Gaulish cause by the Cenomanians and Venetians crippled the invasion at the very outset; for a large force was kept at home to cover the frontier, and the invading army, according to Polybius, did not finally amount to more than 50,000 foot, and 20,000 cavalry and war-chariots.4’ Two roads led from Cisalpine Gaul into the heart of Italy; the’one by Ariminum and Umbria, the other by Etruria. Of these the former was Position of the Roman covered by a consular army of 27,000 men, by the disposable armies. force of the Umbrians, amounting to 20,000 men, and by the Cenomanian and Venetian auxiliaries, who are computed at 20,000 men more. The Umbrians and the barbarian auxiliaries were stationed on the edge of the Gaulish frontier, westward, probably, of Sarsina, to be ready to pour down upon the Boian country, near the modern towns of Forli and Faenza; while the consul, L. _Emilius, was posted at some point in the direction of Ariminum: but whether he was actually at Ariminum to defend the frontier, or in some position nearer to Rome, from whence he might more easily cooperate with the army covering Etruria, the narrative of Polybius does not state clearly.42 On the other line, which led through Etruria, there lay an army of 54,000 Sabines and Etruscans, commanded by a Roman prgetor; whilst Rome itself was covered by a reserve army of more than 50,000, under the command, we may suppose, of the preotor of the city. These forces were actually called out and organized; but the returns of the population capable of bearing arms, and which, in case of need, might recruit and support the troops already in the field, presented, it is said, a sum total, inclusive of the soldiers really enlisted, of no fewer than 750,000.43 The invaders seem to have conducted their march skilfully; for passing between the Roman armies, they descended from the Apennines A. U. C. 29. A. c. into the valley of the upper Arno, followed it down nearly to u., and are doArretium, and from thence advanced towards Clusium, in the very feated. heart of Etruria, after having ravaged the whole country near the line of their march without any opposition. When the Roman prsetor became aware that the enemy were between him and Rome, he put his army in motion to pursue them. The Gauls met him and defeated him, but were prevented from completing the destruction of his army by the sudden appearance of the consul L. iEmilius, who had also hastened to the scene of action, when he heard that the enemy were in Etruria.44 Then the Gauls, enriched, but at the same time encumbered, with their plunder, and having been entirely successful hitherto, determined to carry off their prisoners and spoil in safety to their own country, and afterwards, when their army was again fit for action, to repeat their invasion. As the Roman armies were between them and the Apennines, they resolved to retreat by the coast road into Liguria, and descended into the valley of the Ombrone with that object. But when they had reached the coast, and were marching northwards towards the mouth of the Arno, they suddenly encountered a new enemy. The consul, C. Regulus, having been recalled from Sardinia, had just landed at Pisa, and was now on his march by the very same coast road towards Rome.45 The Gauls were thus placed between two enemies; for L. zEmilius was hanging on 41 II. 23. 1E’ o”;‘AvvZftas, D)tdrrove iXwov OtaiVpOwv, iaTE7aXcy 4 AE6KXOV AlyiXtov… ZfarlarEtTaP WS

1Tr’ el rv’IraXiav. A’ lY v o. 4e Polybius, II. 25, 26. 4 Polybius, II.

24. Eutropius, III. 5. Po-‘6 Polybius, II. 27. lybius, after giving this enormous muster, adds, 30

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466 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. LXI their rear; and they were obliged to engage both the consular armies at once. The battle was long and bloody, and the Romans lost one of their consuls, C. Regulus; but in the end they won a complete victory, and the Gaulish army was almost destroyed.46

Immediately after the victory, L. AEmilius hastened to invade the Gaulish territory by the same road which the Gauls had intended to make their line of retreat; and as the Gauls were mostly on their other frontier, to oppose the Umbrians and their barbarian allies, the consul overran the country without resistance. He returned to Rome and triumphed; and the golden chains worn’by the Gauls round their necks and arms were hung up as a splendid monument of the victory in the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter.47 This great success encouraged the Romans to press the war against the Gauls Conquest of the Boians with the utmost vigor, ithehe hope of completing their destruction, and Insubrians. and effecting the conquest of their country. Trusting to their treaty with Hasdrubal, they thought they should have time to deal with their nearer enemies, before they turned their attention seriously to the affairs of Spain. Accordingly for the next three years both consuls were each year employed in Cisalpine Gaul, and with such success, that the Boian and Insubrian nations, whose country stretched from the Apennines to the Alps across the whole plain of Northern Italy, and extended from the neighborhood of Ariminum westward as far as the Ticinus, were obliged one after the other to submit at discretion.48 The details of battles fought with barbarians are rarely worth recording; but among the consuls of these three years were men whose personal fame attracts our notice; and some of the circumstances connected with their military proceedings will lead us naturally to a subject of far deeper interest, the political state of Rome on the eve of the second Punic war. The consuls of the year 530, who succeeded L. Jmilius and C.

Regulus, had both of them been consuls before, and censors; and in their censorship they had been colleagues, as now in their second consulship.

These were T. Manlius Torquatus and Q. Fulvius Flaceus, men of kindred character; Manlius possessing all the traditional sternness of his race, -and Q.:Falvius, in his unyielding and unrelenting. nature, rivalling the proudest patricians bin Rome. They were made consuls together, in the hope that the Gau’lish war, under their conduct, would be brought to a speedy conclusion; but in this they disappointed their countrymen; for although they reduced the Boians to submission, yet they could do nothing against the Insubrians, owing to an unusually rainy season, which, filling all the streams, made the country about the Po impracticable, and occasioned epiA.

U. C. 30. A. c. demic diseases among the soldiers’.4 The consuls were apparent224. ly required to abdicate before the end of the year; for the old and blind L. -Metellus, the pontifex maximus, was named dictator, to hold the comitia; and by him were elected the consuls of the following year, C. Flaminius Nepos and P. Furius Philus. Flaminius, as we have seen, had been tribune ten years before, and had then carried an agrarian law for a general assignation of the land forFlaminius defeats the Gauls and triumphs in merly conquered from the Gauls near Ariminum. It was perhaps spite of the senate. from some expectation that, if he made fresh conquests, he would propose a similar assignation of: them, that the people elected him consul: the senate, on the other hand, used their utmost endeavors to make his consulship wholly inactive. He was already in the field with his colleagues, and had entered the enemy’s country, when the senate sent orders to both the consuls to return instantly to Rome.,’

Dreadful prodigies had been manifested; three moons had been seen at onc~e in the sky; a vulture had haunted the Forum; and a stream in Picenum had run blood.5’ The augurs declared that the omens had ” Polybius, II. 28-31.

49 Polybius, II. 31. 47 Polybius, II. 81. 51 Zonaras, VIII. 20. Orosius, IV. 18. 4s Polybius, II. 32-35. Zonaras, VIII. 19. Orosius, IV. 13.

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COAP XLIL] FLAMINIUS AND MARCELLUS. 467 not been duly observed at the election of the consuls; they must therefore be forthwith recalled.

Flaminius, guessing the purport of the senate’s dispatches, and. receiving them when he was on the very eve of a battle, would not read them till the action was over; and having gained a’complete victory, he declared, when he did read them, that the gods themselves had solved the A. u. c. 51. A.

C. senate’s scruples as to the lawfulness of his appointment, and that 223. it was needless for him now to return. He continued his operations therefore till the end of the season with much success; he took a great many prisoners, and a large amount of plunder, all of which he distributed to his soldiers; and on his return to Rome he demanded a triumph. The senate, resenting his disobedience, refused it; but he obtained it, as the popular consuls Horatius and Valerius had done 220 years before, by a decree of the comitia.52 Flaminius was through life the enemy of the aristocratical party; and our accounts of these times come from writers whose feeling was Character of Flaminius. strongly aristocratical.

Besides, his defeat and death at Thrasymenus made the Romans in general unfriendly to his memory; as national pride is always ready to ascribe disasters in war tc the incapacity either of the general or the government. But Flaminius was a brave and honest man, over-confident, it is true, and over-vehement, but neither a demagogue, nor a mere blind partisan. Like many others of the noblest of the plebeians, he was impatient of that craft of augury, which he well knew was no genuine and simple-hearted superstition, but an engine of aristocratical policy used by the nobility against those whom they hated or feared. Yet the time was not come when the people at large saw this equally; and therefore Flaminius shared the fate, and incurred the blame, of those premature reformers, who, putting the sickle to the corn before it is ripe, reap only mischief to themselves, and obtain no fruit for the world. Flaminius and Furius were succeeded in the consulship by M. Claudius Marcellus and Cn. Cornelius Scipio. Marcellus; afterwards so famous, A.. 5. A3. C. was at this time nearly fifty years old, and in his natural charac-222.

Character of Marcellus. ter seems greatly to have resembled Flaminius.

Like him he was a brave and hardy soldier, open in his temper, active and enterprising in the highest degree; but so adventurous and imprudent, that even in old age he retained the thoughtlessness of a boy, and perished at sixty by plunging into a snare which a stripling might have expected and shunned. But he attached himself to the aristocracy, which Flaminius opposed; and all his military successes met with their full share of honor and reward.: In this his first consulship he encountered Britomarus, or Viridomarus, one of the Gaulish chiefs, in single combat, and slew him in the sight of his army. For this exploit he was ranked with Romulus and Cornelius Cossus, who, like him, when commanding the Roman armies, had slain the enemy’s general with their own hand; and he offered the Spolia Opima, or choice spoils, of the slain chief to Jupiter Feretrius, as the most striking part of the spectacle of his splendid triumph.53 The two following years, 533 and 534, were only marked by wars with new barbarian enemies;, the Istrians, whose country ran out like a pen-A U. C. 533. A.

C. insula into the Adriatic, at the very head of the gulf, to the east 221. War with the of the country of the Venetians, and the Gaulish or mixed Gaulish tribes, which lived to the north of the Insubrians, on the very roots of the Alps. The Istrians, a people of kindred race and habits to the Illyrians of the more southern parts of the Adriatic, were accused like them of having committed acts of piracy on the Roman merchant vessels. They were defeated, but not without a severe loss on the side of the Romans. One of the consuls employed against them was M. Minucius Rufus, so famous four years afterwards as master of the horse to the dictator Q. Fabius.54 22 Zonaras, VIII. 20. i Zonaras, VIII. 20. Orosiu,, IV. 13. Eutro-‘a Plutarch, Marcell. 7, 8. Livy, Epit. XX. pius, III. 7.

Entropius, III. 6.

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468 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XtIl The year of Rome 534 was marked by the censorship of L..Emilius Papus Censorship of Flamin-and C. Flaminius; a censorship distinguished by several memorable regulations and public works, and which throws great light on the character of Flaminius, and through him on the general state of parties in the commonwealth. In the first place, we may be quite certain that no mere demagogue, nor any one who was considered a bad or unwise man, would have been elected a censor at this period. The high dignity of the office repelled from it all but citizens of the very first reputation; nor were the bravery and activity of a good soldier the qualities which most fitted a man to discharge its many important duties. Flaminius had carried an agrarian law, and had continued to command his army as consul, in direct opposition to the majority of the senate; but he knew how to distinguish between the selfishness and jealousy of an aristocracy, and those aristocratical elements which are essential to all good government; and the great measure of his censorship was a repetition of the regulation made by the famous censors Q. Fabius Rullus and P. Decius, about eighty years before: he removed all freedmen from the country tribes, and enrolled them in the four city tribes, the Palatine, the Esquiline, the Colline, and the Suburran. A single line in the epitome of Livy’s twentieth book contains all our informaTransfer of the freed-tion respecting this measure, and it relates the fact merely, withmento thecitytribes. out a word of explanation. We must suppose that the regulation of Fabius and Decius had been regarded as a remedy for a crying evil at a particular time, and not as a general rule to be observed forever. In common times the freedman, being still closely connected with his old master, who was now become his patron, patronus, would be enrolled in his patron’s tribe; and this would seem the most natural course, when the particular case was considered, without reference to the political consequences of the system, so soon as it was generally adopted. These consequences would be to give political influence to a class of men in all respects unlike the old agricultural commons. The class of freedmen contained many rich citizens, and many poor ones; but rich and poor alike lived by trade rather than by agriculture,-in Rome, rather than in the country. It is said that the freed negro in America is confined by public feeling to the exercise of two or three trades or callings only, and these humble ones; but the freedman of the ancient world labored under no such restriction. He might keep a little stall in the Forum, or he might be a merchant trafficking with Egypt and with Carthage: or again, he might be a moneyed man, and live on the interest of his loans; or he might go out as a farmer of the taxes to Sicily, and acquire an immense fortune at the expense of the province. But in no case were his habits like those of the agricultural citizen; and Flaminius, like M. Curius, and P. Decius, and like C. Marius in later times, was an enemy to every thing which might elevate the mercantile and moneyed classes, and still more the small shopkeepers and low populace of the city, above the proprietors and cultivators of the land. It was probably in the same spirit that Flaminius shortly afterwards supported Bill to check the the bill of an unknown tribune, Q. Claudius, which forbade all growth of a mercantile spirit amhong the.ea-n senators and sons of senators from being the owners of a ship of ators., the burden of more than 300 amphorae. The express object of this bill was to hinder the Rbman aristocracy from becoming, like the Venetian nobles, a company of wealthy merchants. The corn ships which the Istrians were accused of intercepting, belonged, no doubt, to some of the nobility, and were engaged in carrying the corn grown on their extensive occupation lands in Picenum and the coast of Umbria, to the markets of Greece and Macedonia.

Flaminius thought that traffic was unworthy of the Roman nobility: perhaps he fancied that they who derived their wealth from foreign trade would be too much afraid of offending their customers, and would compromise their country’s honor for the sake of their own profit. But on this occasion he stood alone in the senate: neither Q. Fabius, nor T. Manlius, nor M.

Marcellus, nor any of the Atilii,

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CHAP. XLII.] HANNIBAL SUCCEEDS HASDRUBAL. 4039 or Sempronii, or Sarvilii, supported him; but as the comitia by the Hortensiar law enjoyed the supreme legislative power, the opposition of the senate was vain, and the bill was passed.55 Yet, while Flaminius imitated Fabius and Decius in their political regulations, he rivalled Appius Claudius in the greatness of his public works. Publi work. Te, He perfected the direct communication between Rome and Ari-inian Way. minum,56 the great road, which, turning to the right after crossing the Milvian bridge, ascended the valley of the Tiber, leaving Soracte on its left, till it again joined the line of the modern road where it recrosses the Tiber and ascends to Ocriculum; which then ascended the valley of -the Nar to Narnia. and Interamnia, passed over the lofty ridge of the Monte Somma, descended on the newly founded colony of Spoletum, and passed through the magnificent plain beyond, till it reached Fulginia; which there again penetrating into the green valley of the Calcignolo, wound its way along the stream to Nuceria; which then, by an imperceptible ascent, rose through the wide upland plain of Helvillum (Sigillo) to the central ridge of the Apennines; which, the moment it had crossed the ridge, plunged precipitately down into the deep and narrow gorge of the Cantiano, and, hemmed in between gigantic walls of cliff, struggled on for many miles through the defile, till it came out upon the open country, where the Cantiano joins the Metaurus; which then, through a rich and slightly varied plain, followed the left bank of that fateful stream till it reached the shores of the Adriatic; and which finally kept the line of the low coast to Ariminum, the last city of Italy, on the very edge of Cisalpine Gaul. This great road, which is still one of the chief lines of communication’in Italy, and which still exhibits in its bridges, substructions, and above all in the magnificent tunnel of Furlo, splendid monuments of Roman greatness, has immortalized the name of C. Flaminius, and was known throughout the times of the Commonwealth and the Empire as the Flaminian Way. His other great work was the building of a circus in the Campus Martius, which was also called by his name, and which, like the Greek theatres, was used not only for the exhibition of games, but also occasionally for meetings of the senate and assemblies of the people, when they were held without the walls of the city. Flaminius, although opposed to the overbearing rule of the aristocracy, stood aloof, as we have seen, from the party of the populace, and wished Gro,th of a lower deto do no more than to tread in the steps of the best citizens of mocraticalparty. former times, of Fabius Rullus and Decius, of M. Curius and Fabricius. But we find symptoms of the growth of another party, which, in the later times of the Commonwealth, was almost the sole representative of the popular cause, the party of the poorer classes within Rome itself, the Forum populace, as they were called, in whom the ancient political writers saw the worst form of democracy. By the influence of this party, it seems C. Tarentius Varro, a butcher’s son, had already been raised to the quoestorship, and had been made plebeian and curule cedile, and was now looking forward to still higher distinctions. But the war with Carthage crushed it for the present, and delayed its revival for nearly a hundred years, and established the power of the aristocracy on the firmest base, that of the public respect and love, feelings which their conduct in the great national struggle had justly earned for them. Hasdrubal had died in the year before Flaminius’ censorship, having been assassinated in his tent by a Gaulish slave, in revenge for the death Death of Hasdrubal: of his master.7 The voice of the army had immediately called Hantib l takes the command; amboasa Hannibal to the command, and the government of Carthage had dorm sent to Haunibal ratified their choice. He had made two campaigns, and had so and to Carthage. put down all opposition to the Carthaginian dominion, that the Saguntines, ex.‘6 Livy, XXI. 63. by Polybius, II. 36. Appian, Hispan. S. ” Livy, Epit. XX.

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470 HISTORY OF ROME. L[CIAr. XLIIL pecting to Le attacked next, as the only people still left independent, sent earnest embassies to Rome, to request the interference of the Romans in their behalf.5” Towards the close of the year 534, Roman ambassadors visited Hannibal in his winterquarters at New Carthage, warning him not to attack Saguntum, which was an ally of Rome, nor to carry his arms beyond the Iberus. Receiving unsatisfactory answers, they proceeded to Carthage, and declared to the government that the Romans would consider any attack upon Saguntum, or any advance of the Carthaginians beyond the Iberus, as acts of direct hostility against Rome. They could not imagine that Carthage would dare to incur such a penalty; she had paid money and ceded parts of her territory to escape the resentment of the Romans; would she now voluntarily brave it by acts of aggression? Hannibal’s party could not have obtained so: complete an ascendency; and his opponents would surely recover their influence, when his polidy threatened to involve his country in the dreaded evils of another war with Rome. So L. _/Emilius Paullus and M.

Livius were chosen consuls for the year 535, as if the peace would not be broken; and they were both sent over to Illyria with two consular armies to chastise the revolt of Demetrius of Pharus, who, relying on his intimate connection with the court of Macedon, had committed various breaches of treaty, and was setting the Romans at defiance.59 L. zEmilius was a brave and able officer; and he and his colleague did their A.U. C.

535. A. C. work effectually; they reduced all the enemy’s strongholds, took 219. WanIllyria. Pharus itself, and obliged Demetrius to escape for his life to Macedonia, and finally received the submission of all Illyria, and settled its affairs at their discretion. They returned to Rome at the end of the season, and obtained a triumph, the last that was for some years enjoyed by any Roman officer; for already the falsehood of the Roman calculations was manifest; Saguntum, unaided by Rome, had been taken and destroyed: war with Carthage was no longer doubtful; and the seat of that war was likely to be no longer Spain, but Italy. CHAPTER XLIII. SECOND

PUNIC WAR. HANNIBAL-MARCH OF HANNIBAL FROM SPAIN TO ITALY-PASSAGE OF THE

ALPS-BATTLES OF THE TREBIA, AND OF THRASYMENUS-Q. FABIUS MAXIMUS

DICTATOR-BATTLE OF CANNE A. U. C. 535 TO 538. TwIcE in history has there been witnessed the struggle of the highest individA. U. C. 5S5. A. C ual genius against the resources and institutions of a great nation; 219.

Second Punic and, in both cases, the nation has been victorious. For seventeen w’ar. years Hannibal strove against Rome; for sixteen years Napoleon Bonaparte strove against England: the efforts of the first ended in Zama, those of the second in Waterloo. True it is, as Polybius has said, that Hannibal was supported by the zealous reatnes of Hannibal.

exertions of Carthage;’ and the strength of the opposition to his policy has been very possibly exaggerated by the Roman writers. ” Polybius, III.

15. Appian, Hispan. 11. 9 Polvbius, III. 16, 18. Zonaras, VIII. 20. Livy, XXI. 10. Polybius, III. 10.

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CHAP. XLIII.] THE GREATNESS OF ROME. 471 But the zeal of his country in the contest, as Polybius himself remarks in another place,2 was itself the work of his family. Never did great men more show themselves the living spirit of a nation than Hamilcar, and Hasdrubal, and Hannibal, during a period of nearly fifty years, approved themselves to be to Carthage. It is not, then, merely through our ignorance of the internal state of Carthage that Hannibal stands so prominent in all our conceptions of the second Punic war: he was really its moving and directing power; and the energy of his country was but a light reflected from his own. History therefore gathers itself into his single person: in that vast tempest which, from north and south, from the west and the east, broke upon Italy, we see nothing but Hannibal. But if Hannibal’s genius may be likened to the Homeric god, who in his hatred of the Trojans rises from the deep to rally the fainting Greeks, Greatness of Rome. and to lead them against the enemy; so the calm courage with The suces of Rome.. 50 has been for the good which Hector met his more than human adversary in his country’s of mankind. cause, is no unworthy image of the unyielding magnanimity displayed by the aristocracy of Rome. As Hannibal utterly eclipses Carthage, so on the contrary Fabius, Marcellus, Claudius Nero, even Scipio himself, are as nothing when compared to the spirit, and wisdom, and power of Rome. The senale which voted its thanks to its political enemy, Varro, after his disastrous defeat, “because he had not despaired of the Commonwealth,” and which disdained either to solicit, or to reprove, or to threaten, or in any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused their accustomed supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honored than the conqueror of Zama. This we should the more carefully bear in mind, because our tendency is to admire individual greatness far more than national; and as no single Roman will bear comparison with Hannibal, we are apt to murmur at the event of the contest, and to think that the victory was awarded to the least worthy of the combatants. On the contrary, never was the wisdom of God’s providence more manifest than in the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage. It was clearly for the good of mankind that Hannibal should be conquered: his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world. For great men can only act permanently by forming great nations; and no one man, even though it were Hannibal himself, can in one generation effect such a work. But where the nation has been merely enkindled for a while by a great man’s spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated it; and the nation, when he is gone, is like a dead body, to which magic power had for a moment given an unnatural life: when the charm has ceased, the body is cold and stiff as before. He who grieves over the battle of Zama, should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years later, when Hannibal must, in the course of nature, have been dead, and consider how the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilization of Greece, or by its laws and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organized empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved, the free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe. Hannibal was twenty-six years of age when he was appointed commander-inchief of the Carthaginian armies in Spain, upon the sudden death Hannibal takesSagunof Hasdrubal. Two years, we have seen, had been employed in tu-o. expeditions against the native Spaniards; the third year was devoted to the siege of Saguntum. Hannibal’s pretext for attacking it was, that the Saguntines had oppressed one of the Spanish tribes in alliance with Carthage;3 but no caution in the Saguntine government could have avoided a quarrel, which their enemy was determined to provoke. Saguntum, although not a city of native Spaniards, resisted as obstinately as if the very air of Spain had breathed into foreign settlers on its soil the spirit so often, in many different ages, displayed by the Spanish people. Saguntum was defended like Numantia and Gerona: the siege lasted 2 Polybius, IX. 22. 8 Polybius, III. 15. Appian, Hispan. XI.

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472 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLII1 eight months; and when all hope was gone, several of the chiefs kindled a fire in the market-place, and after having thrown in their most precious effects, leapt into it themselves, and perished. Still the spoil found in the place was very considerable: there was a large treasure of money, which Hannibal kept for his wai expenses; there were numerous captives, whom he distributed amongst his soldiers as their share of the plunder; and there was much costly furniture from the public and private buildings, which he sent home to decorate the temples and palaces of Carthage.4 It must have been towards the close of the year, but apparently before the nbassador sent to consuls were returned from Illyria, that the news of the fall of SaCartlage, who declare guntum reached Rome. Immediately ambassadors were sent to war.

Carthage; M. Fabius Buteo, who had been consul seven-andtwenty years before, C. Licinius Varus, and Q. Bembius Tamphilus. Their orders were simply to demand that Hannibal and his principal officers should be given up for their attack upon the allies of Rome, in breach of the treaty, and, if this were refused, to declare war. The Carthaginians tried to discuss the previous question, whether the attack on Saguntum was a breach of the treaty;‘out to this the Romans would not listen. At length M. Fabius gathered up hic toga, as if he was wrapping up something in it, and holding it out thus folded together, he said, ” Behold, here are peace and war; take which you choose!” The Carthaginian suffete, or judge, answered, ” Give whichever thou wilt.” Hereupon Fabius shook out the folds of his toga, saying, “Then here we give you war;” to which several members of the council shouted in answer, ” With all our hearts we welcome it.” Thus the Roman ambassadors left Carthage, and returned straight to Rome. But before the result of this embassy could be known in Spain, IHannibal had 11aneibal’spreparations been making preparations for his intended expedition, in a manner for war. which showed, not only that he was sure of the support of his government, but that he was able to dispose at his pleasure of all the military resources of Carthage. At his suggestion fresh troops from Africa were sent over to Spain to secure it during his absence, and to be commanded by his own brother, Hasdrubal; and their place was to be supplied by other troops raised in Spain;6 so that Africa was to be defended by Spaniards, and Spain by Africans, the soldiers of each nation, when quartered amongst foreigners, being cut off from all temptation or opportunity to revolt. So completely was he allowed to direct every military measure, that he is said to have sent Spanish and Numidian troops to garrison Carthage itself; in other words, this was a part of his general plan, and was adopted accordingly by the government.

Meanwhile he had sent ambassadors into Gaul, and even across the Alps, to the Gauls who had so lately been at war with the Romans, both to obtain information as to the country through which his march lay, and to secure the assistance and guidance of the Gauls in his passage of the Alps, and their cooperation in arms when he should arrive in Italy. His Spanish troops he had dismissed to their several homes at the end of the last campaign, that they might carry their spoils with them, and tell of their exploits to their countrymen, and enjoy, during the winter, that almost listless ease which is the barbarian’s relief from war and plunder. At length he received the news of the Roman embassy to Carthage, and the actual declaration of war; his officers also had returned from Cisalpine Gaul. “The natural difficulties of the passage of the Alps were great,”

they said, ” but by no a. U. c. 536. A. C. means insuperable; while the disposition of the Gauls was most 218. friendly, and they were eagerly expecting his arrival.”’ Then Hannibal called his soldier’s together, and told them openly that he was going to lead them into Italy. “The Romans,”

he said, “have demanded that I and my 9 Livy, XXI. 14. Polybius, III. 18.

d Polybius, III. 33. Livy, XXI. 21. 5 Livy, XXI. 18 -lvybius, III. 20.

Zonaras, 7 Polybius, III. 34.‘vilI. 32.

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Soi. XLIII.] HANNIBAL’S SACRIFICE AND VISION. 473 principal officers should be delivered up to them as nmalefactors. Soldiers, will you suffer such an indignity? The Gauls are holding out their arms to us, inviting us to come to them, and to assist them in revenging their manifold injuries.

And the country which we shall invade, so rich in corn, and wine, and-oil, so full of flocks and herds, so covered with flourishing cities, will be the richest prize that could be offered by the gods to reward your valor.” One common shout from the soldiers assured him of their readiness to follow him. He thanked them, fixed the day on which they were to be ready to march, and then dismissed them. In this interval, and now on the very eve of commencing his appointed work, to which for eighteen years he had been solemnly devoted, and to which he had so long been looking forward with almost sickening hope, he left the headquarters of his army to visit Gades, and there, in the temple of the supreme god of Tyre, and all the colonies of Tyre, to offer his prayers and vows for the success of his enterprise.8 He was attended only by those immediately attached to his person; and amongst these was a Sicilian Greek, Silenus, who followed him throughout his Italian expedition, and lived at his table. When the sacrifice was over, Hannibal returned to his army at New Carthage; and every thing being ready, and the season sufficiently advanced, for it was now late in May, he set out on his march for the Iberus. And here the fulness of his mind, and his strong sense of being the devoted instrument of his country’s gods to destroy their enemies, haunted him by night as they possessed him by day. In his sleep, se he told Silenus, he fancied that the supreme god of his fathers had called him into the presence of all the gods of Carthage, who were sitting on their thrones in council.

There he received a solemn charge to invade Italy; and one, of the heavenly council went with him and with his army, to guide him on his way.

He went on, and his divine guide commanded him, “See that thou look not behind thee.” But after a while, impatient of the restraint, he turned to look back; and there he beheld a huge and monstrous form, thick-set all over with serpents; wherever it moved, orchards, and woods, and houses fell crashing before it. He asked his guide in wonder, what that monster form was? The god answered, ” Thou seest the desolation of Italy; go on thy way, straight forward, and cast no look behind.“9 Thus, with no divided heart, and with an entire resignation of all personal and domestic enjoyments forever, Hannibal went forth, at the age of twenty-seven,”~ to do the work of his country’s gods, and to redeem his early VOW. The consuls at Rome came into office at this period on the fifteenth of March: it was possible therefore for a consular army to arrive on the scene iscalculations of t of action in time to dispute with Hannibal not only the passage of Rom.ns. the Rhone, but that of the Pyrenees. But the Romans exaggerated the difficulties of his march, and seem to have expected that the resistance of the Spanish tribes between the Iberus and the Pyrenees, and of the Gauls between the Pyrenees and the Rhone, would so delay him that he would not reach the Rhone till the end of the season. They therefore made their preparations leisurely. Of the consuls for this year, the year of Rome 536, and 218 before the Christian era, one was P.

Cornelius Scipio, the son of L. Scipio, who Their preparations fog had been consul in the sixth year of the first Punic war, and the war.

grandson of L. Scipio Barbatus, whose services in the third Samnite war are recorded in his famous epitaph. The other was Ti. Sempronius Longus, probably, but not certainly, the son of that C. Sempronius Blaesus who had been consul in the year 501. The consuls’ provinces were to be Spain and Sicily; Scipio, with two Roman legions, and 15,600 of the Italian allies, and with a fleet of sixty quinqueremes, was to command in Spain; Sempronius, with a somewhat largel 8 Livy, XXI. 21. Compare Polybius, XXXIV. Valerius Maximus, I. 7, 1, Externa. Zonaras, 9. VIII. 22. Cicero de Liv. I. 24. Livy, XXIV. 22.‘l Nepos, Hannibal, c. 3.

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474 HISTORY OF ROME. [OCAP. XLII1 army, and a fleet of 160 quinqueremes, was to cross over to Lilybseum, and from thence, if circumstances favored, to make a descent on Africa. A third army, consisting also of two Roman legions, and 11,000 of the allies, was stationed in Cisalpine Gaul, under the praetor, L. Manlius Vulso.‘L The Romans suspected that the Gauls would rise in arms ere long; and they hastened to send out the colonists of two colonies, which had been resolved on before, but not actually founded, to occupy the important stations of Placentia and Cremona on the opposite banks of the Po. The colonists sent to each of these places were no fewer than six thousand; and they received notice to be at their colonies in thirty days. Three commissioners, one of them, C. Lutatius Catulus, being of consular rank, were sent out, as usual, to superintend the allotment of lands to the settlers; and these 12,000 men, together with the praetor’s army, were supposed to be capable of keeping the Gauls quiet.“2 It is a curious fact, that the danger on the side of Spain was considered to be Revolt ofthea. so much the less urgent, that Scipio’s army was raised the last, after those of his colleague and of the prmetor, L. Manlius.13

Indeed, Scipio was still at Rome, when tidings came that the Boians and Insubrians had revolted, had dispersed the new settlers at Placentia and Cremona, and driven them to take refuge at Mutina, had treacherously seized the three commissioners at a conference, and had defeated the prator, L. Manlius, and obliged him also to take shelter in one of the towns of Cisalpine Gaul, where they were blockading him.l4 One of Scipio’s legions, with five thousand of the allies, was immediately sent off into Gaul under another prmetor, C. Atilius Serranus; and Scipio waited till his own army should again be completed by new levies. Thus, he cannot have left Rome till late in the summer; and when he arrived with his fleet and army at the mouth of the eastern branch of the Rhone, he found that Hannibal had crossed the Pyrenees; but he still hoped to impede his passage of the river. Hannibal meanwhile, having set out from New Carthage with an army of Hannibal conquers the 90,000 foot and 12,000 horse, crossed the Iberus;15 and from north of Spain. thenceforward the hostile operations of his march began. He might, probably, have marched through the country between the Iberus and the Pyrenees, had that been his sole object, as easily as he made his way from the Pyrenees to the Rhone; a few presents and civilities would easily have induced the Spanish chiefs to allow him a free passage. But some of the tribes northward of the Iberus were friendly to Rome: on the coast were the Greek cities of Rhoda and Emporiae, Massaliot colonies, and thus attached to the Romans as the old allies of their mother city: if this part of Spain were left unconquered, the Romans would immediately make use of it as the base of their operations, and proceed from thence to attack the whole Carthaginian dominion. Accordingly, Hannibal employed his army in subduing the whole country, which he effected with no great loss of time, but at a heavy expense of men, as he was obliged to carry the enemy’s strongholds by assault, rather than incur the delay of besieging them. He left Hanno with eleven thousand men to retain possession of the newly conquered country; and he further diminished his army by sending home as many more of his Spanish-soldiers, probably those who had most distinguished themselves, as an earnest to the rest, that they too, if they did their duty well, might expect a similar release, and might look forward to return ere long to their homes full of spoil and of glory. These detachments, together with the heavy loss sustained in the field, reduced the force with which Hannibal entered Gaul to no more than 50,000 foot and 9000 horse.‘6 From the Pyrenees to the Rhone his progress was easy. Here he had no wish to make regular conquests; and presents to the chiefs mostly succeeded in con-‘ Polybius, III. 40, 41.‘4 Polybius, III. 40. 12 Polybius, III. 40. 15

Polybius, III. 85. Livy, XXI. 23. Livy, XXI. 26. 16 Polybius, III. 35.

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COAr. XLHI.] HANNIBAL’S PREPARATIONS. 475 ciliating their friendship, so that he was allowed to pass freely. He marches to the But on the left.

bank of the Rhone the influence of the Massaliots.hone. with the Gaulish tribes had disposed them to resist the invader; and the passage of the Rhone was not to be effected without a contest. Scipio, by this time, had landed his army near the eastern mouth of the Rhone; and his information of Hannibal’s movements was vague and imper-Scipio’s movements. feet. His men had suffered from sea-sickness on their voyage from Pisa to the Rhone; and he wished to give them a short time to recover their strength and spirits, before he led them against the enemy. He still felt confident that Hannibal’s advance from the Pyrenees must be slow, supposing that he would be obliged to fight his way; so that he never doubted that he should have ample time to oppose his passage of the Rhone. Meanwhile he sent out 300 horse, with some Gauls, who were in the service of the Massaliots, ordering them to ascend the left bank of the Rhone, and discover, if possible, the situation of the enemy. He seems to have been unwilling to place the river on his rear, and therefore never to have thought of conducting his operations on the right bank, or even of sending out reconnoitring parties in this direction.? The resolution which Scipio formed a few days afterwards, of sending his army to Spain, when he himself returned to Italy, was deserving of such Hannibal’s prepareahigh praise, that we must hesitate to accuse him of over caution tion fos passing tho or needless delay at this critical moment. Yet he was sitting idle Rha.e. at the mouth of the Rhone, while the Gauls were vainly endeavoring to oppose Hannibal’s passage of the river. We must understand that Hannibal kept his army as far away from the sea as possible, in order to conceal his movements from the Romans; therefore he came upon the Rhone, not on the line of the later Roman road from Spain to Italy, which crossed the river at Tarasco, between Avignon and Arles, but at a point much higher up, above its confluence with the Durance, and nearly half way, if we can trust Polybius’ reckoning, from the sea to its confluence with the Isere.‘8 Here he obtained from the natives on the right bank, by paying a fixed price, all their boats and vessels of every description with which they were accustomed to traffic down the river: they allowed him also to cut timber for the construction of others; and thus in two days he was provided with the means of transporting his army. But finding that the Gauls were assembled on the eastern bank to oppose his passage, he sent off a detachment of his army by night with native guides, to’

ascend the right bank, for about two-and-twenty miles, and there to cross as they could, where there was no enemy to stop them. The woods, which then lined the river, supplied this detachment with the means of constructing barks and rafts enough for the passage; they took advantage of one of the many islands in this part of the Rhone, to cross where the stream was divided; and thus they all reached the left bank in safety.

There they took, up a strong position, probably one of those strange masses of rock which rise here and there with steep cliffy sides like islands out of the vast plain, and rested for four-and-twenty hours after their exertions in the march and the passage of the river. Hannibal allowed eight-and-forty hours to pass from the time when the detachment left his camp; and then, on the morning of the fifth day The army crosses the after his arrival on the Rhone, he made his preparations for the river. passage of his main army. The mighty stream of the river, fed by the snows of the high Alps, is swelled rather than diminished by the heats of summer; so that, although the season was that when the southern rivers are generally at their lowest, it was rolling the vast mass of its waters along with a startling fulness and rapidity. The heaviest vessels were therefore placed on the left, highest up the stream, to form something of a breakwater for the smaller craft crossing below; the small boats held the flower of the lightarmed foot, while the cavalry 17 Polybius, II. 41.

Livy, XXI. 26. Is Polybius, III. 42.

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476 HISTORY OF ROME. [OCLP. XLIfIl were in the larger vessels; most of the horses being towed astern swimming, and a single soldier holding three or four together by their bridles. Every thing was ready, and the Gauls on the opposite side had poured out of their camp, and lined the bank in scattered groups at the most accessible points, thinking that their task of stopping the enemy’s landing would be easily accomplished. At length Hannibal’s eye observed a column of smoke rising on the farther shore, above or on the right of the barbarians. This was the concerted signal which assured him of the arrival of his detachment; and he instantly ordered his men to embark, and to push across with all possible speed.

They pulled vigorously against the rapid stream, cheering each other to the work; while behind them were their friends, cheering them also from the bank; and before them were the Gauls singing their war-songs, and calling them to come on with tones and gestures of defiance. But on a sudden a mass of fire was seen on the rear of the Barbarians; the Gauls on the bank looked behind, and began to turn away from the river; and presently the bright arms and white linen coats of the African and Spanish soldiers appeared above the bank, breaking in upon the disordeily line of the Gauls. Hannibal himself, who was with the party crossing the river, leapedon shore amongst the first, and forming his men as fast as they landed, led them instantly to the charge. But the Gauls, confused and bewildered, made little resistance; they fled in utter rout; whilst Hannibal, not losing a moment, sent back his vessels and boats for a fresh detachment of his army; and before night his whole force, with the exception of his elephants, was safely established on the eastern side of the Rhone.19 As the river was no longer between him and the enemy, Hannibal early on the Arrival of emissaries next morning sent out a party of Numidian cavalry to discover fros the Cisalpine the position and number of Scipio’s forces, and then called his army together, to see and hear the communications of some chiefs of the Cisalpine Gauls, who were just arrived from the other side of the Alps. Their words were explained to the Africans and Spaniards in the army by interpreters; but the very sight of the chiefs was itself an encouragement; for it told the soldiers that the communication with Cisalpine Gaul was not impracticable, and that the Gauls had undertaken so long a journey for the purpose of obtaining the aid of the Carthaginian army against their old enemies, the Romans.

Besides, the interpreters explained to the soldiers that the chiefs undertook to guide them into Italy by a short and safe route, on which they would be able to find provisions; and spoke strongly of the great extent and richness of Italy, when they did arrive there, and how zealously the Gauls would aid them. Hannibal then came forward himself and addressed his army: their work, he said, was more than half accomplished by the passage of the Rhone; their own eyes and ears had witnessed the zeal of their Gaulish allies in their cause; for the rest, their business was to do their duty, and obey his orders implicitly, leaving every thing else to him. The cheers and shouts of the soldiers again satisfied him how fully he might depend upon them; and he then addressed his prayers and vows to the gods of Carthage, imploring them to watch over the army, and to prosper its work to the end, as they had prospered its beginning. The soldiers were now dismissed, with orders to prepare for their march on the morrow.20 Scarcely was the assembly broken up, when some of the Numidians who had been sent out in the morning, were seen riding for their lives to Scipio sends his army toSpain, and returnto the camp, manifestly in flight from a victorious enemy. Not half. It’I1 of the original party returned; for they had fallen in with Scipio’s detachment of Roman and Gaulish horse, and, after an obstinate conflict, had been completely beaten.

Presently after, the Roman horsemen appeared in pursuit; but when they observed the Carthaginian camp, they wheeled about and rode off, to carry back word to their general. Then at last Scipio put his army in -motion, and PoXymain, II. 42, 4,. &3.Polybius, III. 44.

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CHAP. XLIII.] MARCH THROUGH GAUL. 47 ascended the left bank of the river to find and engage the enemy.2’ But when he arrived at the spot where his cavalry had seen the Carthaginian camp, he found it deserted, and was told that Hannibal had been gone three days, having marched northwards, ascending the left bank of the river. To follow him seemed desperate: it was plunging into a country wholly unknown to the Romans, where they had neither allies nor guides, nor resources of any kind; and where the natives, over and above the common jealousy felt by all barbarians towards a foreign army, were likely, as Gauls, to regard the Romans with peculiar hostility. But if Hannibal could not be followed now, he might easily be met on his first arrival in Italy; from the mouth of the Rhone to Pisa was the chord of a circle, while Hannibal was going to make a long circuit; and the Romans had an army already in Cisalpine Gaul; while the enemy would reach the scene of action exhausted with the fatigues and privations of his, march across the Alps. Accordingly, Scipio descended the Rhone again, embarked Lis army and sent it on to Spain under the command of his brother, Cnmus Scipio, as his lieutenant; while he himself, in his own ship, sailed for Pisa, and immediately crossed the Apennines to take the command of the forces of the two prietors, Manlius and Atilius, who, as we have seen, had an army of about 25,000 men, over and above the colonists of Placentia and Cremona, still disposable in Cisalpine Gaul.22 This resolution of Scipio to send his own army on to Spain, and to meet Hannibal with the army of the two proctors, appears to show that he Wiom of this resolupossessed the highest qualities of a general, which involve the tionwisdom of a statesman no less than of a soldier. As a mere military question, his calculation, though baffled by the event, was sound; but if we view it in a higher light, the importance to the Romans of retaining their hold on Spain would have justified a far greater hazard; for if the Carthaginians were suffered to consolidate their dominion in Spain, and to avail themselves of its immense resources, not in money only, but in men, the hardiest and steadiest of barbarians, and, under the training of such generals as Hannibal and his brother, equal to the best soldiers in the world, the Romans would hardly have been able to maintain the contest. Had not P. Scipio then dispatched his army to Spain at this critical moment, instead of carrying it home to Italy, his son in all probability would never have won the battle of Zama. Meanwhile Hannibal, on the day after the skirmish with Scipio’s horse, had sent forward his infantry, keeping the cavalry to cover his opera-The olophants are car. tions, as he still expected the Romans to pursue him; while he riedovertheRhone. himself waited to superintend the passage of the elephants. These. were thirtyseven in number; and their dread of the water made their transport a very difficult operation. It was effected by fastening to the bank large rafts of 200 feet in length, covered carefully with earth: to the end of these smaller rafts were attached, covered with earth in the same manner, and with towing lines extended to a number of the largest barks, which were to tow them over the stream. The elephants, two females leading the way, were brought upon the rafts by their drivers without difficulty; and as soon as they came upon the smaller rafts, these were cut loose at once from the larger, and towed out into the middle of the river. Some of the elephants, in their terror, leaped overboard, and drowned their drivers; but they themselves, it is said, held their huge trunks above water, and struggled to the shore; so that the whole thirtyseven were landed in safety.23 Then Hannibal called in his cavalry, and covering his march with them and with the elephants, set forward up the left bank of the Rhone to overtake the infantry. In four days they reached the spot where the Isere,24 coming down from the main Alps, brings to the Rhone a stream hardly less full or mighty Hannibal’s mar than his own. In the plains above the confluence two Gaulish throughGaul. 21

Polybius, III. 45.,s Polybius, III. 46. Livy, XXI. 28. 2a Polybius, III.

47. 24 Polybius, III. 49.

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478 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLII1 brothers were contending which should be chief of their tribe; and the elder called in the stranger general to support his cause. Hannibal readily complied, established him firmly on the throne, and received important aid from him in return. He supplied.

the Carthaginian army plentifully with provisions, furnished them with new arms, gave them new clothing, especially shoes, which were found very useful in the subsequent march, and accompanied them to the first entrance on the mountain country, to secure them from attacks on the part of his countrymen. The attentive reader, who is acquainted with the geography of the Alps and Difficulty of determin-their neighborhood, will perceive that this account of Hannibal’s inghisle of march. march is vague. It does not appear whether the Carthaginians ascended the left bank of the Isere, or the right bank; or whether they continued to ascend the Rhone for a time, and leaving it only so. far as to avoid the great angle which it makes at Lyons, rejoined it again just before they entered the mountain country, a little to the left of the present road from Lyons to Chamberri.

But these uncertainties cannot now be removed, because Polybius neither possessed a sufficient knowledge of the bearings of the country, nor sufficient liveliness as a painter, to describe the line of the march so as to be clearly recognized. I believe, however, that Hannibal crossed the Isere, and continued tc ascend the Rhone-; and that afterwards, striking off to the right across the plains of Dauphine, he reached what Polybius calls the first ascent of the Alps, at the northern extremity of that ridge of limestone mountains, which, rising abruptly from the plain to the height of 4000 or 5000 feet, and filling up the whole space between the Rhone at Belley and the Isere below Grenoble, first introduces the traveller coming from Lyons to the remarkable features of Alpine scenery.

At the end of the lowland country, the Gaulish chief, who had accompanied Hannibal finds the Hannibal thus far, took leave of him: his influence probably did nmountaineers ready to not extend to the Alpine valleys; and the mountaineers, far from )poehim. respecting his safe-conduct, might be in the habit of making plundering inroads on his own territory. Here then Hannibal was left to himself; and he found that the natives were prepared to beset his passage. They occupied all such points as commanded the road; which, as usual, was a sort of terrace cut in the mountain side, overhanging the valley whereby it penetrated to the central ridge. But as the mountain line is of no great breadth here, the natives guarded the defile only by day, and withdrew when night came,on to their own homes, in a town or village among the mountains, and lying in the valley behind them.25 Hannibal, having learnt this from some of his Gaulish guides whom he sent among them, encamped in their sight just below the entrance of the defile; and as soon as it was dusk, he set out with a detachment of light troops, made his way through the pass, and occupied the positions which the barbarians, after their usual practice, had abandoned at the approach of night. Day dawned; the main army broke up from its camp, and began to enter the defile; while the natives, finding their positions occupied by the He baffles them. enemy, at first looked on quietly, and offered no disturbance to the march. But when they saw the long narrow line of the Carthaginian army winding along the steep mountain side, and the cavalry and baggage-cattle struggling at every step with the difficulties of the road, the temptation to plunder was too strong to be resisted; and from many points of the mountain above the road they rushed down upon the Carthaginians. The confusion was terrible; for the road or track was so narrow, that the least crowd or disorder pushed the heavily loaded baggage-cattle down the steep below; and the horses, wounded by the barbarians’ missiles, and plunging about wildly in their pain and terror, increased the mischief. At last Hannibal was obliged to charge down from his position, which commanded the whole scene of confusion, and Polybius, III. 50.

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CHAr. XLIII] PASSAGE OF THE ALPS. 479 to drive the barbarians off. This he effected; yet the conficit of so many men on the narrow road made the disorder worse for a time; and he unavoidably occasioned the destruction of many of his own men.6 At last, the barbarians being quite beaten off, the army wound its way out of the, defile in safety, and rested in the wide and rich valley which extends from the lake of Bourget, with scarcely a perceptible change of level, to the Isere at Montmeillan. Hannibal meanwhile attacked and stormed the town, which was the barbarians’

principal stronghold; and here he not only recovered a great many of his own men, horses, and baggage-cattle, but also found a large supply of corn and cattle belonging to the barbarians, which he immediately made use of for the consumption of his soldiers. In the plain which he had now reached, he halted for a whole day, and then, resuming his march, proceeded for three days up the valley of the Difficulties of tho Isere on the right bank, without encountering any difficulty. Then,arch. the natives met him with branches of trees in their hands, and wreaths on their heads in token of peace: they spoke fairly, offered hostages, and wished, they said, neither to do the Carthaginians any injury, nor to receive any from them. Hannibal mistrusted them, yet did not wish to offend them; he accepted their terms, received their hostages, and obtained large supplies of cattle; and their whole behavior seemed so trustworthy, that at last he accepted hleir guidance, it is said, through a difficult part of the country, which he was now approaching.27 For all the Alpine valleys become narrower, as they draw nearer to the central chain; and the mountains often come so close to the stream, that the roads in old times were often obliged to leave the valley and ascend the hills by any accessible point, to descend again when the gorge became wider, and follow the stream as before. If this is not done, and the track is carried nearer the river, it passes often through defiles of the most formidable character, being no more than a narrow ledge above a furious torrent, with cliffs rising above it absolutely precipitous, and coming down on the other side of the torrent abruptly to the water, leaving no passage by which man or even goat could make its way. It appears that the barbarians persuaded Hannibal to pass through one of these defiles, instead of going round it; and while his army was At,,,tl of the mountinvolved in it, they suddenly, and without provocation, as we are aincers. told, atacked him.

Making their way along the mountain sides above the defile, they rolled down masses of rock on the Carthaginians below, or even threw stones upon them from their hands, stones and rocks being equally fatal against an enemy’-so entangled. It was well for Hannibal, that, still doubting the barbarians’ faith, he had sent forward his cavalry and baggage, and covered the march with his infantry, who thus had to sustain the brunt of the attack. Foot soldiers on such ground were able to move, where horses would be quite helpless; and thus at last Hannibal, with his infantry, forced his way to the summit of one of the bare cliffs overhanging the defile, and remained there during the night, whilst the cavalry and baggage slowly struggled out of the defile.28 Thus again baffled, the barbarians’made no more general attacks on the army; some partial annoyance was occasioned at intervals, and some baggage was carried off; but it was observed, that wherever the elephants were, the line of march was secure; for the barbarians beheld those huge creatures with terror, having never had the slightest knowledge of them, and not daring to approach when they saw them. Without any further recorded difficulty, the army on the ninth day after they had left the plains of Dauphine arrived at the summit of the Hanniba leaches tsh cenfral ridge of the Alps. Here there is always a plain of some summitoftheAlps’ Polybius, III. 51. 28

Polybius, 111. bS. ~ Polybius, III. 52.

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480 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIII extent, immediately overhung by the snowy summits of the high mountains, but itself in summer presenting in many parts a carpet of the freshest grass, with the chalets of the shepherds scattered over it, and gay with a thousand flowers. But far different is its aspect through the greatest part of the year: then it is one unvaried waste of snow; and the little lakes, which on many ot the passes enliven the summer landscape, are now frozen over and covered with snow, so as to be no longer distinguishable. Hannibal was on the summit of the Alps about,he end of October: the first winter snows had already fallen; but two hundred years before the Christian era, when all Germany was one vast forest, the climate of the Alps was far colder than at present, and the snow lay on the passes all through the year. Thus the soldiers were in dreary quarters; they remained two days on the summit, resting from their fatigues, and giving opportunity to many of the stragglers, and of the horses and cattle, to rejoin them by following their track; but they were cold, and worn, and’disheartened; and mountains still rose before them, through which, as they knew too well, even their descent might be perilous and painful. But their great general, who felt that he now stood victorious on the ramparts of Italy, and that the torrent which rolled before him was carrying its waters to the rich plains of Cisalpine Gaul, endeavored to kindle his soldiers with his own spirit of hope. He called them together; he pointed out the valley beneath, to which the descent seemed the work of a moment: ” That valley,” he said, “
is Italy; it leads us to the country of our friends the Gauls; and yonder is our way to Rome.” His eyes were eagerly fixed on that point of the horizon; and as he gazed, the distance between seemed to vanish, till he could almost fancy that he was crossing the Tiber, and assailing the capitol.29 After the two days’ rest the descent began. Hannibal experienced no more Descot. open hostility from the barbarians, only some petty attempts here and there to plunder; a fact strange in itself, but doubly so, if he was really descending the valley of the Doria Baltea, through the country of the Salassians, the most untamable robbers of all the Alpine barbarians. It is possible that the influence of the Insubrians may partly have restrained the mountaineers; and partly also they may have been deterred by the ill success of all former attacks, and may by this time have regarded the strange army and its monstrous beasts with something of superstitious terror. But the natural difficulties of the ground on the descent were greater than ever. The snow covered the track so that the men often lost it, and fell down the steep below: at last they came to a place where an avalanche had carried it away altogether for about three hundred yards, leaving the mountain side a mere wreck of scattered rocks and snow. To go round was impossible; for the depth of the snow on the heights above rendered it hopeless to scale them; nothing therefore was left but to repair the road. A summit of some extent was found, and cleared of the snow; and here the army was obliged to encamp, whilst the work went on. There was no want of hands; and every man was laboring for his life; the road therefore was restored, and supported with solid substructions below; and in a single day it was made practicable for the cavalry and baggage-cattle, which were immediately sent forward, and reached the lower valley in safety, where they were turned out to pasture.

A harder labor was required to make a passage for the elephants: the way for them must be wide and solid; and the work could not be accomplished in less than three days. The poor animals suffered severely in the interval from hunger; for no forage was to be found in that wilderness of snow, nor any trees whose leaves might supply the place of other herbage. At last they too were able to proceed with safety:30 Hannibal overtook his cavalry and baggage; and in three days more the whole army had got clear of the Alpine val” Polybius, III. 54. Livy, XXI. 35. “0 Polybius, III. 54, 55.

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CHAP. XLIII.] HANNIBAL ARRIVES IN ITALY. 481 leys, and entered the country of their friends, the Insubrians, on the wide plain of northern Italy.

Hannibal was arrived in Italy, but with a force so weakened by its losses in men and horses, and by the exhausted state of the survivors, that Arrival in Italy. Lorses he might seem to have accomplished his great march in vain. On the march. According to his own statement, which there is no reason to doubt, he brought out of the Alpine valleys no more than 12,000 African and 8000 Spanish infantry, with 6000 cavalry;31 so that his march from the Pyrenees to the plains of northern Italy must have cost him 33,000 men; an enormous loss, which proves how severely thearmy must have suffered from the privations of the march and the severity of the Alpine climate; for not half of these 33,000 men call have fallen in battle. With his army in this condition, some period of repose was absolutely necessary; accordingly, Hannibal remained in the country of the Insubrians, till rest, and a more temperate climate, and wholesome food, with which the Gauls plentifully supplied him, restored ihe bodies and spirits of his soldiers, and made them again ready for action.32 His first movement was against the Taurinians, a Ligurian people, who were constant enemies of the Insubrians, and therefore would not listen to Hannibal, when he invited them to join his cause. He therefore attacked and stormed their principal town, put the garrison to the sword, and struck such terror into the neighboring tribes, that they submitted immediately, and became his allies. This was his first accession of strength in Italy, the first fruits, as he hoped, of a long succession of defections among the allies of Rome, so that the swords of the Italians might effect for him the conquest of Italy. Meanwhile Scipio had landed at Pisa, had crossed the Apennines, and taken the command of the praetors’ army, sending the proctors themselves Scipio marches to meet back to Rome, had crossed the Po at Placentia, and was ascending him. its left bank, being anxious to advance with all possible haste, in order to hinder a general rising of the Gauls by his presence.33 Hannibal, for the opposite reason, was equally anxious to meet him, being well aware that the Gauls were only restrained from revolting to the Carthaginians by fear, and that on his first success in the field they would join him.34 He therefore descended the left bank of the Po, keeping the river on his right; and Scipio having thrown a bridge over the Ticinus, had entered what are now the Sardinian dominions, and was still advancing westward, with the Po on his left, although, as the river here makes a bend to the southward, he was no longer in its immediate neighborhood.3 Each general was aware that: his enemy was at hand, and both pushed forward with their cavalry and light troops in advance of their main Engage.ment on the. armies, to reconnoiter. each other’s position and numbers. Thus T.icina. was brought on accidentally the,first action between Hannibal and the Romans in Italy, which, with some exaggeration, has been called the battle of the Ticic nus.36 The Numidians in Hannibal’s army, being’ now properly supported by heavy cavalry, were able to follow their own manner of fighting, and, falling on the flanks and rear of the Romans, who were already engaged in front with Hannibal’s heavy horsemen, took ample vengeance for their defeat on the Rhone. The Romans were routed; and the consul himself.was severely wounded, and owed his life, it is said, to the courage and fidelity of a Ligurian slave.31 With their cavalry thus crippled, it was impossible to act in such an open country; the Romans therefore hastily retreated, recrossed the Ticinus, and broke down the bridge, yet with so much hurry and confusion, that 600 men were left on the right bank, and fell into the enemy’s hands’; and then, crossing the Po also, established themselves under the walls of their colony, Placentia. s’ Polybius, IlI.

56. a olybius, ll. 64. a2 Polybius, III. 60. s6 Polybius, III. 65.‘3

Polybius, III. 56. 37 Polybius, III. 66. Livy, XXI. 46. 94 Polybius, III.

60.

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482 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIII Hannibal, finding the bridge over the Ticinus destroyed, reascended the left Hannibal’s advance, bank of the Po till he found a convenient point to cross, and then, having constructed a bridge with the river boats, carried over his army in safety. Immediately, as he had expected, the Gauls on the right bank received him with open arms; and again descending the river, he arrived on the second day after his passage in sight of the Roman army, and on the following day offered them battle. But as the Romans did not move, he chose out a spot for his camp, and posted his army five or six miles from the enemy, and apparently on the east of Placentia, cutting off their direct communication with Ariminum and Rome.38 On the first news of Hannibal’s arrival in Italy, the senate had sent orders to Campaign in S the other consul, Ti. Sempronius, to return immediately to reinSemp.onilus joins Sci-force his colleague.39

No event of importance had marked the pio. first summer of the war in Sicily. Hannibal’s spirit so animated the Carthaginian government, that they were everywhere preparing to act on the offensive; and before the arrival of Sempronius, M. iEmilius, the praetor, had already had to fight a naval action with the enemy, in order to defend Lilybeeum.40 He had defeated them, and prevented their landing, but the Carthaginian fleets still kept the sea; and whilst Sempronius was employing his whole force in the conquest of the island of Melita, the enemy were cruising on the northern side of Sicily, and making descents on the coast of Italy. On his return to Lilybaeum he was going in pursuit of them, when he received orders to return home and join his colleague. He accordingly left part ~f his fleet with the prator in Sicily, and part he committed to Sex.

Pomponius, his lieutenant, for the protection of the coasts of Lucania and Campania; while, from a dread of the dangers and delays of the winter navigation of the Adriatic, his army was to march from Lilybmeum to Messana, and, after crossing the strait, to go by land through the whole length of Italy, the soldiers being bound by oath to appear on a certain day at Ariminum. They completed their long march, it is said, in forty days; and from Ariminum they hastened to the scene of action, and effected their junction with the army of Scipio.41 Semnpronius found his colleague no longer in his original position, close by Position of the Roman Placentia and the Po, but withdrawn to the first hills which bound army.

the great plain on the south, and leave an interval here of about six miles between themselves and the river.42 But Hannibal’s army lying, as it seems, to the eastward, the Roman consul retreated westward, and leaving Placentia to its own resources, crossed to the left bank of the Trebia, and there lay encamped, just where the stream issues from the last hills of the Apennines. It appears that the Romans had several magazines on the right bank of the Po above Placentia, on which the consul probably depended for his subsistence; and these posts, together with the presence of his army, kept the Gauls on the immediate bank of the river quiet, so that they gave Hannibal no assistance. When the Romans fell back behind the Trebia, Hannibal followed them, and encamped about five miles off from them, directly between them and Placentia.43 But his powerful cavalry kept his communications open in every direction; and the Gauls who lived out of the immediate control of the Roman army and garrisons, supplied him with provisions abundantly. It is not explained by any existing writer how Sempronius was able to effect l polic. his junction with his colleague without any opposition from Hannibal. The regular road from Ariminum to Placentia passes through a country unvaried by a single hill; and the approach of a large army should have been announced to Hannibal by his Numidian cavalry, soon enough to allow him to interrupt it. But so much in war depends upon trifling accidents, s8 Polybius, III. 66. 41 Polybius, III. 61, 68. Livy, XXI. 51. rs Polybius, III. 61. 42 Polybius, III. 67. 4O

Livy, XXI. 49, 50. 43 Polybius, III. 68.

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CHAP. XLIII.] SEMPRONIUS ATTACKS HANNIBAL. 483 that it is in vain to guess where we are without information. We only know that the two consular armies were united in Scipio’s position on the left bank of the Trebia; that their united forces amounted to 40,000 men; and that Hannibal, with an army so reinforced by the Gauls since his arrival in Italy, that it was little inferior to his enemy’s,44 was so far from fearing to engage either consul singly, that he wished for nothing so much as to bring on a decisive battle with the combined armies of both. Depending on the support of the Gauls for his subsistence, he must not be too long a burden to them; they had hoped to be led to live on the plunder of the enemy’s country, not to maintain him at the expense of their own. In order to force the Romans to a battle, he began to attack their magazines.

Clastidium, now Castiggio, a small town on the right bank of the Po, nearly opposite to the mouth of the Ticinus, was betrayed into his hands by the governor; and he here found large supplies of corn.45 On the other hand, Sempronius, having no fears for the event of a battle, was longing for the glory of a triumph over such an enemy as Hanni-Sempronius comr bal;46 and as Scipio was still disabled by his wound, he had the my,,nds the Raisn ato command of the whole Roman army. Besides, the Gauls who engage. lived in the plain between the Trebia and Placentia, not knowing which side to espouse, had been plundered by Hannibal’s cavalry, and besought the consuls to protect them. This was no time, Sempronius thought, to neglect any ally who still remained faithful to Rome: he sent out his cavalry and light troops over the Trebia to drive off the plunderers; and in such skirmishes he obtained some partial success, which made him the more disposed to risk a general battle.47 For this, as a Roman officer, and before Hannibal’s military talents were fully known, he ought not to be harshly judged; but his manner of en-His rasnss. gaging was rash, and unworthy of an able general. He allowed the attacks of Hannibal’s light cavalry to tempt him to follow them to their own field of battle. Early in the morning the Numidians crossed the river, and skirmished close up to the Roman camp: the consul first sent out his cavalry, and then his light infantry, to repel them;48 and when they gave way and recrossed the river, he led his regular infantry out of his camp, and gave orders for the whole army to advance over the Trebia and attack the enemy. It was mid-winter, and the wide pebbly bed of the Trebia, which the summer traveller may almost pass dry-shod, was now filled with a rapid Commencement of the stream running breast-high. In the night it had rained or snowed battle on the Trebia. heavily; and the morning was raw and chilly, threatening sleet or snow.49 Yet Sempronius led his soldiers through the river, before they had eaten any thing; and wet, cold, and hungry as they were, he formed them in order’of battle on the plain.

Meanwhile Hannibal’s men had eaten their breakfast in their tents, and had oiled their bodies, and put on their armor around their fires., Then, when the enemy had crossed the Trebia, and were advancing in the open plain, the Carthaginians marched out to meet them; and about a mile in front of their camp, they formed in order of battle. Their disposition was simple: the heavy infantry, Gauls, Spaniards, and Africans, to the number of 20,000, were drawn up in a single line; the cavalry, 10,000 strong, was, with the elephants, on the two wings; the light infantry and Balerian slingers were in the fiont of the whole army. This was all Hannibal’s visible force. But near the Trebia, and now left in their rear by the advancing Roman legions, were lying close hid in the deep and overgrown bed of a small water-course, two thousand picked soldiers, horse and foot, commanded by Hannibal’s younger brother, Mago, whom he had posted there during the night, and whose ambush the Romans passed with no suspicion.

Arrived on the field of battle, the legions were formed in their usual order, with the allied infantry on the wings; and their weak cavalry 44

Polybius, III. 72. Livy, XXI. 52. 47 Polybius, III. 69. 45 Polybius, 1II.

69. 48 Polybius, III. 71.,n Polybius, III. 70. 49 Polybius III. 72.

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484 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIII. of 4000 men, ill able to contend with the numerous horsemen of Hannibal, were on the flanks of the whole line.

The Roman velites, or light infantry, who had been in action since daybreak, and had already shot away half their darts and arrows, were Defeat of the Roman light infantry and cav-soon driven back upon the hastati and principes, and passed through the intervals of the maniples to the rear. With no less ease were the cavalry beaten on both wings, by Hannibal’s horse and elephants. But when the heavy infantry, superior in numbers and better armed both for offence and defence, closed with the enemy, the confidence of Sempronius seemed to be justified: and the Romans, numbed and exhausted as they were, yet, by their excellence in all soldierly qualities, maintained the fight with equal ad. vantage.5? On a sudden a loud alarm was heard; and Mago, with his chosen band, broke Rout of the whole out from his ambush, and assaulted them furiously in the rear. army. Meantime both wings of the Roman infantry were broken down by the elephants, and overwhelmed by the missiles of the light infantry, till they were utterly routed, and fled towards the Trebia. The legions in the centre, finding themselves assailed on the rear, pushed desperately forwards, forced their way through the enemy’s line, and marched off the field straight to Placentia. Many of the routed cavalry made off in the same direction, and so escaped. But those who fled towards the river were slaughtered unceasingly by the conquerors till they reached it; and the loss here was enormous. The Carthaginians, however, stopped their pursuit on the brink of the Trebia: the cold was piercing, and to the elephants so intolerable that they almost all perished; even of the men and horses many were lost, so that the wreck of the Roman army reached their camp in safety; and when night came on, Scipio again led tlem across the river, and, passing unnoticed by the camp of the enemy, took refuge with his colleague within the walls of Placentia.51 So ended Hannibal’s first campaign in Italy. The Romans, after their defeat, Hannibal winters ia despaired of maintaining their ground on the Po; and the two Gaul. I consular armies retreated in opposite directions, Scipio’s upon Ariminum, and that of Sempronius across the Apennines into Etruria. Hannibal remained master of Cisalpine: Gaul; but the season did not allow him to besiege Placentia and Cremona; and, the temper of the Gauls rendered it evident that he must not make their country the-seat of war in another campaign. Already they bore the burden of supporting his army so impatiently, that he made an attempt, in the dead of the winter, to cross the Apennines into Etruria, and was only driven back by the extreme severity of the weather, the wind sweeping with such fury over the ridges, and through the passes of the mountains, that neither man nor beast could stand against it.5t He was forced therefore to winter in Gaul; but the innate fickleness and treachery of the people led him to suspect that attempts would be made against his life, and that a Gaulish assassin might hope to purchase forgiveness from the Romans for his country’s revolt, by destroying the general who had seduced them. He therefore put on a variety of disguises to baffle such designs; he wore false hair, appearing sometimes as a man of mature years, and sometimes with the gray hairs of old age;53 and if he had that taste for humor which great men are seldom without, and which some anecdotes of him imply, he must have been often amused by the mistakes thus occasioned, and have derived entertainment from that which policy or necessity had dictated. We should be glad to catch a distinct view of the state of Rome, when the news first arrived of the battle of the Trebia. Since the disaster of tlaminius is chosen toual and takIes the Caudium, more than a hundred years before, there had been Sainmand. known no defeat of two consular armies united; and the surprise 50 Polybius, III. 73. 52 Livy, XXI. 58. 6 Polybius, III. 74. 63 Polybius, III. 78.

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CH:AP. XLIII.J HANNIBAL ENTERS ETRURIA. 4855 and vexation must havebeen great. Sempronius, it is said, returned to Rome to hold the comitia; and the people resolved to elect as consul a man who, however unwelcome to the aristocracy, had already distinguished himself by brilliant victories in the very country which was now the seat of war. They accordingly chose C.

Flaminius for the second time consul; and with him was elected Cn.

Servilius Geminus, a man of an old patrician family, and personally attached to the aristocratical party, but unknown to us before his present consulship. Flaminius’ election was most unpalatable to the aristocracy; and as numerous prodigies were reported, and the Sibylline books consulted, and it was certain that various rites would be ordered to propitiate the favor of the gods,54 he had some A. C 531. A. c. 217o reason to suspect that his election would again be declared null and void, and he himself thus deprived of his command. He was anxious therefore to leave Rome as soon as possible: as his colleague was detained by the religious ceremonies, and by the care of superintending the new levies, Flaminius, it is said, left the city before the 15th of March, when his consulship was to begin, and actually entered upon his office at Ariminum, whither he had gone to superintend the formation of magazines, and to examine the state of the army.55 But the aristocracy thought it was no time to press party animosities;, they made no attempt to disturb Flaminius’ election; and he appears to have had his province assigned him without opposition, and to have been appointed to command Sempronius’ army in Etruria, while Servilius succeeded Scipio at Ariminum. The levies of soldiers went on vigorously; two legions were employed in Spain one was sent to Sicily, another to Sardinia, and another to Tarentum; and four legions, more or less thinned by the defeat at the Trebia, still formed the nucleus of two armies in Ariminum and in Etruria. It appears that four new legions were levied, with an unusually large proportion of soldiers from the Italian allies and the Latin name; and these being divided between the two consuls, the armies opposed to Hannibal on either line, by which he might advance, must have been, in point of numbers, exceedingly formidable. Servilius, as we have seen, had his headquarters at Ariminunz; and Scipio, whom he superseded, sailed as proconsul into Spain, to take command of his original army there. Flaminius succeeded to Sempronius in Etruria, and lay encamped, it is said, in the neighborhood of Arretium.56 Thus the main Roman armies lay nearly in the same positions which they had held eight years before, to oppose the expected invasion of the Hannibal enters EtruGauls. But as the Gauls then broke into Etruria unperceived by ria. either Roman army, so the Romans were again surprised by Hannibal on a line where they had not expected him. He crossed the Apennines, not by the ordinary road to Lucca, descending the valley of the Macra, but, as it appears, by a straighter line down the valley of the Anser or Serchio; and leaving Lucca on his right, he proceeded to struggle through the low and flooded country which lay between the right bank of the Arno and the Apennines below Florence, and of which the marsh or lake of Fucecchio still remains a specimen. Here again the sufferings of the army were extreme; but they were rewarded when they reached the firm ground below Fmsulae, and were let loose upon the plunder of the rich valley of the upper Arno.5 Flaminius lay quietly at Arretium, and did not attempt to give battle, but sent messengers to his colleague, to inform him of the enemy’s appear-Advances towards Pe. ance in Etruria. Hannibal was now on the south of the Apen-rogia’ nines, and in the heart of Italy; but the experience of the Samnites and of Pyrrhus had shown that the Etruscans were scarcely more to be relied on than the Gauls; and it was in the south, in Samnium, and Lucania, and Apulia, that the only materials existed for organizing a new Italian war against Rome. Accord6’ Livy, XXI.

62. 58 Livy, XXII. 2. 5~ Livy, XXI. 63. 57 Polybius, III. 78, 79.

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486 HISTORY OF ROME. J [CHAP. XLI, ingly Hannibal advanced rapidly into Etruria, and finding that Flaminius still did not move, passed by Arretium, leaving the Roman army in his rear, and marching, as it seemed, to gain the great plain of central Italy, which reaches from Perusia to Spoletum, and was traversed by the great road from Ariminum te Rome. The consul Flaminius now at last broke up from his position, and followed the Flaninius followsM. enemy. Hannibal laid waste the country on every side with fire and sword, to provoke the Romans to a hasty battle; and leaving Cortona on his left untouched on its mountain seat, he approached the lake of Thrasymenus, and followed the road along its northeastern shore, till it ascended the hills which divide the lake from the basin of the Tiber.58

Flaminius was fully convinced that Hannibal’s object was not to fight a battle, but tc lay waste the richest part of Italy: had he wished to engage, why had he noi attacked him when he lay at Arretium, and while his colleague was far away at Ariminum? With this impression he pressed on his rear closely, never dreaming that the lion would turn from the pursuit of his defenceless prey, to spring on the shepherds who were dogging his steps behind. The modern road along the lake, after passing the village of Passignano, runs Diffiolty of marking for some way close to the water’s edge on the right, hemmed in outthefieldofbattle. on the left by a line of cliffs, which make it an absolute defile. Then it turns from the lake and ascends the hills; yet, although they form something of a curve, there is nothing to deserve the name of valley; and the road, after leaving the lake, begins to ascend almost immediately, so that there is a very short distance during which the hills on the right and left command it. The ground therefore does not well correspond with the description of Polybius, who states that the valley in which the Romans were caught was not the narrow interval between the hills and the lake, but a valley beyond this defile, and running down to the lake, so that the Romans, when engaged in it, had the water, not on their right flank, but on their rear.59 Livy’s account is different, and represents the Romans as caught in the defile beyond Passignano, between the cliff and the lake. It is possible that if the exact line of the ancient road could be discovered, it might assist in solving the difficulty: in the mean time the battle of Thrasymenus must be one of the many events in ancient military history, where the accounts of historians, differing either with each other or with the actual appearances of the ground, are to us inexplicable. The consul had encamped in the evening on the side of the lake, just within Flaminius advances to the present Roman frontier, and on the Tuscan side of Passignano: attack Hannibal. he had made a forced march, and had arrived at his position so late that he could not examine the ground before him.60

Early the next morning he set forward again; the morning mist hung thickly over the lake and the low grounds, leaving the heights, as is often the case, quite clear. Flaminius, anxious to overtake his enemy, rejoiced in the friendly veil which thus concealed his advance, and hoped to fall upon Hannibal’s army while it was still in marching order, and its columns encumbered with the plunder of the valley of the Arno. He passed through the defile of Passignano, and found no enemy; this confirmed him in his belief that Hannibal did not mean to fight. Already the Numidian cavalry were on the edge of the basin of the Tiber: unless he could overtake them speedily, they would have reached the plain; and Africans, Spaniards, and Gauls, would be rioting in the devastation of the garden of Italy. So the consul rejoiced as the heads of his columns emerged from the defile, and, turning to the left, began to ascend the hills, where he hoped at least to find the rear-guard of the enemy. At this moment the stillness of the mist was broken by barbarian warcries on 5s Polybius, III. 82. Livy, XXII. 3.

10 Polybius, III. 83, 84.‘o III. 83.

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CrGAP. XLII I.] BATTLE OF THRASYMENUS. 487 every side; and both flanks of the [Roman column were assailed Destructio, of the ma at once. Their right was overwhelmed by a storm of javelins and body of thlle Rc.mans. arrows, shot as if from the midst of darkness, and striking into the soldier’s unguarded side, where he had no shield to cover him; while ponderous stones, against which no shield or helmet could avail, came crashing down upon their heads. On the left were heard the trampling of horse, and the wellknown warcries of the Gauls; and presently Hannibal’s dreaded cavalry emerged from the mist, and were in an instant in the midst of their ranks; and the huge forms ot the Gauls and their vast broadswords broke in upon them at the same moment. The head of the Roman column, which was already ascending to the higher ground, found its advance also barred; for here was the enemy whom they had so longed to overtake; here were some of the Spanish and African foot of Hannibal’s army drawn up to wait their assault. The Romans instantly attacked these troops, and cut their way through: these must be the covering parties, they thought, of Hannibal’s main battle; and, eager to bring the contest to a decisive issue, they pushed forward up the heights, not doubting that on the summit they should find the whole force of the enemy. And now they were on the top of the ridge, and to their astonishment no enemy was there; but the mist drew up, and, as they looked behind, they saw too plainly where Hannibal was: the whole valley was one scene of carnage, while on the sides of the hills above were the masses of the Spanish and African foot witnessing the destruction of the Roman army, which had scarcely cost them a single stroke. The advanced troops of the Roman column had thus escaped the slaughter; but being too few to retrieve the day, they continued their advance, which was now become a flight, and took refuge in one of the o rgu. neighboring villages. Meantime, while the centre of the army was cut to pieces in the valley, the rear was still winding through the defile beyond, between the cliffs and the lake. But they too were attacked from the heights above by the Gauls, and forced in confusion into the water.

Some of the soldiers, in desperation, struck out into the deep water swimming, and, weighed down by their armor, presently sank: others ran in as far as was within their depth, and there stood helplessly, till the enemy’s cavalry dashed in after them. Then they lifted up their hands, and cried for quarter; but on this day of sacrifice, the gods of Carthage were not to be defrauded of a single victim; and the horsemen pitilessly fulfilled Hannibal’s vow. Thus, with the exception of the advanced troops of the Roman column, who were about 6000 men, the rest of the army was utterly destroyed. DeathofFrminiu,. The consul himself had not seen the wreck consummated. On finding himself surrounded, he had vainly endeavored to form his men amidst the confusion, and to offer some regular resistance: when this was hopeless, he continued to do his duty as a brares soldier, till one of the Gaulish horsemen, who is said to have known him by sight from his former consulship, rode up and ran him through the body with his lance, crying out, ” So perish the man who slaughtered our brethren, and robbed us of the lands of our fathers.“6’ In these last words we probably rather read the unquenchable hatred of the Roman aristocracy to the author of an agrarian law, than the genuine language of the Gaul. Flaminius died bravely, sword in hand, having committed no greater military error than many an impetuous soldier, whose death in his country’s cause has been felt to throw a veil over his rashness, and whose memory is pitied and honored. The party feelings which have so colored the language of the ancient writers respecting him, need not be shared by a modern historian: Flaminius was indeed an unequal antagonist to Hannibal; but in his previous life, as consul and as censor, he had served his country well; and if the defile of Thrasymenus witnessed his rashness, it also contains his honorable grave. *1 Livy, XXII. 6.

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488 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIIn The battle must have been ended before noon; and Hannibal’s indefatigable Capturs of the ad-cavalry, after having destroyed the centre and rear of the Roman duct of Hannibal to the army, hastened to pursue the troops who had broken off from the prisoners.

front, and had for the present escaped the general overthrow. They were supported by the lightarmed foot and the Spaniards, and finding the Romans in the village to which they had retreated, proceeded to invest it on every side. The Romans, cut off from all relief, and with no provisions, surrendered to Maharbal, who commanded the party sent against them. They were brought to Hannibal: with the other prisoners taken in the battle, the whole number amounted to 15,000. The general addressed them by an interpreter; he told the soldiers who had surrendered to Maharbal, that their lives, if he pleased, were still forfeited, for Maharbal had no authority to grant terms without his consent: then he proceeded with the vehemence often displayed by Napoleon in similar circumstances, to inveigh against the Roman government and people, and concluded by giving all his Roman prisoners to the custody of the several divisions of his army. Then he turned to the Italian allies: they were not his enemies, he said; on the contrary, he had invaded Italy to aid them in casting off the yoke of Rome; he should still deal with them as he had treated his Italian prisoners taken at the Trebia; they were frce from that moment, and without ransom.“2 This being done, he halted for a shb.it time to rest his army, and buried with great solemnity thirty of the most distinguished of those who had fallen on his own side in the battle. His whole loss had amounted only to 1500 men, of whom the greater part were Gauls. It is said also that he caused careful search, but in vain, to be made for the body of the consul, Flaminius, being anxious to give him honorable burial.63 So he acted afterwards to L..milius and to Marcellus; and these humanities are worthy of notice, as if he had wished to show that, though his vow bound him to unrelenting enmity towards the Romans while living, it was a pleasure to him to feel that he might honor them when dead. The army of Hannibal now broke up from the scene of its victory, and, leaving Perusia unassailed, crossed the infant stream of the Tiber, and enHe ravages Umbria. tered upon the plains of Umbria. Here Maharbal, with the cavalry and light troops, obtained another victory over a party of some thousand men, commanded by C. Centenius, and killed, took prisoners, or dispersed the whole body.64 Then that rich plain, extending from the Tiber under Perusia to Spoletum, at the foot of the Monte Somma, was laid waste by the Carthaginians without mercy. The white oxen of the Clitumnus, so often offered in sacrifice to the gods of Rome by her triumphant generals, were now the spoil of the enemy, and were slaughtered on the altars of the gods of Carthagce, amidst prayers for the destruction of Rome. Tbh left bank of the Tiber again heard the Gaulish war-cry; and the terrified inhabitants fled to the mountains or into the fortified cities from this unwonted storm of barbarian invasion. The figures and arms of the Gauls, however formidable, might be familiar to many of the Umbrians; but they gazed in wonder on the slingers from the Balearian islands, on the hardy Spanish foot, conspicuous by their white linen coats. bordered with scarlet;65 on the regular African infantry, who had not yet exchanged their long lances and small shields for the long shield and stabbing, sword of the Roman soldier; on the heavy cavalry, so nunierous, and mounted on horses so superior to those of Italy; above all, on the bands of wild Numidians, who rode without saddle or bridle, as if the rider and his horse were one creature, and who scoured over the country with a speed and impetuosity defying escape or resistance. Amidst such a scene the colonists of Spoletum deserved well of their country, for shutting their gates boldly, and not yielding to the general panic; and when the Numid62 Polybius, III.

85. t4 Polybius, III. 86. 63 Livy, XlII. 7. Compare Valerius Matxi-6

Polybius, III. 114. Livy, XXII. 46. mus, V. 1, Ext. 6.

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CHAP. XLIII.] ROME ON HEARING OF THE BATTLE. 489 inn horsemen reined up their horses, and turned away from its well-manned walls, the colonists, with an excusable boasting, might claim the glory of having repulsed Hannibal.66 But Hannibal’s way lay not over the Monte Somma, although its steep pass, rising immediately behind Spoletum, was the last natural obstacle He marches into Apubetween him and Rome. Beyond that pass the country was full, lanot of Roman colonies merely, but of Roman citizens: he would soon have entered on the territory of the 1hirty-five Roman tribes, where every man whom he would have met was his enemny. His eyes were fixed elsewhere:’ the south was entirely open to him; the way to Apulia and Samnium was cleared of every impediment. He crossed the Apennines in the direction of Ancona, and invaded Picenuml: he then followed the coast of the Adriatic, through the country of the Marrucinians and Frentanians, till he arrived in the northern part of Apulia, in the country called by the Greeks Daunia.67 He advanced slowly and leisurely, encamping after short marches, and spreading devastation far and wide: the plunder of slaves, cattle, corn, wine, oil, and valuable property of every description, was almost more than the army could carry or drive along. The soldiers, who, after their exhausting march from Spain ovcr the Alps, had ever since been in active service, or in wretched quarters, and who from cold and the want of oil for anointing the skin had suffered severely from scorbutic disorders, were now revelling in plenty in a land of corn and olives and vines, where all good things were in such abundance that the very horses of the army, so said report, were bathed in old wines to improve their condition.68 Meanwhile, wherever the army passed, all Romans or Latins, of an age to bear arms, were, by Hannibal’s express orders, put to the sword.69 Many an occupier of domain land, many a farmer of the taxes, or of those multiplied branches of revenue which the Roman government possessed all over Italy, collectors of customs and port duties, surveyors and farmers of the forests, farmers of the mountain pastures, farmers of the salt on the seacoast, and of the mines in the mountains, were cut off by the vengeance of the Carthaginians; and Rome, having lost thousands of her poorer citizens in battle, and now losing hundreds of the richer classes in this exterminating march, lay bleeding at every pore. But her spirit was invincible. When the tidings df the disaster of Thrasymenus reached the city, the people crowded to the Forum, and called upon the magistrates to tell them the whole truth.70 The prmetor ing the news of the batperegrinus, M. Pomponius Matho, ascended the rostra, and said tie. to the assembled multitude, “We have been beaten in a great battle; our army is destroyed; and C. Flaminius, the consul, is killed.” Our colder temperaments scarcely enable us to conceive the effect of such tidings on the lively feelings of the people of the south, or to image to ourselves the cries, the tears, the hands uplifted in prayer, or clenched in rage, the confused sounds of ten thousand voices, giving utterance with breathless rapidity to their feelings of eager interest, of terror, of grief, or of fury. All the northern gates of the city were beset with crowds of wives and mothers, imploring every fresh fugitive from the. fatal field for some tidings of those most dear to them. The prtmtors, M. XEmilius and M. Pomponius, kept the senate sitting for several days from sunrise to sunset, without adjournment, in earnest consultation on the alarming state of their country. Peace was not thought of for a moment: nor was it proposed to withdraw a single soldier from Spain, or Sicily, or Sardinia; but it was re-Fabi,, Maximus is apn solved that a dictator ought to be appointed, to secure unity of pointed dictator. command. There had been no dictatorship for actual service since that of A. Atilius Colatinus, two-and-thirty years before, in the disastrous consulship of a6 Livy, XXII. 9. 6g Polybius, III. 86. 67

Polybius, III. 86. Livy, XXII. 9. 70 Polybius, III. 85. Livy, XXII. 7.

Polybius, III. 87, 88.

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490 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIIL P. Claudius Pulcher and L. Junius Pullus. But it is probable that some jeal ousy was entertained of the senate’s choice, if, in the absence of the consul, Cn Servilius, the appointment, according to ancient usage, had rested with them: nor was it thought safe to leave the dictator to nominate his master of the horse.

Hence an unusual course was adopted: the centuries in their comitia elected both the one and the other, choosing one from each of the two parties in the state; the dictator, Q. Fabius Maximus, from one of the noblest, but at the same time the most moderate families of the aristocracy, and himself a man of a nature no less gentle than wise; the master of the horse, M. Minucius Rufus, as representing the popular party.1 Religion in the mind of Q. Fabius was not a mere instrument for party purMensures to propitiato poses: although he may have had little belief in its truth, he was the gods. convinced of its excellence, and that a reverence for the gods was an essential element in the character of a nation, without which it must assuredly degenerate. Therefore, on the very day that he entered on his office, he summoned the senate, and dwelling on the importance of propitiating the gods, moved that the sibylline books should forthwith be consulted.72 They directed, among other things, that the Roman people should vow to the gods what was called “a holy spring;” that is to say, that every animal fit for sacrifice born in the spring of that year, between the first day of March and the thirtieth of Ap’il, and reared on any mountain or plain or river-bank or upland pasture throughuut Italy, should be offered to Jupiter.73

Extraordinary games were also vowed to be celebrated in the Circus Maximus; prayers were put up at all the temples; new temples were vowed to be built; and for three days those solemn sacrifices were performed, in which the images of the gods were taken down fiom their temples, and laid on couches richly covered, with tables full of meat and wine set before them, in the sight of all the people, as if the gods could not but bless the city where they had deigned to receive hospitality. Then the dictator turned his attention to the state of the war. A long camPlan of Fabius for the paign was in prospect; for it was still so early in the season that campaign. the preetors had not yet gone out of their provinces; and Hannibal was already in the heart of Italy. All measures were taken for the defence of the country; even the walls and towers of Rome were ordered to be made good against an attack. Bridges were to be broken down; the inhabitants of open towns were to withdraw into places of security; and in the expected line of Hannibal’s march, the country was to be laid waste before him, the corn destroyed, and the houses burnt.74 This would probably be done effectually in the Roman territory; but the allies were not likely to make such extreme sacrifices; and this of itself was a reason why Hannibal did nbt advance directly upon Rome. More than thirty thousand men, in killed and prisoners, had been lost to the Romans in the late battle. The consul Cn. Servilius commanded above thirty thousand in Cisalpine Gaul; and he was now retreating in all haste, after having heard of the total defeat of his colleague. Two new legions were raised, besides a large force out of the city tribes, which was employed partly for the defence of Rome itself, and partly, as it consisted laroely of the poorer citizens, for the service of the fleet. This last indeed was become a matter of urgent necessity; for the Carthaginian fleet was already on the Italian coast, and had taken a whole convoy of corn-ships, off Cosa, in Etruria, carrying supplies to the army in Spain; while the Roman ships, both in Sicily and at Ostia, had not yet been launched after the winter.75

Now all the ships at Ostia and in the Tiber were sent to sea in haste, and the consul Cn. Servilius commanded them; whilst the dictator and master of the horse, having added the two newly raised legions to the consul’s army, proceeded through Campania and 71 Polybius, III. 87. Livy, XXII. 8. 4

Livy, XXII. 11, a’ Livy, XXII. 9. -5 Livy, XXII. 11. s3 Livy, XXII. 10.

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CrAP XLIII.] FABIUS FOLLOWS HANNIBAL. 491 Samnium into Apulia, and, with an army greatly superior in numbers, encamped at the distance of about five or six miles from Hannibal.? Besides the advantage of numbers, the Romans had that of being regularly and abundantly supplied with provisions. They had no occasion Hanib ravagesSn to scatter their forces in order to obtain subsistence; but keeping nium and enters Cam their army together, and exposing no weak point to fortune, they pani followed Hannibal at a certain distance, watched their opportunity to cut off his detached parties, and above all, by remaining in the field with so imposing an army, overawed the allies, and checked their disposition to revolt.1 Thus Hannibal, finding that the Apulians did not join him, recrossed the Apennines, and moved through the country of the Hirpinians into that of the Caudinian Samnites. But Beneventum, once a great Samnite city, was now a Latin colony; and its gates were close shut against the invader. Hannibal laid waste -is territory with fire and sword, then moved onwards under the south side of the Matese, and took possession of Telesia, the native city of C. Pontius, but now a decayed and defenceless town: thence descending the Calor to its junction with the Vulturnus, and ascending the Vulturnus till he found it easily fordable, he finally crossed it near Allifme, and passing over the hills behind Calatia, descended by Cales into the midst of the Falernian plain, the glory of Campania.78 Fabius steadily followed him, not descending into the plain, but keeping his army on the hills above it, and watching all his movements. Again FRUns feloos him. the Numidian cavalry were seen scouring the country on every side; and the smoke of burning houses marked their track. The soldiers in the Roman army beheld the sight with the greatest impatience: they were burning for battle, and the master of the horse himself shared and encouraged the general feeling. But Fabius was firm in his resolution; he sent parties to secure even the pass of Tarracina, lest Hannibal should attempt to advance by the Appian road upon Rome; he garrisoned Casilinum on the enemy’s rear; the Vulturnus from Casilinum to the sea barred all retreat southwards; the colony of Cales stopped the outlet from the plain by the Latin road; while from Cales to Casilinum the hills formed an unbroken barrier, steep and wooded, the few paths over which were already secured by the Roman soldiers.79 Thus Fabius thought that Hannibal was caught as in a pitfall; that his escape was cut off, while his army, having soon wasted its plunder, could not possibly winter where it was, without magazines, and without a single town in its possession. For himself, he had all the resources of Campania and Samnium on his rear; while on his right the Latin road, secured by the colonies of Cales, Casinum, and Fregellue, kept his communications with Rome open.

Hannibal, on his part, had no thought of wintering where he was; but he had carefully husbanded his plunder, that it might supply his winter Hannibl’s tifice tc consumption, so that it was important to him to carry it off in escape the Roman safety. He had taken many thousand cattle; and his army be- ”” Y sides was encumbered with its numerous prisoners, over and above the corn, wine, oil, and other articles, which had been furnished by the ravage of one of the richest districts in Italy. Finding that the passes in the hills between Cales and the Vulturnus were occupied by the enemy, he began to consider how he could surprise or force his passage without abandoning any of his plunder. He first thought of his numerous prisoners; and dreading lest in a night march they should either escape or overpower their guards and join their-countrymen in attacking him, he commanded them all, to the number it is said of 5000 men, to be put to the sword. Then he ordered 2000 of the stoutest oxen to be selected from the plundered cattle, and pieces of split pine wood, or dry vine wood, to be fastened to their horns. About two hours before midnight the drovers began to,e Polybius, III. 88. s Polybius, III. 90. Livy, XXII.

18.‘7 Polybius, III. 90. 70 Livy, XXII. 15.

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492 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIII drive them straight to the hills, having first set on fire the bundles of wood about their heads; while the light infantry following them till they began to run wild, then made their own way to the hills, scouring the points just above the pass occupied by the enemy. Hannibal then commenced his march; his African infantry led the way, followed by the cavalry; then came all the baggage; and the rear was covered by the Spaniards and Gauls. In this order he followed the road in the defile, by which he was to get out into the upper valley of the Vulturnus, above Casilinum and the enemy’s army.80 He found the way quite clear; for the Romans who had guarded it, seeing the hills above them illuminated on a sudden with a multitude of movtssuccess..ing lights, and nothing doubting that Hannibal’s army was attempting to break out over the hills in despair of forcing the road, quitted their position in haste, and ran towards the heights to interrupt or embarrass his retreat. Meanwhile Fabius, with his main army, confounded at the strangeness of the sight, and dreading lest Hannibal was tempting him to his ruin as he had tempted Flaminius, kept close within his camp till the morning. Day dawned only to show him his own troops who had been set to occupy the defile, engaged on the hills above with Hannibal’s light infantry. But presently the Spanish foot were seen scaling the heights to reinforce the enemy; and the Romans were driven down to the plain with great loss and confusion; while the Spaniards and the light troops, having thoroughly done their work, disappeared behind the hills, and followed their main army.81 Thus completely successful, and leaving his shamed and baffled enemy behind him, Hannibal no longer thought of returning to Apulia by the most direct road, but resolved to extend his devastations still further before the season ended. He mounted the valley of the Vulturnus towards Venafrum, marched from thence into Samnium, crossed the Apennines, and descended into the rich Pelignian plain by Sulmo, which yielded him an ample harvest of plunder, and thence retracing his steps into Samnium, he finally returned to the neighborhood of his old quarters in Apulia. The summer was far advanced; Hannibal had overrun the greater part of His plan for the win-Italy: the meadows of the Clitumnus and the Vulturnus, and the ter.

forest glades of the high Apennines, had alike seen their cattle driven away by the invading army; the Falernian plain and the plain of Sulmo had alike yielded their tribute of wine and oil; but not a single city had as yet opened its gates to the conqueror, not a single state of Samnium had welcomed him as its champion, under whom it might revenge its old wrongs against Rome. Everywhere the aristocratical party had maintained its ascendency, and had repressed all mention of revolt from Rome. Hannibal’s great experiment therefore had hitherto failed. He knew that his single army could not conquer Italy; as easily might king William’s Dutch guards have conquered England: and six months had brought Hannibal no fairer prospect of aid within the country itself, than the first week after his landing in Torbay brought to king William. But among Hannibal’s greatest qualities was the patience with which he knew how to abide his time; if one campaign had failed of its main object, another mut be tried; if the fidelity of the Roman allies had been unshaken by the disaster of Thrasymenus, it must be tried by a defeat yet more fatal. Meantime he would take undisputed possession of the best winterquarters in Italy; his men would be plentifully fed; his invaluable cavalry would have forage in abundance; and this at no cost to Carthage, but wholly at the expense of the enemy. The point which he fixed upon to winter at was the very edge of the Apulian plain, where it joins the mountains: on one side was a boundless expanse of corn, intermixed with open grass land, burnt up in summer, but in winter fresh and green; whilst on the other side were the wide pastures of the mountain forests, where his numnerous cattle might be turned out till the first snows of autumn fell. These were e Polybius, III. 93. Livy, XXII. 16, 17. 8’ Polybius, III. 94. Livy, XXII. 18.

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CHAP. XLIII.] UNPOPULARITY OF FABIUS. 493 as yet far distant; for the corn in the plain, although ripe, was still standing; and the rich harvests of Apulia were to be gathered this year by unwonted reapers. Descending from Samrnium, Hannibal accordingly appeared before the little town of Geronium, which was situated somewhat more than twenty le takes Geroium.

miles northwest of the Latin colony of Luceria, in the immediate neighborhood of Larinum.82 The town, refusing to surrender, was taken, and the inhabitants put to the sword; but the houses and walls were left standing, to serve as a great magazine for the army; and the soldiers were quartered in a regularly fortified camp without the town. Here Hannibal posted himself; and, keeping a third part of his men under arms to guard the camp and to cover his foragers, he sent out the other two-thirds to gather in all the corn of the surrounding country, or to pasture his cattle on the adjoining mountains. In this manner the storehouses of Geronium were in a short time filled with corn. Meanwhile the public mind at Rome was strongly excited against the dictator. He seemed like a man who, having played a cautious game, at UnpopulaiityofFaiiua last makes a false move, and is beaten; his slow defensive system, unwelcome in itself, seemed rendered contemptible by Hannibal’s triumphant escape from the Falernian plain. But here too Fabius showed a patience worthy of all honor. Vexed as he must have been at his failure in Campania, he still felt sure that his system was wise; and again he followed Hannibal into Apulia, and encamped, as before, on the high grounds in his neighborhood.

Certain religious offices called him at this time to Rome; but he charged Minucius to observe his system strictly, and on no account to risk a battle.83 The master of the horse conducted his operations wisely: he advanced his camp to a projecting ridge of hills, immediately above the plain, Minoeiusadoptsabold. and sending out his cavalry and light troops to cut off Hannibal’s er system. foragers, obliged the enemy to increase his covering force, and to restrict the range of his harvesting. On one occasion he cut off a great number of the foragers, and even advanced to attack Hannibal’s camp, which, owing to the necessity of detaching so many men all over the country, was left with a very inferior force to defend it. The return of some of the foraging parties obliged the Romans to retreat; but Minucius was greatly elated, and sent home very encouraging reports of his success.84 The feeling against Fabius could no longer be restrained. Minucius had known how to manage his system more ably than he had done himself; Hia authority is msda such merit at such a crisis deserved to be rewarded; nor was it equalto tle dictator’s. fit that the popular party should continue to be deprived of its share in the conduct of the war. Even among his own party Fabius was not universally popular: he had magnified himself and his system somewhat offensively, and had spoken too harshly of the blunders of former generals. Thus it does not appear that the aristocracy offered any strong resistance to a bill brought forward by the tribune M. Metilius, for giving the master of the horse power equal to the dictator’s. The bill was strongly supported by C.

Terentius Varro, who had been prretor in the preceding year, and was easily carried.85 The dictator and master of the horse now divided the army between them, and encamped apart, at more than a mile’s distance from each other. He is rollted, and Fa. Their want of cooperation was thus notorious; and Hannibal was biu veslim. not slow to profit by it. He succeeded in tempting Minucius to an engagement on his own ground; and having concealed about 5000 men in some ravines and hollows close by, he called them forth in the midst of the action to fall on the enemy’s rear.

The rout of the Trebia was well-nigh repeated; but Fabius was near enough to come up in time to the rescue; and his fresh legions checked the 3

Polybius, III. 100. Livy, XXII. 23. 8c Polybius, III. 101, 102. Iivy, XXII. 84. u Polybius, III. 94. Livy, XXII. 18. 5 Polybius, III. 103. Livy, XXII. 25, 26.

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494 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIIL pursuit of the conquerors, and enabled the broken Romans to rally. Still the loss already sustained was severe; and it was manifest that Fabius had saved his colleague from total destruction. Minucius acknowledged this generously: he instantly gave up his equal and separate command, and placed himself and his army under the dictator’s orders.86 The rest of the season passed quietly; and the dictator and master of the horse resigning their offices as usual at the end of six months, the army during the winter was put under the command of the consuls; Cn. Servilius having brought home and laid up the fleet, which he had commanded during the summer, and M. Atilius Regulus having been elected to fill the place of Flaminius. Meanwhile the elections for the following year were approaching; and it was state of feeling at evident that they would be marked by severe party struggles. Rcme. The mass of the Roman people were impatient of the continuance of the war in Italy; not only the poorer citizens, wL.bm it obliged to constant military service through the winter, and with no prospect of plunder, but still more perhaps the moneyed classes, whose occupation as farmers of the revenue was so greatly curtailed by Hannibal’s army. Again, the occupiers of domain lands in remote parts of Italy could get no returns from their property; the wealthy graziers, who fed their cattle on the domain pastures, saw their stock carried off to furnish winter provisions for the enemy. Besides, if Hannibal were allowed to be unassailable in the field, the allies, sooner or later, must be expected to join him; they would not sacrifice every thing for Rome, if Rome could neither protect them nor herself. The excellence of the Roman infantry was undisputed: if fith equal numbers they could not conquer Hannibal’s veterans, let their numbers be increased, and they must overwhelm him. These were, no doubt, the feelings of many of the nobility themselves, as well as of the majority of the people; but they were imbittered by party animosity: the aristocracy, it was said, seemed bent on throwing reproach on all generals of the popular party, as if none but themselves were fit to conduct the war; Minucius himself had yielded to this spirit by submitting to be commanded by Fabius, when the law had made him his equal: one consul, at least, must be chosen, who would act firmly for himself and for the people; and such a man, to whocse merits the bitter hatred of the aristocratical party bore the best testimony, was to be found in C.

Terentius Varro.87 Varro, his enemies said, was a butcheres son; nay, it was added, that he had A. U. c. 538. A. c. himself been a butcher’s boy,88
and had only been enabled by the 1,6.,conelt.of taed fortune which his father had left him to throw aside his ignoble calling, and to aspire to public offices. So Cromwell was called a brewer; but Varro had been successively elected quaestor, plebeian and curule Wdile, and prmtor, while we are not told that he was ever tribune; and it is without example in Roman history, that a mere demagogue, of no family, with no other merits, civil or military, should be raised to such nobility. Varro was eloquent, it is true; but eloquence alone would scarcely have so recommended him; and if in his przutorship, as is probable, he had been one of the two home proetors, he must have possessed a competent knowledge of law. Besides, even after his defeat at Cannme, he was employed for several years in various important offices, civil and military; which would never have been the case had he been the mere factious braggart that historians have painted him. The aristocracy tried in vain to prevent his election: he was not only returned consul, but he was returned alone, no other candidate obtaining a sufficient number of votes to entitle him to the suffrage of a tribe.89 Thus he held the comitia for the election of his colleague; and considering the great influence exercised by the magistrate so presiding, it is creditable to him, and to the temper of the people generally, e8 1’olybius, III. 104, 105. Livy, XXI. 28, 8s Valerius Maximus, III. 4, 4. 39. Plutarch, Fabius, 13. 09 Livy, XXII. 05. vy Livy, XXII. 84.

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CHAP. XLIII.] HANNIBAL. 495 that the other consul chosen was L. iEmilius Paullus, who was not only a known partisan of the aristocracy, but having been consul three years before, had been brought to trial for an alleged misappropriation of the plunder taken in the Illyrian war, and, although acquitted, was one of the most unpopular men in Rome. Yet he was known to be a good soldier; and the people, having obtained the election of Varro, did not object to gratify the aristocracy by accepting the candidate of their choice. No less moderate and impartial was the temper shown in the elections of praetors. Two of the four were decidedly of the aristocratical party, M. Marcellus and L. Postumius Albinus; the other two,were also men of consular rank, and no way known as opponents of the nobility, P. Furius Philus and M. Pomponius Matho. The two latter were to have the home proetorships; Marcellus was to command the fleiet, and take charge of the southern coast of Italy; L. Postumius was to watch the frontier of Cisalpine Gaul. The winter and spring passed without any military events of importance. Servilius and Regulus retained their command as proconsuls for some time after their successors had come into office; but nothing beyond occasional skirmishes took place between them and the enemy. Hannibal was at Geronium, maintaining his army on the supplies which he had so carefully collected in the preceding campaign: the consuls apparently were posted a little to the southward, receiving their supplies from the country about Canusium, and immediately from a large magazine, which they had established at the small town of Cannge, near the Aufidus.90 Never was Hannibal’s genius more displayed than during this long period of inactivity. More than half of his army consisted of Gauls, of all barbarians the most impatient and uncertain in their humor, whose a.nnibal during the fidelity, it was said, could only be secured by an ever open hand; witer. no man was their friend any longer than he could gorge them with pay or plunder. Those of his soldiers who were not Gauls were either Spaniards or Africans; the Spaniards were the newly conquered subjects of Carthage, strangers to her rams and language, and accustomed to divide their lives between actual battle and the most listless bodily indolence; so that, when one of their tribes first saw the habits of a Roman camp, and observed the centurions walking up and down before the praetorium for exercise, the Spaniards thought them mad, and ran up to guide them to their tents, thinking that he who was not fighting could do nothing but lie at his ease and enjoy himself.9’ Even the Africans were foreigners to Carthage: they were subjects harshly governed, and had been engaged within the last twenty years in a war of extermination with their masters. Yet the long inactivity of winterquarters, trying to the discipline of the best national armies, was borne patiently by Hannibal’s soldiers: there was neither desertion nor mutiny amongst them; even the fickleness of the Gauls seemed spell-bound; they remained steadily in their camp in Apulia, neither going home to their own country, nor over to the enemy. On the contrary, it seems that fresh bands of Gauls must have joined the Carthaginian army after the battle of Thrasymenus, and the retreat of the Roman army from Ariminum. For the Gauls and the Spaniards and the Africans were overpowered by the ascendency of Hannibal’s character: under his guidance they felt themselves invincible: with such a general the yoke of Carthage might seem to the Africans and Spaniards the natural dominion of superior beings; in such a champion the Gauls beheld the appointed instrument of their country’s gods to lead them once more to assault the capitol. Silanus, the Greek historian, was living with Hannibal daily;92 and though not intrusted with his military and political secrets, he must have seen and known him as a man; he must have been familiar with his 00 Polybins, III. 107. 02 Nepos, Hannib. c. XIII. 00

Strabo, p. 164.

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496 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLII1 habits of life, and must have heard his conversation in those unrestrained moments when the lightest words of great men display the character of their minds so strikingly. His work is lost to us; but had it been worthy of his opportunities, anecdotes from it must have been quoted by other writers, and we should know what Hannibal was. Then, too, the generals who were his daily companions would be something more to us than names: we should know Maharbal, the best cavalry officer of the finest cavalry service in the world: and Hasdrubal, who managed the commissariat of the army for so many years in an enemy’s country; and Hannibal’s young brother, Mago, so full of youthful spirit and enterprise, who commanded the ambush at the battle of the Trebia. We might learn something, too, of that Hannibal, surnamed the Fighter, who was the general’s coun-.sellor, ever prompting him, it was said, to deeds of savage cruelty,93 but whose counsels Hannibal would not have listened to, had they been merely cruel, had they not breathed a spirit of deep devotion to the cause of Carthage, and of deadly hatred to Rome, such as possessed the heart of Hannibal himself. But Silanus saw and heard without heeding or recording; and on the tent and camp of Hannibal there hangs a veil, which the fancy of the poet may penetrate; but the historian turns away in deep disappointment; for to him it yields neither sight nor sound.

Spring was come, and well-nigh departing; and in the warm plains of Apulia the corn was ripening fast, while Hannibal’s winter supplies were Opening of the campaign; Hannibal takes now nearly exhausted. He broke up from his camp before Geronium, descended into the Apulian plains, and whilst the Roman army was still in its winter position, he threw himself on its rear, and surprised its great magazine at Canne.94 The citadel of Cannee was a fortress of some strength; this, accordingly, he occupied, and.placed himself, on the very eve of harvest, between the Roman army and its expected resources; while he secured to himself all the corn of southern Apulia. It was only in such low and warm situations that the corn was nearly ready; the higher country, in the immediate neighborhood of Apulia, is cold and backward; and the Romans were under the necessity of receiving their supplies from a great distance, or else of retreating, or of offering battle. Under these circumstances the proconsuls sent to Rome, to ask what they were to do. The turning point of this question lay in the disposition of the allies. We cannot doubt that Hannibal had been busy during the winter in soundThe Roman ary. ing their feelings; and now it appeared that, if Italy was to be ravaged by the enemy for a second summer without resistance, their patience would endure no longer. The Roman government therefore resolved to risk a battle; but, they sent orders to the proconsuls to wait till the consuls should join them with their newly raised army; for a battle being resolved upon, the senate hoped to secure success by an overwhelming superiority of numbers. We do not exactly know the proportion of the new levies to the old soldiers; but when the two consuls arrived on the scene of action, and took the supreme command of the whole army, there were no fewer than eight Roman legions under their orders, with an equal force of allies; so that the army opposed to Hannibal must have amounted to 90,000 men.9” It was evident that so great a multitude could not long be fed at a distance from its resources; and thus a speedy engagement was inevitable. But the details of the movements by which the two armies were brought in varro resolves to bring presence of each other on the banks of the Aufidus, are not easy sn a batt!e. to discover. It appears that the Romans, till the arrival of the new consuls, had not ventured to follow Hannibal closely; for when they did follow him, it took them two days’ march to arrive in his neighborhood, where they encamped at about six miles distance from him.96 They found him on the 93

Polybius, IX. 24, 5. 96 Polybius, III. 107. 94 Polybius, III. 107. 90

Polybius, III. 110.

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CHAP. XLIII.J MANCUVRES AND SKIRMISHES. 497 left bank of the Aufidus, about eight or nine miles from the sea, and busied, probably, in collecting the corn from the early district on the coast, the season being about the middle of June. The country here was so level and open, that the consul, L. _/Emilius, was unwilling to approach the enemy more closely, but wished to take a position on the hilly ground further from the sea, and to bring on the action there.9 But Varro, impatient for battle, and having the supreme command of the whole army alternately with:zEmilius every other day, decided the question irrevocably on the very next day, by interposing himself between the enemy and the sea, with his left resting on the Aufidus, and his right communicating with the town of Salapia. From this position.Emilius, when he again took the command in chief, found it impossible to withdraw. But availing himself of his great supe-Emiius crosses the riority in numbers, he threw a part of his army across the river, Aufidui. and posted them in a separate camp on the right bank, to have the supplies of the country south of the Aufidus at command, and to restrain the enemy’s parties who might attempt to forage in that direction. When Hannibal saw the Romans in this situation, he also advanced nearer to them, descending the left bank of the Aufidus, and encamped over against the main army of the enemy, with his right resting on the river. The next day, which, according to the Roman calendar, was the last of the month Quinctilis, or July, the Roman reckoning being six or seven Preparatory manouweeks in advance of the true season, Hannibal was making his res andakirmishe. preparations for battle, and did not stir from his camp; so that Varro, whose command it was, could not bring on an action. But on the first of Sextilis, or August, Hannibal being now quite ready, drew out his army in front of his camp and offered battle..AEmilius, however, remained quiet, resolved not to fight on such ground, and hoping that Hannibal would soon be obliged to fall back nearer the hills, when he found that he could no longer forage freely in the country near the sea.9” Hannibal, seeing that the enemy did not move, marched back his infantry into his camp, but sent his Numidian cavalry across the river to attack the Romans on that side, as they were coming down in straggling parties to the bank to get water. For the Aufidus, though its bed is deep and wide, to hold its winter floods, is a shallow or a narrow stream in summer, with many points easily fordable, not by horse only, but by infantry. The watering parties were driven in with some loss, and the Numidians followed them to the very gates of the camp, and obliged the Romans, on the right bank, to pass the summer night in the burning Apulian plain without water. At daybreak on the next morning, the red ensign, which was the wellknown signal for battle, was seen flying over Varro’s headquarters;9 Hannibal draw nout hs and he issued orders, it being his day of command, for the main army. army to cross the river, and form in order of battle on the right bank. Whether he had any further object in crossing to the right bank, than to enable the soldiers on that side to get water in security, we do not know; but Hannibal, it seems, thought that the ground on either bank suited him equally; and he too forded the stream at two separate points, and drew out his army opposite to the enemy. The strong town of Canusium was scarcely three miles off in his rear; he had left his camp on the other side of the river; if he were defeated, escape seemed hopeless. But when he saw the wide, open plain around him, and looked at his numerous and irresistible cavalry, and knew that his infantry, however inferior in numbers, were far better and older soldiers than the great mass of their opponents, he felt that defeat was impossible. In this confidence his spirits were not cheerful merely, but even mirthful; he rallied one of his officers jestingly, who noticed the overwhelming numbers of the Romans; those near him ” Polybius, III. 110.,u Plutarch, Fabius, 15.,a Polybius, III. 111. Livy, XXII. 45. 32

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498 HISTORY OF ROME. [CNAP. XLIIL laughed; and as any feeling at such a moment is contagious, the laugh was echoed by others; and the soldiers, seeing their great general in such a mood, were satisfied that he was sure of victory.‘00 The Carthaginian army faced the north, so that the, early sun shone on their its position. right flank, while the wind, which blew strong from the south, but without a drop of rain, swept its clouds of dust over their backs, and carried,them full into the faces of the enemy.’~’ On their left, resting on the river, were the Spanish and Gaulish horse; next in the line, but thrown back a little,’ were half of the African infantry armed like the Romans; on their right, somewhat in advance, were the Gauls and Spaniards, with their companies intermixed; then came the rest of the African foot, again thrown back like their comrades; and on the right of the whole line were the Numidian light horsemen.102 The right of the army rested, so far as appears, on nothing; the ground was open and level; but at some distance were hills overgrown with copsewood, and furrowed with deep ravines, in which, according to one account of the battle, a body of horsemen and of light infantry lay in ambush. The rest of the light troops, and the Balearian slingers, skirmished as usual in front of the whole line. Meanwhile the masses of the Roman infantry were forming their line opposite. That of the Roman The sun on their left flashed obliquely on their brazen. helmets, army, now uncovered for battle,- and lit up the waving forest of their red and black plumes, which rose upright from their helmets a foot and a half high. They stood brandishing their formidable pila, covered with their long shields, and bearing on their right thigh their peculiar and fatal weapon, the heavy sword, fitted alike to cut and to stab.l03 On the right of the line were the Roman legions; on the left the infantry of the allies; while between the Roman right and the river were the Roman horsemen, all of them of wealthy or noble families; and on the left, opposed to the Numidians, were the horsemen of the Italians and of the Latin name. The velites or light infantry covered the front, and were ready to skirmish with the light troops and slingers of the enemy. For some reason or other, which is not explained in any account of the battle, the Roman infantry were formed in columns rather than in line, drawn up in columns. the files of the maniples containing many more than their. ranks.l04 This seems an extraordinary tactic to be adopted in a plain by an army inferior in cavalry, but very superior in infantry. Whether the Romans relied on the river as a protection to their right flank, and their left was covered in some manner which is not mentioned,-one account would lead us to suppose that it reached nearly to the sea,‘05 or whether the great proportion of new levies obliged the Romans to adopt the system of the phalanx, and to place their raw soldiers in the rear, as incapable of fighting in the front’ ranks with Hannibal’s 100 Plutarch, Fabius, 15. ElrvTo Se Tvo o rTov that “this had been found convenient against 7repS atrv &abupbs laoortov, rovopa UKVor, o Oav-the Carthaginians in the former war. It was paorTv arrO obaivsrat Tr 7rX00os rTv roXElhAv avva-indeed no bad way of resistance against eleyayv T7 rr-.6nmorroV 5 Avvt3laS, ” rEpov,” ETrEv, “(

W phants, to make the ranks thick and short, but rI’KWV, L.nOE cs Troihrov OavaaaTreepo.“‘EPo-the files long, as also to strengthen well the tleoV
ie roV rTaKWvo; ” To roiov’” ””..Or’” ui rear, that it might stand fast compacted as a ” o rroyUro’ TOo OrviTOVJ, oUSiS EV aVTrotS ri’Kv wall, under shelter whereof the disordered KaXetrat.” rFvopEvov 31 taps o5dav abroL? TOe troops might rally themselves. Thus much, it -rt’l/aros oxir/rrst yeAcos rra~o’ xai Ktarflatvov ayrt seems, that Terentius had learned of some old rTOV roV aT0 arv aO raVTWLV i Tid TratylyEPvov aray-soldiers; and therefore he now ordered his batyiXXovr7e, Wares t3a roAXWv 7roXOv rivar Trb ylAcora ties accordingly, as meaning to show more skill sat #v6’ aLXa/aEv Et avrobs UvvaaOat roTs 0rspi’Avvi-than was in his understanding. But the Car-,Bav. Touro r os KaIpX-qovLotS /iooto Odmkos wapearl.tthaginians had here,no elephants with them Xoqeotdvors o ao7roX
oAtX Ka ioaXvpoC roV Kacraopo-in the field: their advantage was in horse, votvroS IrrLvatr yEXav oiroJ Kai rraisEv rTi arpa-arny~ against which this manner of imbattailing was Ma0pa TPbv KivVVov. very unprofitable, forasmuch as their charge Livy, XXII. 46. Plutalrch, Fabius, 16. is better sustained in front, than upon a long 102 Polybius, III. 113. Livy, XXII.

46. flank.” 11 Polybius, III. 114. Livy, XXII. 45. 105 Appian, VII. 21. or Tr Xato E’Xovrts X.4 Polybius, III. 113. roLtoPv rro)rXarartov To pa-ri-OaXdcran. sog Ev rats arTilpats roO rTsrTrov. Raleigh suggests

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CnAP. XLIII.] BATTLE OF CANNE. 499 veterans, it appears at any rate that the Roman infantry, though nearly double the number of the enemy, yet formed a line of only equal length with Hannibal’s. The skirmishing of the lightarmed troops preluded as usual to the battle: the Balearian slingers slung their stones like hail into the ranks of the Defeat of the Roman line, and severely wounded the consul 2JEmilius himself. -cavary Then the Spanish and Gaulish horse charged the Romans front to front, and maintained a standing fight with them, many leaping off their horses and fighting on foot, till the Romans, outnumbered and badly armed, without cuirasses, with light and brittle spears, and with shields made only of ox-hide, were totally routed, and driven off the field.‘06 Hasdrubal, who commanded the Gauls and Spaniards, followed up his work effectually; he chased the Romans along the river till he had almost destroyed them; and then, riding off to the right, he came up to aid the Numidians, who, after their manner, had been skirmishing indecisively with the cavalry of the Italian allies. These, on seeing the Gauls and Spaniards advancing, broke away and fled; the Numidians, most effective in pursuing a flying enemy, chased them with unweariable speed, and slaughtered them unsparingly; while Hasdrubal, to complete his signal services on this day, charged fiercely upon the rear of the Roman infantry. He found its huge masses already weltering in helpless confusion, crowded upon one another, totally disorganized, and fighting each r an as Ofth whole army. he best could, but struggling on against all hope by mere indomitable courage. For the Roman columns on the right and left, finding the Gaulish and Spanish foot advancing in a convex line or wedge, pressed forwards to assail what seemed the flanks of the enemy’s column; so that, being already drawn up with too narrow a front by their original formation, they now became compressed still more by their own movements, the right and left converging towards the centre, till the whole army became one dense column, which forced its way onwards by the weight of its charge, and drove back the Gauls and Spaniards into the rear of their own line.

Meanwhile its victorious advance had carried it, like the English column at Fontenoy, into the midst of Hannibal’s army; it had passed between the African infantry on its right and left; and now, whilst its head was struggling against the’Gauls and Spaniards, its long flanks were fiercely assailed by the Africans, who, facing about to the right and left, charged it home, and threw it into utter disorder. In this state, when they were forced together into one unwieldy crowd, and already falling by thousands, whilst the Gauls and Spaniards, now advancing in their turn, were barring further progress in front, and whilst the Africans were tearing their mass to pieces on both flanks, IIasdrubal with his victorious Gaulish and Spanish horsemen broke with thundering fury upon their rear. Then followed a butchery such as has no recorded equal, except the slaughter of the Persians in their camp, when the Greeks forced it after the battle of Platna. Unable to fight or fly, with no quarter asked or given, the Romans and Italians fell before the swords of their enemies, till, when the sun set upon the field, there were left out of that vast multitude no more than three thousand men alive and unwounded; and these fled in straggling parties, under cover of the darkness, and found a refuge in the neighboring towns.‘07 The consul zEmilius, the proconsul Cn. Servilius, the late master of the horse M. Minucius, two qusestors, twenty-one military tribunes, and eighty senators, lay dead amidst the carnage; Varro with seventy horsemen had escaped from the rout of the allied cavalry on the right of the army, and made his way safely to Venusia. But the Roman loss was not yet completed. A large force had been left in the camp on the left bank of the Aufidus, to attack Hannibal’s f th camp. camp during the action, which it was supposed that, with his apt oft p inferior numbers, he could not leave adequately guarded. But it was defended 105 Polyb. III.

115. Livy, XXII. 47. 107 Polybius, III. 116. Livy, XXII, 49.

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500 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV so obstinately, that the Romans were still besieging it in vain, when Hannibal, now completely victorious in the battle, crossed the river to its relief. Then the besiegers fled in their turn to their own camp, and there, cut off from all succor, they presently surrendered. A few resolute men had forced their way out of the smaller camp on the right bank, and had escaped to Canusium; the rest who were in it followed the example of their comrades on the left bank, and surrendered to the conqueror. Less than six thousand men of Hannibal’s army had fallen: no greater price alt the battl had he paid for the total destruction of more than eighty thousand of the enemy, for the capture of their two camps, for the utter annihilation, as it seemed, of all their means for offensive warfare. It is no wonder that the spirits of the Carthaginian officers were elated by this unequalled victory. Maharbal, seeing what his cavalry had done, said to Hannibal, “Let me advance instantly with the horse, and do thou follow to support me; in four days from this time thou shalt sup in the capitol.“‘0s There are moments when rashness is wisdom; and it may be that this was one of them. The statue of the goddess Victory in the capitol may well have trembled in every limb on that day, and have dropped her wings, as if forever, but Hannibal came not; and if panic had for one moment unnerved the iron courage of the Roman aristocracy, on the next their inborn spirit revived; and their resolute will, striving beyond its present power, created, as is the law of our nature, the power which it required. CHAPTER XLIV, PROGRESS OF THE

WAR IN ITALY AFTER THE BATTLE OF CANNE-REVOLT OF CAPUA, AND OF THE PEOPLE

OF SOUTHERN ITALY, TO HANNIBAL  GREAT EXERTIONS OF THE ROMANS-SURPRISE OF

TARENTUM-SIEGE OF CAPUA-HANNIBAL MARCHES ON ROME-REDUCTION AND PUNISiHMENT

OF CAPUA.-A. U. C. 538 TO 543. FROM New Carthage to the plains of Cannoe, Hannibal’s march resembled a Change in the chara.- mighty torrent, which, rushing along irresistible and undivided, ter of the war. fixes our attention to the one line of its course: all other sights and sounds in the landscape are forgotten, while we look on the rush of the vast volume of waters, and listen to their deep and ceaseless roar. Therefore I have not wished to draw away the reader’s attention to other objects, but to keep it fixed upon the advance of Hannibal. But from Canune onwards the character of the scene changes. The single torrent, joined by a hundred lesser streams, has now swelled into a wide flood, overwhelming the whole valley; and the principal object of our interest is the one rock, now islanded amid the waters, and on which they dashed furiously on every side, as though they must needs sweep it away. But the rock stands unshaken: the waters become feebler; and their streams are again divided: and the flood shrinks; and the rock rises higher and higher; and the danger is passed away. In the next part of the second Punic war, our attention will be mainly fixed on Rome, as it has hitherto been on Hannibal. But in order to value aright the mightiness of her energy, we must consider the multitude of her enemies; how all southern Italy, led by Hannibal, struggled with her face to face; how Sicily and Macedon struck at her from be. Js Livy, XXII. 51.

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CHAP. XLIV.I MEASURES OF THE SENATE. 501 hind; how Spain supplied arms to her most dangerous enemy. Yet her policy and her courage were everywhere: Sicily was struck to the earth by one blow; Macedon obliged to defend himself against his nearer enemies; the arms which Spain was offering to Hannibal were torn out of his grasp; revolted Italy was crushed to pieces; and the great enemy, after all his forces were dispersed and destroyed, was obliged, like Hector, to fight singly under his country’s walls, and to fall like Hector, with the consolation of “having done mighty deeds, to be famed in after ages.” The Romans, knowing that their army was in presence of the enemy, and that the consuls had been ordered no longer to decline a battle, were The newsof th defeat for some days in the most intense anxiety. Every tongue was eaches Rome. repeating some line of old prophecy, or relating some new wonder or portent; every temple was crowded with supplicants; and incense and sacrifices were offered on every altar.

At last the tidings arrived of the utter destruction of both the consular armies, and of a slaughter such as Rome had never before known. Even Livy felt himself unable adequately to paint the grief and consternation of that day;’ and the experience of the bloodiest and most imbittered warfare of modern times would not help us to conceive it worthily. But one simple fact speaks eloquently: the whole number of Roman citizens able to bear arms had amounted at the last census to 270,000;2 and supposing, as we fairly may, that the loss of the Romans in the late battle had been equal to that of their allies, there must have been killed or taken, within the last eighteen months, no fewer than 60,000, or more than a fifth part of the whole population of citizens abcve seventeen years of age. It must have been true, without exaggeration, that every house in Rome was in mourning. The two home praetors summoned the senate to consult for the defence of the city. Fabius was no longer dictator; yet the supreme govern-Measures taken by the ment at this moment was effectually in his hands; for the reso-senate. lutions which he moved were instantly and unanimously adopted. Light-horsemen were to be sent out to gather tidings of the enemy’s movements; the members of the senate, acting as magistrates, were to keep order in the city, to stop all loud or public lamentations, and to take care that all intelligence was conveyed in the first instance to the preotors: above all, the city gates were to be strictly guarded, that no one might attempt to fly from Rome, but all abide the common danger together.3 Then the Forum was cleared, and the assemblies of the people suspended; for at such a moment had any one tribune uttered the word “peace,” the tribes would have caught it up with eagerness, and obliged the senate to negotiate. Thus the first moments of panic passed; and Varro’s dispatches arrived, informing the senate that he had rallied the wrecks of the army at Ca-Arrival of dispatches nusium, and that Hannibal was not advancing upon Rome.’ Hope from varro. then began to revive; the meetings of the senate were resumed, and measures taken for maintaining the war. M. Marcellus, one of the preetors for the year, was at this moment at Ostia, preparing to sail to Sicily. It was resolved to transfer him at Marcells, is sent into once to the great scene of action in Apulia; and he was ordered Apulia. to give up the fleet to his colleague, P. Furius Philus, and to march with the single legion which he had under his command into Apulia, there to collect the remains of Varro’s army, and to fall back as he best could into Campania, while the consul returned immediately to Rome.’ In the mean time the scene at Canusium was like the disorder of a ship going to pieces, when fear makes men desperate, and the instinct of selfpreservation swallows up every other feeling. Some young men Livy, XXII. 54. 4 Livy, XXII. 56. a Livy, Epit. XX. Livy, XXII. 57. Plutarch, Marcellus, 9. Livy, XXII. 55.

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502 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV of the noblest families, a Metellus being at the head of them, looking upon Rome as lost, were planning to escape from the ruin, and to fly beyond sea, in the hope of entering into some foreign service. Such an example at such a moment would have led the way to a general panic: if the noblest citizens of Rome despaired of their country, what allied-state, or what colony, could be expected to sacrifice themselves in defence of a hopeless cause? The consul exerted himself to the utmost to check this spirit, and aided by some firmer spirits amongst the officers themselves, he succeeded in repressing it.6

He kept his men together, gave them over to the prsetor Marcellus, on his arrival at Canusium, and prepared instantly to obey the orders of the senate by returning to Rome. The fate of P. Claudius and L. Junius in the last war might have warned him of the dangers which threatened a defeated general; he himself was personally hateful to the prevailing party at Rome; and if the memory of Flaminius was persecuted, notwithstanding his glorious death, what could he look for, a fugitive general from that field where his colleague and all his soldiers had perished? Demosthenes dared not trust himself to the Athenian people after his defeat in Aztolia; but Varro, with a manlier spirit, returned to bear the obloquy and the punishment which the popular feeling, excited by party animosity, was so likely to heap on him. He stopped, as usual, without the city walls, and summoned -the senate to meet him in the Campus Martius. The senate felt his confidence in them, and answered it nobly. All party feeling was suspended; all popular irritation was subdued; the m. butcher’s son, the turbulent demagogue, the defeated general, were all forgotten; only Varro’s latest conduct was remembered, that he had resisted the panic of his officers, and, instead of seeking shelter at the court of a foreign king, had submitted himself to the judgment of his countrymen. The senate voted him their thanks, “because he had not despaired of the commonwealth.”’ It was resolved to name a dictator; and some writers related that the general voice of the senate and people offered the dictatorship to Varro A dicttor pponted. himself, but that he positively refused to accept it.8 This story is extremely doubtful; but the dictator actually named was M. Junius Pisa, a member of a popular family, and who had himself been consul and censor. His master of the horse was T.

Sempronius Gracchus, the first of that noble but illfated name who appears in the Roman annals.9 Already, before the appointment of the dictator, the Roman government had The senate refuses to shown that its resolution was fixed to carry on the war to the death..thpe.ison.es. Hannibal had allowed his Roman prisoners to send ten of their number to Rome to petitionthat the senate would permit the whole body to be 6The author would, doubtless, have ex-cellus, when he went to Rome-implies that plained his reasons for ascribing the suppres-Scipio distinguished himself at Canusium. sion of this conspiracy to leave Italy to Varro. Dion’s statement is the more trustworthy, as By Livy, XXII. 58, by Valerius Maximus, V. he did not join in the cry against Varro, but 6, 7, by Dion, Fragm. Peiresc. XLIX., it is at-speaks with high praise of his conduct after the tributed to Scipio.

See also Silius Italicus, X. defeat.‘Es 7r Kavfneo~v I)XOv.ra Trs ivraVa 426, fol. It is somewhat remarkable that Po-KarcaTriiaro, Kcat o0S; 7rlcrLoxepoLe opovtpaWs US c lybius makes no mention of the fact, either in Trv 7rap6sYTav 7 rVsE8v, rpooaJdXXvovTarrd rt r. rXE the account of the battle of Cann%, or in the n7rrasg, a7WEKpocaro7’ - r6 -c aR6voXoe oeur’

eOv6aag, character of Scipio, X. 1-6, where he speaks of oi’re Kara-rT7ag, -ag, sAr’ Op6r S J;avoia;g Wi7rep Scipio’s early exploits. According to Livy, PlEvaS oUiart &erVOv avpetg3ESK6oroe, Gdvra ia rl 7rpo6upa with whose accounts Dion’s concurs, the figi- -rots rapoU(t Kcai i[foJXevrce Kat’ erpatEv. Zonacras tives at Canusium were headed by four trib-was so careless in abridging his author, that he unes, who voluntarily submitted to, the com-transfers what Dion here says of Varro to maud of Scipio and Appius Claudius, two of Scipio. their number; and Scipio by a characteristic Livy, XXII. 61, Plutarch, Fabius, 18. See act of youthful heroism, stifled the plot. Mean-also Florus, II. 6. while Varro is represented to have been at Ve-8 Valerius Maximus, III. 4, IV. 5, 2.

nusia. Appian’s account, too, VII. 26, though Frontinus, IV. 5, 6. ”’

Honoribus, quum, ei differing as to the order of the events; and deferrentur a populo, renuntiavit, dicens, feliplainly inaccurate-since it makes Varro re-cioribus, magistratibus reipublice opus esse.” fign the command to Scipio, instead of Mar-9 Livy, XXII. 57.

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CHAP. XLIV.] POSITION OF THE ROMAN ARMY. 503 ransomed by their friends at the sum of three minku, or 3000 ases for each prisoner. But the senate absolutely forbade the money to be paid, neither choosing to furnish Hannibal with so large a sum, nor to show any compassion to men who had allowed themselves to fall alive into the enemy’s hands.‘0 The prisoners therefore were left in hopeless captivity; and the armies which the state required were to be formed out of other materials. The expedients adopted showed the urgency of the danger. When the consuls took the field at the beginning of the campaign, two legions had been left, as usual, to cover the capital. These were now to Measures to raise be employed in active service; and with them was a small detach-troops. ment of troops, which had been drawn from Picenum and the neighborhood of Ariminum, where their services were become of less importance. The contingents from the allies were not ready; and there was no time to wait for them. In order, therefore, to enable the dictator to take the field immediately, eight thousand slaves were enlisted, having expressed their willingness to serve; and arms were provided by taking down from the temple the spoils won in former wars.” The dictator went still further: he offered pardon to criminals and release to debtors, if they were willing to take up arms; and amongst the former class were some bands of robbers, who then, as in later times, infented the mountains, and who consented to serve the state on receiving an indemnity for their past offences.’” With this strange force, amounting, it is said, to about twentyfive thousand men, M. Junius marched into Campania; whilst a new levy of the oldest and youngest citizens supplied two new legions for the defence of the capital, in the place of those which followed the dictator into the field. M. Junius fixed his headquarters at Teanum,“3 on high ground upon the edge of the Falernian plain, with the Latin colony of Cales in his front, and communicating by the Latin road with Rome. The dictator was at Teanum, and M. Marcellus with the army of Cannem, whom we left in Apulia, is described as now lying encamped above Sues-Position of the Roman sula,‘4 that is, on the right bank of the Vulturnus, on the hills army. which bound the Campanian plain, ten or twelve miles to the east of Capua, on the right of the Appian road as it ascends the pass of Caudium towards Beneventum. Thus we find the seat of war removed from Apulia to Campania; but the detail of the intermediate movements is lost; and we must restore the broken story as well as we can, by tracing Hannibal’s operations after the battle of Cannue, which are undoubtedly the key to those of his enemies. The fidelity of the allies of Rome, which had not been shaken by the defeat of Thrasymenus, could not resist the fiery trial of Cannm. The Apu-Revolt of the allies; lians joined the conqueror immediately, and Arpi and Salapia condct ofHnnibal opened their gates to him. Bruttium, Lucania, and Samnium were ready to follow the example;’” and Hannibal was obliged to divide his army, and send officers into different parts of the country, to receive and protect those who wished to join him, and to organize their forces for effective cooperation in the field. Meanwhile lie himself remained in Apulia, not perhaps without hope that this last blow had broken the spirit as well as the power of the enemy, and that they would listen readily to proposals of peace. With this view he sent a Carthaginian officer to accompany the deputation of the Roman prisoners to Rome, and ordered him to encourage any disposition on the part of the Romans to open a negotiation.‘6 When he found, therefore, on the return of the deputies, that his officers had not been allowed to enter the city, and that the Romans had refused to ransom their prisoners, his disappointment betrayed him into acts of the most ” Polybius, VI. 58. Livy, XII. 58-61. Ap-1S

Livy, XXIII. 24. pian, VII. 28. Cicero de Off I. 13, 32. III. 32. 14 Livy, XXII. 14. Aulus Gellius, VII. 18. 15 Livy, XXII. 61. Polybius, III. 118.

Ap Livy, XXII. 57. pian VII. 31. 2 Livy, XXIII. 14. Livy, XXII. 58.

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504 HISTORY OF ROME. [C0AP. LXIV inhuman cruelty. The mass of the prisoners left in his hands he sold for slaves and so far he did not overstep the recognized laws of warfare; but many of the more distinguished of them he put to death; and those who were senators he obliged to fight as gladiators with each other in the presence of his whole army. It is added, that brothers were in some instances brought out to fight with their brothers, and sons with their fathers; but that the prisoners refused so to sin against nature, and chose rather to suffer the worst torments than to draw their swords in such horrible combats.l7

Hannibal’s vow may have justified all these cruelties in his eyes; but his passions deceived him, and he was provoked to fury by the resolute spirit which ought to have excited his admiration. To admire the virtue which thwarts our-dearest purposes, however natural it may seem to indifferent spectators, is one of the hardest trials of himanity. Finding the Romans immovable, Hannibal broke up from his position in Apulia, Hannibal enters Cam-and moved into Samnium. The F:opular party in Compsa opened pania.revoltofCapua. their gates to him; and he made the place serve as a depot for his plunder, and for the heavy baggage of his army.‘8 His brother Mago was then ordered to march into Bruttium with a division of the army, and after having received the submission of the Hirpinians on his way, to embark at one of the Bruttian ports, and carry the tidings of his success to Carthage.” Hanno, with another division, was sent into Lucania, to protect the revolt of the Lucanians;” while Hannibal himself, in pursuit of a still greater prize, descended once more into the plains of Campania. The Pentrian Samnites, partly restrained by the Latin colony of CEsernia, and partly by the influence of their own countryman, Num.

Decimius of Bovianum, a zealous supporter of the Roman alliance, remained firm in their adherence to Rome: but the Hirpinians and the Caudinian Samnites all joined the Carthaginians; and their soldiers no doubt formed part of the army with which Hannibal invaded Campania.” There all was ready for his reception. The popular party in Capua were headed by Pacuvius Calavius, a man of the highest nobility, and married to a daughter of Appius Claudius, but whose ambition led him to aspire to the sovereignty, not of his own country qnly, but, through Hannibal’s aid, of the whole of Italy, Capua succeeding, as he hoped, to the supremacy now enjoyed by Rome. The aristocratical party were weak and unpopular, and could offer no opposition to him; while the people, wholly subject to his influence, concluded a treaty with Hannibal, and admitted the Carthaginian general and his army into the city.2 Thus the second city in Italy, capable, it is said, of raising an army of 30,000 foot and 4000 horse,“3
connected with Rome by the closest ties, and which for nearly a century had remained true to its alliance under all dangers, threw itself into the arms of Hannibal, and took its place at the head of the new coalition of southern Italy, to try the old quarrel of the Samnite wars once again.

This revolt of Capua, the greatest result, short of the submission of Rome itself, Marcellus encamps at which could have followed from the battle of Cannm, drew the Suessulra. nRoman armies towards Campania. Marcellus had probably fallen 17 Diodorus, XXVI. Exe. de. Virtut. et Vitiis. phant, and killed him, and was then treacherAppian, VII. 28. Zonaras, IX. 2. Valerius ously waylaid and murdered by Hannibal’s Maximus, IX. 2, Ext. 2. But as even Livy does orders, was probably invented with reference not mention these stories, though they would to this very occasion. The remarks of Polybius have afforded such a topic for his rhetoric,-nor should make us slow to believe the stories of does Polybius, either in IX. 24, when speaking Hannibal’s cruelties, which so soon became, a of Hannibal’s alleged cruelty, or in VI. 58, where theme for the invention of poets and rhetorihe gives the account of the mission of the cap-cians. tives, and adds that Hannibal, when he heard “I Livy, XXIII. 1. that the Romnans lhad refused to ransom them, 19 Livy, XXIII. 11. rare7rXdyrtl Tri radlIaov Kai T7 FpyaX‘4sXoV TcV ai-2U Livy, XXIII. 37. ipWv.v roag &tagLovAioLS,-thcre must doubtless 21 Livy, XXII. 61, 24. be a great deal of exaggeration in them, even 22 Livy, XXIII. 2-4 if they had any foundation at all. The story 2” Livy, XXIII. 5. See Niebuhr, Vol. II. in Pliny, VIII. 7, that the last survivor of these note 145. gladiatorial combats had to fight against an ele

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CHAP. XL1V.] CAUSES WHICH SAVED ROME. 505 back from Canusium by the Appian road through Beneventum, moving by an interior and shorter line; whilst Hannibal advanced by Compsa upon Abellinum, descending into the plain of Campania by what is now the pass of Monteforte. Hannibal’s cavalry gave him the whole command of the country; and Marcellus could do no more than watch his movements from his camp above Suessula, and wait for some opportunity of impeding his operations in detail. At this point in the story of the war, the question arises, how was it possible for Rome to escape destruction? Nor is this question merely How cmeitthatRomo prompted by the thought of Hannibal’s great victories in the field, was not destroyed and the enormous slaughter of Roman citizens at Thrasymenus and Cannse; it appears even more perplexing to those who have attentively studied the preceding history of Rome. A single battle, evenly contested and hardly won, had enabled Pyrrhus to advance into the heart of Latium; the Hernican cities and the impregnable Prseneste had opened their gates to him; yet Capua was then faithful to Rome; and Samnium and Lucania, exhausted by long years of unsuocessful warfare, could have yielded him no such succor, as now, after fifty years of peace, they were able to afford to Hannibal. But now, when Hannibal was received into Capua, the state of Italy seemed to have gone backwards a hundred years, and to have returned to what it had been after the battle of Lautulve in the second Samnite war,24 with the immense addition of the genius of Hannibal and the power of Carthage thrown into the scale of the enemies of Rome. Then, as now, Capua had revolted, and Campania, Samnium, and Lucania, were banded together against Rome; but this same confederacy was now supported by all the resources of Carthage: and at its head in the field of battle was an army of thirty thousand veterans and victorious soldiers, led by one of the greatest generals whom the world has ever seen. How could it happen that a confederacy so formidable was only formed to be defeated?-that the revolt of Capua was the term of Hannibal’s progress?-that from this day forwards his great powers were shown rather in repelling defeat than in commanding victory?-that, instead of besieging Rome, he was soon employed in protecting and relieving Capua?-and that his protection and succors were alike unavailing? No single cause will explain a result so extraordinary. Rome owed her deliverance principally to the strength of the aristocratical interest Causes which saved throughout Italy,-to her numerous colonies of the Latin name,- her. to the scanty numbers of Hannibal’s Africans and Spaniards, and to his want of an efficient artillery. The material of a good artillery must surely have existed in Capua; but there seem to have been no officers capable of directing it; and no great general’s operations exhibit so striking a contrast of strength and weakness, as may be see n in Hannibal’s battles and sieges.

And when Cannae had taught the Romans to avoid pitched battles in the open field, the war became necessarily a series of sieges, where Hannibal’s strongest arm, his cavalry, could render little service, while his infantry was in quality not more than equal to the enemy, and his artillery was decidedly inferior. With two divisions of his army absent in Lucania and Bruttium, and while anxiously waiting for the reinforcements which Mago was to pro-Mitry measures in cure from Carthage, Hannibal could not undertake any great offen-Campanis. sive operation after his arrival in Campania. He attempted only to reduce the remaining cities of the Campanian plain and seacoast, and especially to dislodge the Romans from Casilinum, which, lying within three miles of Capua, and commanding the passage of the Vulturnus, not only restrained all his movements, but was a serious annoyance to Capua, and threatened its territory with continual incursions. Atilla and Calatia had revolted to him already with Capua: and he took Nuceria, Alfaterna, and Acerrme. The Greek cities on the coast, Neapolis and Cumse, were firmly attached to Rome, and were too strong to be besieged See Chap. XXXI.

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506 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV with success; but Nola lay in the midst of the plain nearly midway between Capua and Nuceria; and the popular party there, as elsewhere, were ready to open their gates to Hannibal. He was preparing to appear before the town; but the aristocracy had time to apprise the Romans of their danger; and Marcellus, who was then at Casilinum, marched round behind the mountains to escape the enemy’s notice, and descended suddenly upon Nola from the hills which rise directly above it. He secured the place, repressed the popular party by some bloody executions, and when Hannibal advanced to the walls, made a sudden sally, and repulsed him with some loss.2” Having done this service, and left the aristocratical party in absolute possession of the government, he returned again to the hills, and lay encamped on the edge of the mountain boundary of the Campanian plain, just above the entrance of the famous pass of Caudium. His place at Casilinum was to be supplied by the dictator’s army from Teanum; but Hannibal watched his opportunity, and anticipating his enemies this time, laid regular siege to Casilinum, which was defended by a garrison of about 1000 men. This garrison had acted the very same part towards the citizens of Casilinum, Conduct ofthe garrison which the Campanians had acted at Rhegium in the war with ofGaqilnun,. gPyrrhus.26 About 500 Latins of Praeneste, and 450 Etruscans of Perusia, having been levied too late to join the consular armies when they took the field, were marching after them into Apulia by the Appian road, when they heard the tidings of the defeat of Cannqe. They immediately turned about, and fell back upon Casilinum, where they established themselves, and for their better security massacred the Campanian inhabitants, and, abandoning the quarter of the town which was on the left bank of the Vulturnus, occupied the quarter on the right bank.27 Marcellus, when he retreated from Apulia with the wreck of Varro’s army, had fixed his headquarters for a time at Casilinum; the position being one of great importance, and there being some danger lest the’garrison, while they kept off Hannibal, should resolve to hold the town for themselves rather than for the Romans. They were now left to themselves; and dreading Hannibal’s vengeance for the massacre of the old inhabitants, they resisted his assaults desperately, and obliged him to turn the siege into a blockade. This was the last active operation of the campaign: all the armies now went into winterquarters. The dictator remained at Teanum; Marcellus lay in his mountain camp above Nola; and Hannibal’s army was at Capua.28 Being quartered in the houses of the city, instead of being encamped by themselves, their discipline, it is likely, was somewhat impaired by the various temptations thrown in their way: and as the wealth and enjoyments of Capua at that time were notorious, the writers who adopted the vulgar declamations against luxury, pretended that Hannibal’s army was ruined by the indulgences of this winter, and that Capua was the Cannae of Carthage.29 This intermission of active warfare will afford us afford us an opportunity of noticing the Progress of the war in progress of events elsewhere, which we have hitherto unavoidably other quarters. neglected. From the banks of the Iberus Hannibal had made his way without interruption to Capua; and the countries which he left behind him sink in like manner from the notice of the historian. We must now see what had happened in each of them since Hannibal’s passage. It has been mentioned above, that P. Scipio, when he returned from the Rhone A.

U. C. 537. A. C. to Italy, to be ready to meet Hannibal in Cisalpine Gaul, sent his,17. Success of the army into Spain under the command of his brother.30 After his consulship was over, his province of Spain was still continued to him as proconsul; and he went thither accordingly to take the command. - He found that his brother had already effected much: he had defeated and made l 5Livy, XXIII. 14-17. Plutarch, Marcel-a8 Livy, XXIII.

18. us, 11. 29 Livy, XXIII. 45. Florus, II. 6. Valerius 26 See Vol. II. p.

398. Maximus, IX. Ext. 1. 27 Livy, XXIII. 17. 30 Above, p. 477.

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CHAPI XLIV.] TRANQUILLITY OF CISALPINE GAUL. 507 prisoner the Carthaginian general, Hanno, whom Hannibal left to maintain his latest conquests in Spain, and had driven the Carthaginians beyond the Iberus.3l His own arrival in Spain took place in the summer of the year 537, three or four months after the battle of Thrasymenus; and although little was done in the field before the end of the season, the Carthaginian governor of Saguntum was persuaded to set at liberty all the Spanish hostages left in his custody; and the Spaniard who had advised this step under the mask of good will to Carthage, as a means of securing the affections of the Spanish people, had no sooner received the hostages with orders to take them back to their several homes, than he delivered them up to the Romans.

Thus Scipio enjoyed the whole credit of restoring them to their friends, and made the Roman name generally popular.” In the following year, Hasdrubal, the son of Hamilcar, having received orders to march into Italy to cooperate with his brother, was encountered by the Romans near the Iberus, and defeated;33 so that his invasion of Italy was for the present effectually prevented. The importance of this Spanish war cannot be estimated too highly; for, by disputing the possession of Spain, the Romans, deprived their en-A. C. C.. A.C. emy of his best nursery of soldiers, from which otherwise he would 26. Its great inmor. have been able to raise army after army for the invasion of Italy. tance. But its importance consisted not so much in the particular events, as in its being kept up at all; nor is there any thing requiring explanation in the success of the Romans. Their army had originally consisted of 20,000 men; and P. Scipio had brought some reinforcements; while Hasdrubal and Hanno in their two armies had a force not much superior: hence, after the total defeat of Hanno, Hasdrubal could not meet the Romans with any chance of success. For Spanish levies were now no longer to be depended on, while the Romans were inviting the nations of Spain to leave the Carthaginians, and come over to them. In this contest between the two nations, which should most influence the minds of the Spaniards, the ascendency of the Roman character was clearly shown; and the natives were drawn, as by an invincible attraction, to the worthier. While Spain was thus the scene of active warfare, Cisalpine Gaul, after Hannibal’s advance into Italy, seems to have sunk back into a state of TranquillityofCisalpine tranquillity, such as it had enjoyed in the first Punic war. It is Gaul. very remarkable; that the colonies of Placentia and Cremona, so far in advance of the Roman frontier, and surrounded by hostile tribes, were left unassailed from the time when Hannibal crossed the Apennines into Etruria.

We are only told that L. Postumius Albinus, one of the prmetors of the year 538, was sent with an: army into Gaul, when Varro and _Emilius marched into Apulia, with the express object of compelling the Gauls in Hannibal’s service to return to the defence of their own country.34 What he did in the course of that summer we know not: at the end of the consular year he was still in his province, and was elected consul for the year following, with Ti. Sempronius Gracchus. But before his consulship began, early in March apparently, according to the Roman calendar, he fell into an ambuscade, while advancing into the enemy’s country, and was cut to pieces35 with his whole army. We are told that the Romans found it utterly impossible to replace the army thus lost, and that it was resolved for the present to leave the Gauls to themselves.36 But it was not so certain that the Gauls, if unopposed, would leave the Romans to themselves; and we find that M. Pomponius Matho, who had been city proetor in 538, was sent, on the expiration of his office, with proconsular power to Ariminum, and that he remained on that frontier for two years with an army of two legions,31 while C. Varro with another legion was quartered in Picenum, to support him in ”’ Polybius, III. 76. 5 Livy, XXIII. 24.

Polybius, III.. 118.;2 Polybius, III. 98, 99. 0 Livy, XXIII. 25. s3 Livy, XXIII. 27, 28, 29. ” Livy, XXIV. 10, 44. See Duker’s note on 4 Polybius, III. 106. the former passage.

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508 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV time of need.38 Still the inaction of the Gauls is extraordinary, the more so as we find them in arms immediately after the end of the war with Carthage, and attacking Placentia and Cremona, which they had so long left in peace.39 We can only suppose that the absence of a large portion of their soldiers, who were serving in Hannibal’s army, crippled the power of the Gauls who were left at home; and that long experience had taught them that, unless when conducted by a general of a more civilized nation, they could not carry on war successfully with the Romans. The older Gaulish chiefs also were often averse to war, when the younger chiefs were in favor of it;40 and the Romans were likely to be lavish of presents at a time so critical, to confirm their friends in their peaceful sentiments, and to win over their adversaries. It seems probable that some truce was concluded, which restrained either the Gauls or Romans from invading each other’s territory; and the Romans were contented not to require the recall of the Gauls serving with Hannibal; some of whom, we know, continued to be with him till a much later period. The multitude of the Gauls rejoiced, perhaps, that they had won thus much from their proud enemy, and were well content that the war should be carried on far from their own frontiers, and yet that they should share in its advantages. But wiser men might regret that better use was not made of the favorable moment; that no Carthaginian officer had been left with them to organize their armies and conduct them into the field; that the Roman encroachments on their soil were still maintained; and thai there was no Gellius Gnatius in northern Italy to rouse the Etruscans and Umbrians to Inite their forces with those of the Gauls on the south of the Apennines, and, while Hannibal lay triumphant in Capua, to revenge the defeat of Sentinumr by a second victory on the Alia or the Tiber. Whatever was the cause, the inactivity of the Gauls, after their great victory Rosourcee of the Re-over L.

Postumius, might strengthen the arguments of those maine. Greeks who ascribed the conquests of the Romans to their good fortune. It was no less timely than the peace with Etruria, concluded at the very moment when Pyrrhus was advancing upon Rome, or than the quiet of these same Gauls during the first Punic war. The consequence was, that the Romans had the whole force of Etruria and Umbria disposable for the contest in the south; and that any disposition to revolt, which might have existed in those countries, was unable to show itself in action. Their soldiers served as allies in the Roman armies, and with the Sabines, Picentians, Vestinians, Frentanians, Marrucinians, Marsians, and Pelignians, together with the cities of the Latin name, composed the Roman confederacy after the revolt of southern Italy. That revolt made the drain, both of men and money, press more heavily on the states which still remained faithful; and the friends of Rome must everywhere have had the greatest difficulty in persuading their countrymen not to desert a cause which seemed so ruinous.

Under such a pressure, the Roman government plainly told its officers in Sardinia and Sicily, that they must provide for their armies as they best could, for that they must expect no supplies of ariy kind from home.4’ The proprzetor of Sicily applied to the never-failing friendship of Hiero, and obtained from him, almost as the last act of his long0life, money enough to pay his soldiers, and corn for six months’ consumption. But the proprmetor of Sardinia had no such friend to help him; and he was obliged to get both corn and money from the people of the province.42 The money, it seems, like the benevolences of our own government in old times, was nominally a freewill offering of the loyal cities of Sardinia to the Roman people: but the Sardinians knew that it was a gift which they could not help giving; and impatient of this addition to their former burdens, they applied to Carthage for aid, and broke out the following year into open revolt.43 s Livy, XXIII. 32. 41 Livy, XXIII. 21. 9 Livy, XXXI. 10. 42

Livy, XXIII. 21. 40 See, for instance, Coesar, B. G. II. 17. 43 Livy, XXIII. 32.

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CHAP. XLIV.j DISTRESS OF THE ROMANS. 509 It is not without reason that the Roman government had abandoned its officers in the provinces to their own resources. Their financial difficulties Their fandi dif were enormous.

Large tracts of land, arable, pasture, and forest, celtis.from which the state ordinarily derived a revenue, were in the hands of the enemy; the number of tax-payers had been greatly diminished by the slaughter of so many citizens in battle; and in many cases their widows and children would be unable to cultivate their little property, and would be altogether insolvent. If the poorer citizens were again obliged, as after the Gaulish invasion, to borrow money of the rich, discontent and misery would have been the sure consequence; and the debtor would regard his creditor as a worse enemy than Hannibal. Accordingly three commissioners were appointed, on the proposition of the tribune Minucius, like the five commissioners of the year 403, with the express object of facilitating the circulation, and assisting the distressed tax-payer.4 Their measures are not recorded; but we may suppose that they acted like the former commissioners, and allowed the poor citizens to pay their taxes in kind, when they could not procure money, and did not force them to sell their property, when it must have been sold at a certain loss.45 The war must no doubt have raised the value of money, and diminished that of land; and the agricultural population, who had to pay a fixed amount of taxation in money, were thus doubly sufferers. As a mere financial operation, the commissioners’ measures may not have been very profitable; but the government had the wisdom to see that every thing depended on the unanimity and devotion of all classes to the cause of their country; and it was worth a great pecuniary sacrifice, even in the actual financial difficulties, to attach the people heartily to the government, and to prevent that intolerable evil of a general state of debt, which must speedily have led to a revolution, and laid Rome prostrate at the feet of Hannibal. Neither Rome nor Carthage could be said to have the undisputed mastery of the sea. Roman fleets sometimes visited the coasts of Africa; Event of the naval and Carthaginian fleets in the same way appeared off the coasts war. of Italy. Hannibal received supplies from Carthage, which were landed in the ports of Bruttium; and when the Carthaginians wished to assist the revolt of the Sardinians, the expedition which they sent, although it suffered much from bad weather, was neither delayed nor prevented by the enemy.46 On the other hand, the Romans had gained a naval victory of some importance in Spain;4 and their cruising squadrons in the Ionian Gulf, having the ports of Brundisium and Tarentum to run to in case of need, were of signal service, as we shall see hereafter, in intercepting the communications which the king of Macedon was trying to open with Hannibal.48 Meantime the news of the battle of Cannee had been carried to Carthage, as we have seen, by Hannibal’s brother Mago, accompanied with a Reinforcements from request for reinforcements. Nearly two years before, when he Carthage. first descended from the Alps into Cisalpine Gaul, his Africans and Spaniards were reduced to no more than 20,000 foot and 6000 horse. The Gauls, who had joined him since, had indeed more than doubled this number at first; but three great battles, and many partial actions, besides the unavoidable losses from sickness during two years of active service, must again have greatly diminished it; and this force was now to be divided: a part of it was employed in Bruttium, a part in Lucania, leaving an inconsiderable body under Hannibal’s own command. On the other hand, the accession of.the Campanians, Samnites, Lucanians, and Bruttians supplied him with auxiliary troops in abundance, and of excellent quality; so that large reinforcements from home were not required, ” Livy, XXIII. 21. Compare VII. 21. tatorship of Fabius Maximus, was a measure of 45 Salmasius (de Usuris. p. 510) conceives these commissioners. that the reduction of the as to an ounce, which, 46 Livy, XXIII. 43, 34. Pliny (XXXIII. 13) says, took place in the di-47 Polybius, III. 96. ” Livy, XXIlI. 82, 834.

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510 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV but only enough for the Africans to form a substantial part of every army em. ployed in the field; and above all, to maintain his superiority in cavalry. It is said that some of the reinforcements which were voted on Mago’s demand, were afterwards diverted to other services;49 and we do not know what was’the amount of force actually sent over to Italy, nor when.it arrived.50 It consisted chiefly, if not entirely, of cavalry and elephants; for all the elephants which Hannibal had brought with him into Italy had long since perished; and his anxiety to obtain others, troublesome and hazardous as it must have been to transport them from Africa by sea, speaks strongly in favor of their use in war, which modern writers are perhaps too much inclined to deprec;ate.5 - We have no information as to the feelings entertained by Hannibal and the Feelings of the Cam-Campanians towards each other, while the Carthaginians were pnnri aw; wintering in Capua. The treaty of alliance had provided carefully for the independence of the Campanians, that they might not be treated as Pyrrhus had treated the Tarentines.

Capua was to have its own laws and magistrates; no Campanian was to be compelled to any duty, civil or military, nor to be in any way subject to the authority cf the Carthaginian officers.52 There must have been something of a Roman party cpposed to the alliance with Carthage altogether; though the Roman writers mention one man only, Decis Magius, who was said to have resisted Hannibal to his face with such vehemence, that Hannibal sent him prisoner to Carthage.53 But three hundred Campanian horsemen of the richer classes, who were serving in the Roman army in Sicily when Capua revolted, went to Rome as soon as their service was over, and were there received as Roman citizens;54 and others, though unable to resist the general voice of their countrymen, must have longed in their hearts to return to the Roman alliance. Of the leaders of the Campanian people we know little: Pacuvius Calavius, the principal author of the revolt, is never mentioned afterwards; nor do we know the fate of his son Perolla, who, in his zeal for Rome, wished to assassinate Hannibal at his own father’s table, when he made his public entrance into Capua.55

Vibius Virrius is also named as a leading partisan of the Carthaginians;56
and amid the pictures of the luxury and feebleness of the Campanians, their cavalry, which was formed entirely out of the wealthiest classes, is allowed to have been excellent;57 and one brave and practised soldier, Jubellius Taurea, had acquired a high reputation amongst the Romans when he served with them, and had attracted the notice and respect of Hannibal.58 During the interval from active warfare afforded by the winter, the Romans took measures for filling up the numerous vacancies which the Measures to fi up the,.e.ate. Two dictators lapse of five years, and so many disastrous battles, bad made in attlhe same time the numbers of the senate.59 The natural course would have been to elect censors, to whom the duty of making out the roll of the senate properly belonged; but the vacancies were so many, and the censor’s power in admitting new citizens, and degrading old ones, was so enormous, that the senate feared, it seems, to trust to the result of an ordinary election; and resolved that. the censor’s business should be performed by the oldest man in point of standing, of all those who had already been censors, and that he should be appointed dictator for this especial duty, although there was one dictator already for the conduct of the war. The person thus selected’ was M. Fabius Buteo, who had been censor six-and-twenty years before, at the end of the first Punic war, and who 49 Livy, XXIII. 13, 32. 06 Livy, XXIII. 7, 10. 5u He is represented as having elephants at 04 Livy, XXIII.

4, 7, 81. the siege of Casilinum. Livy, XXIII. 18. If 05 Livy, XXIII. 8, 9. this be correct, the reinforcements must already 6 Livy, XXIII. 6.

liave joined him. - Frontinus, Strateg. IV. 7 29. G1 See the interesting dissertation on ele-68 ILivy, XXIII. 8, 46, 47. XXVI. 15. Valeriua phants by A. S. Schlegel, in his Indische Bib-Maximus, V. 3. Ex. 1. 2iotek, Vol.

I. 173, foll. 09 Livy, XXIII. 22. ”’] Livy, XXIII. 7.

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COAP. XLIV.] ELECTION OF OFFICERS FOR YEAR 539. 511 had more recently been the chief of the embassy sent to declare war on Carthage after the destruction of Saguntum. That his appointment might want no legal formality, C. Varro, the only surviving consul, was sent for home from Apulia to nominate him, the senate intending to detain Varro in Rome till he should have presided at the comitia for the’ election of the next year’s magistrates. The nomination as usual took place at midnight; and on the following morning M. Fabius appeared in the Forum with his four-and-twenty lictors, and ascended the rostra to address the people.

Invested with absolute power for six. months, and especially charged with no less a task than the formation, at his discretion, of that great council which possessed the supreme government of the commonwealth, the noble old man neither shrunk weakly from so heavy a burden, nor ambitiously abused so vast an authority. He told the people that he would not strike off the name of a single senator from the list of the senate, and that, in filling up the vacancies, he would proceed by a defined rule; that he would first add all those who had held curule offices within the last five years, without having been admitted as yet into the senate; that in the second plage he would take all who within the same period had been tribunes, ediles, or quaestors; and thirdly, all those who could show in their houses spoils won in battle from an enemy, or who had received the wreath of oak for saving the life of a citizen in battle. In this manner 177 new senators were placed on the roll; the new members thus forming a large majority of the whole number of the sennae, which amounted only to three hundred. This being done forthwith, the dictator, as he stood in the rostra, resigned his office, dismissed his lictors, and went down into the Forum a private man. There he purposely lingered amidst the crowd, lest the people should leave their business to follow him home; but their admiration was not cooled by this delay; and when he withdrew at the usual hour, the whole people attended him to his house.60 Such was Fabius Buteo’s dictatorship, so wisely fulfilled, so simply and nobly resigned, that the dictatorship of Fabius Maximus himself has earned no purer glory.

Varro, it is said, not wishing to be detained in Rome, returned to his army the next night, without giving the senate notice of his departure.

Eection of officers foz The dictator, M. Junius, was therefore requested to repair to Rome Year 539. to hold the comitia; and Ti. Gracchus and M.

Marcellus were to come with him to report on the state of their several armies, and concert measures for the ensuing campaign.6’ There is no doubt that the senate determined on the persons to be proposed at the ensuing elections, and that, if any one else had come forward as a candidate, the dictator who presided would have refused to receive votes: for him.

Accordingly the consuls and praetors chosen were all men of the highest reputation for ability and experience: the consuls were A. U. c. 639. A.

C. L. Postumius, whose defeat and death in Cisalpine Gaul were not 215.

yet known in Rome, and Ti. Gracchus, now master of the horse. The praetors were M. Valerius Luevinus, Ap. Claudius Pulcher, a grandson of the famous censor, Appius the blind, Q. Fulvius Flaccus, old in years, but vigorous in mind and body, who had already been censor, and twice -consul, and Q.

Mucius Scevola.62 When the death of L. Postumius was known, his: place was finally filled by no less a person than Q. Fabius Maximus: whilst Marcellus was still to retain his command with proconsular power, as his activity and energy could ill be spared at a time so critical?. The officers for the year being thus appointed, it remained to determine their several provinces, and to provide them with sufficient forces.64

Disribution of,ovinFabius was to succeed to the army of the dictator, M.

Junius; ce. ad troop:. and his headquarters were advanced from Teanum to Cales, at the northern extremity of the Falernian plain, about seven English miles from Casilinum and the ” Livy, XXIII. 23. 63 Livy, XXIII.

31. 61 Livy, XXIII. 24. 6 Livy, XXIII. 31, 32. a2 Livy, XXIII. 30.

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512:HISTORY OF ROMIE. [CHAP. XLIV Vulturnus, and less than ten from Capua.

The other consul, Ti. Sempronius, was to have no other Roman army than two legions of volunteer slaves, who were to be raised for the occasion; but both he and his colleague had the usual contingent of Latin and Italian allies. Gracchus named Sinuessa on the Appian road, at the point where the Massic hills run out with a bold headland into the sea, as the place of meeting for his soldiers; and his business was to protect the towns on the coast, which were still faithful to Rome, such as Cuma and Neapolis.

Marcellus was to command two new Roman legions, and to lie as before in his camp above Nola; while his old army was sent into Sicily to relieve the legions there, and enable them to return to Italy, where they formed a fourth army under the command of M. Valerius Lsevinus, the praetor peregrinus, in Apulia. The small force which Varro had commanded in Apulia was ordered to Tarentum, to add to the strength of that important place; while Varro himself was sent with proconsular power into Picenum, to raise soldiers, and to watch the road along the Adriatic by which the Gauls might have sent reinforcements to Hannibal. Q. Fulvius Flaccus, the prsetor urbanus, remained at Rome to conduct the government, and had no other military command than that of a small fleet for the defence of the coast on both sides of the Tiber. Of the other two prietors, Ap. Claudius was to command in Sicily, and Q. Mucius in Sardinia; and P. Scipio as proconsul still commanded his old army of two legions in Spain. On the whole, including the volunteer slaves, there appeared to have been fourteen Roman legions in active service at the beginning of the year 539, without reckoning the soldiers who served in the fleets; and of these fourteen legions, nine were employed in Italy. If we suppose that the Latin and Italian allies bore their usual proportion to the number of Roman soldiers in each army, we shall have a total of 140,000 men, thus divided: 20,000 in Spain, and the same number in Sicil’y; 10,000 in Sardinia; 20,000 under each of the consuls; 20,000 with Marcellus; 20,000
under Luevinus in Apulia; and 10,000 in Tarentum. Seventy thousand men were thus in arms, besides the seamen, out of a population of citizens which at the last census before the war had Extraordinary exertions.of the YRomas, amounted only to 270,213,65 and which had since been thinned by.miitarynand.nci so. SO many disastrous battles. Nor was the drain on the finances of Rome less extraordinary. The legions in the provinces had indeed been left to their own resources as to money; but the nine legions serving in Italy must have been paid regularly; for war could not there be made to support war; and if the Romans had been left to live at free quarters upon their Italian allies, they would have driven them to join Hannibal in mere self-defence. Yet the legions in Italy cost the government in pay, food, and clothing, at the rate of 541,800 denarii a month; and as they were kept on service throughout the year, the annual expense was 6,501,600 denarii; or in Greek money, reckoning the denarius as equal to the drachma, 1083 Euboic talents. To meet these enormous demands on the treasury, the government resorted to the simple expedient of doubling the year’s taxes, and calling at once for the payment of one-half of this amount, leaving the other to be paid at the end of the year.66 It was a struggle for life and death; and the people were in a mood to refuse no sacrifices, however costly: but the war must have cut off so many sources of wealth, and agriculture itself must have so suffered from the calling away of so many hands from the cultivation of the land, that we wonder how the money could be found, and how many of the poorer citizens’ families could be provided with daily bread. In addition to the five regular armies which the Romans brought into the field Other military mean. in Italy, an irregular warfare was also going on, we know not to of tho Romas. what extent; and bands of peasants and slaves were armed in many parts of the country to act against the revolted Italians, and to ravage their territory. For instance, a great tract of forest in Bruttium, as we have Livy, Epit. XX. 1w Livy, XXIII. 81.

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CHAP. XLIV.] FALL OF CASILINUM. 513 seen, was the domain of the Roman people; this would be farmed like all the other revenues; and the publicani who farmed it, or the wealthy citizens who turned out cattle to pasture in it, would have large bodies of slaves employed as shepherds, herdsmen, and woodsmen, who, when the Bruttian towns on the coast revolted, would at once form a guerilla force capable of doing them great misehief. And lastly, besides all these forces, regular and irregular, the Romans still held most of the principal towns in the south of Italy; because they had long since converted them into Latin colonies. Brundisium on the Ionian sea, Prestum on the coast of Lucania, Luceria, Venusia, and Beneventum in the interior, were all so many strong fortresses, garrisoned by soldiers of the Latin name, in the very heart of the revolted districts;67 whilst the Greek cities of Cumre and Neapolis in Campania, and Rhegium on the straits of Messina, were held for Rome by their own citizens with a devotion no way inferior to that of the Latin colonies themselves.68 Against this mass of enemies, the moment that they had learnt to use their strength, Hannibal, even within six months after the battle of Can-Hnnibalresour nee, was already contending at a disadvantage. We have seen that he had detached two officers with two divisions of his axmy, one into Lucania, the other into Bruttium, to encourage the revolt of those countries, and then to organize their resources in men and money for the advancement of the common cause. Most of the Bruttians took up arms immediately as Hannibal’s allies, and put themselves under the command of his officer, Himilcon; but Petelia, one of their cities, was for some reason or other inflexible in its devotion to Rome, and endured a siege of eleven months, suffering all extremities of famine before it surrendered.69 Thus Himilcon must have been still engaged in besieging it long after the campaign was opened in the neighborhood of Capua. The Samnites also had taken up arms, and apparently were attached to Hannibal’s own army: the return of their whole population of the military age, made tell years before during the Gaulish invasion, had stated it at 70,000 foot and 7000 horse;`0 but the Pentrians, the most powerful tribe of their nation, were still faithful to Rome; and the Samnites, like the Romans themselves, had been thinned by the slaughter of Thrasymenus and Cannme, which they had shared as their allies. It is vexatious that we have no statement of the amount of Hannibal’s old army, any more than of the allies who joined him, at any period of the war later than the battle of Cannme. His reinforcements from home, as we have seen, were very trifling; while his two divisions in Lucania and Bruttium, and the garrisons which he had been obliged to leave in some of the revolted towns, as, for example, at Arpi in Apulia,” must have considerably lessened the force under his own personal command. Yet, with the accession of the Samnites and Campanians, it was probably much stronger than any one of the Roman armies opposed to him; quite as strong, indeed, in all likelihood, as was consistent with the possibility of feeding it. Before the winter was over, Casilinum fell. The garrison had made a valiant defence, and yielded at last to famine: they were allowed to ran-Fal fCaili som themselves by paying each man seven ounces of gold for his life and liberty. The plunder which they had won from the old inhabitants enabled them to discharge this large sum; and they were then allowed to march out unhurt, and retire to Cumae. Casilinum again became a Campanian town; but its important position, at once covering Capua, and securing a passage over the Vulturnus, induced Hannibal to garrison it with seven hundred soldiers of his own army.‘2 67 Livy, XXVII. 10. 7 Polybius, II.

24, 10. es Livy, XXIII. 1, 86, 37. XXIV. 1. 71 Livy, XXIV. 4, 47. Appian, VII. 1. on Polybius, VII. 1. Livy, XXII. 61. XXIII. 72 Livy, XXIII. 19, 20. 20, 80. Appian, YII. 28. Valerius Maximus, Vi. 6. Ext. 2. 33

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514 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV The season for active operations was now arrived. The three Roman armies of Fabius, Gracchus, and Marcellus, had taken up their positions Mount Tifata. Rone round Campania; and Hannibal marched out of Capua, and endeserted by her allies.. an dte by her s.

camped his army on the mountain above it, on that same Tifata where the Samnites had so often taken post in old times, when they were preparing to invade the Campanian plainl.3 Tifata did not then exhibit that bare and parched appearance which it has now; the soil, Which has accumulated in the plain below, so as to have risen several feet above its ancient level, has been washed down in the course of centuries, and after the destruction of its protecting’ woods, from the neighboring mountains; and Tifata, in Hannibal’s time, furnished grass in abundance for his cattle in its numerous glades, and offered cool and healthy summer quarters for his men.

There he lay waiting for some opportunity of striking a blow against his enemies around him, and eagei y watching the.progress of his intrigues with the Tarentines, and his negotiations with the king of Macedon. A party at Tarentum began to open a correspondence with him immediately after the battle of Canne;7 and since he had been in Campania he had received an embassy from Philip, king of Macedon, and had concluded an alliance, offensive and defensive, with ihe ambassadors, who acted with full powers in their master’s name.75 Such were his prospects on one side, while, if he looked westward and southwest, he saw Sardinia in open revolt against Rome:“6 and in Sicily the death of Hiero at the age of ninety, and the succession of his grandson Hieronymus, an ambitious and inexperienced youth, were detaching Syracuse also from the Roman alliance. Hannibal had already received an embassy from Hieronymus, to which he had replied by sending a Carthaginian officer of his own name to Sicily, and two Syracusan brothers, Hippocrates and Epicydes, who had long served with him in Italy and in Spain, being, in fact, Carthaginians by their mother’s side, and having become naturalized at Carthage, since Agathocles had banished their grandfather, and their father had married and settled in his place of exile.“7 Thus the effect of the battle of Cannse seemed to be shaking the whole fabric of the Roman dominion; their provinces were revolting; their firmest allies were deserting them; while the king of Macedon himself, the successor of Alexander, was throwing the weight of his power, and of all his acquired and inherited glory, into the scale of their enemies. Seeing the fruit of his work thus fast ripening, Hannibal sat quietly on the summit of Tifata, to break forth like the lightning flash when the storm should be fully gathered. Thus the summer of 539 was like a breathing-time, in which both parties were es. Fbto looking at each other, and considering each other’s resources, Measures of. Fabius to cttoff Hanibal’s sup-while they were recovering strength after their past efforts, and plies. preparing for a renewal of the struggle. Fabius, with the authority of the senate, issued an order, calling on the inhabitants of all the country which either actually was, or was likely to become, the seat of war, to clear their corn off the ground, and carry it into the fortified cities, before the first of June, threatening to lay waste the land, to sell thl slaves, and burn the farm buildings, of any one who should disobey the order.“8 In the utter confusion of the Roman calendar at this period, it is difficult to know whether in any given year it was in advance of the true time, or behind it; so that we can scarcely tell whether the corn was only to be got in when ripe without needless delay, or whether it was to be cut when green, lest Hannibal should use it as forage for his cavalry. But at any rate, Fabius was now repeating the system which he had laid down in his dictatorship, and hoped, by wasting the country, to oblige Hannibal to retreat; for his means of transport were not sufficient for him to feed his army from a distance: hence, when the resources in his immediate neighborhood were exhausted, he was obliged to move elsewhere. ” Livy, XXIII. 86. VII. 29.‘6 Livy, XXIII. 32, 34.‘4

Livy, XXII. 61. Appian, VII. 32. 77 Livy, XXIII. 4, 6. Polybius, VII. 2. “

Livy, XXIII. 33. Zonaras, IX. 4. 78 Livy, XXIII. 32

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CrAP. XLIV.] THE ROMAN ARMIES. 515 Meanwhile Gracchus had crossed the Vulturnus near its mouth, and was now at Liternum, busily employed in exercising and training his hete-Massacre of 200 rogeneous army. The several Campanian cities were accustomed p…s at. festival by to hold a joint festival every year at a place called Hamme, only. three miles from Cumae.79 These festivals were seasons of general truce, so that the citizens even of hostile nations met at them safely: the government of Capua announced to the Cummans, that their chief magistrate and all their senators would appear at Hamte, as usual, on the day of the solemnity; and they invited the senate of Cumin to meet them. At the same time they said that an armed force would be present to repel any interruption from the Romans. Tlhe Cunmeans informed Gracchus of this; and he attacked the Capuans in the night, when they were in such perfect security, that they had not even fortified a camp, but were sleeping in the open country, and massacred about 2000 of them, among whom was Marius Alfius, the supreme magistrate of Capua. The Romans charge the Capuans with having meditated treachery against the Cumreans, and say that they were caught in their own snare; but this could only be a suspicipn, while the overt acts of violence were their own. Hannibal no sooner heard of this disaster, than he descended from Tifata, and hastened to Hamwe, in the hope of provoking the enemy to battle in the confidence of their late success. But Gracchus was too wary to be so tempted, and had retreated in good time to Cumai, where he lay safe within the walls of the town,“0 It is said that Hannibal, having supplied himself with all things necessary for. a siege, attacked the place in form, and was repulsed with loss, so that he returned defeated to his camp at Tifata. A consular army defending the walls of a fortified town was not indeed likely to be beaten in an assault; and neither could a maritime town, with the sea open, be easily starved; nor could Hannibal linger before it safely, as Fabius, with a second consular army, was preparing to cross the Vulturnus. Casilinum being held by the enemy, Fabius was obliged to cross at a higher point behind the mountains, nearly opposite to Allife; and he Strengthof theRoman then descended the left bank to the confluence of the Calor with armies. the Vulturnus, crossed the Calor, and passing between Taburnus and the mountains above Caserta and Maddaloni, stormed the town of Saticula, and joined Marcellus in his camllp above Suessula.8’ He was again anxious for Nola, where the popular party were said to be still plotting the surrender of the town to Hannibal: to stop this mischief, he sent Marcellus with his whole army to garrison Nola, while he himself took his place in the camp above Suessula. Gracchus, on his side, advanced from Cumoe towards Capiua; so that three Roman armies, amounting in all to about sixty thousand men, were on the left bank of the Vulturnus together; and all, so far as appears, in free communication with each other..They availed themselves of their numbers and of their position to send plundering parties out on their rear to overrun the lands of the revolted Samnites and Hirpinians; and as the best troops of both these nations were with Hannibal on Tifata, no force was left at home sufficient to check the enemy’s incursions. Accordingly, the complaints of the sufferers were loud, and a deputation was sent to Hannibal imploring him to protect his allies.82 Already Hannibal felt that the Roman generals understood their business, and had learnt to use their numbers wisely.. On ground where his HIannlibal receives hMi cavalry could act, he would not have feared to engage their three.n..r.e~.ents. armies together; but when they were amongst mountains, or behind walls, his cavalry were useless, and he could not venture to attack them: besides, he did not wish to expose the territory of Capua to their ravages; and therefore he did not choose lightly to move from Tifata. But the prayers of the Samnites were urgent: his partisans in Nola might require his aid, or might be able to admit 79

Livy, XXIII. 85. sl Livy, XXIII. 39. X Livy, XXIII. 36. t2 Livy, XXIII.

41, 42.

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516 HISTORY OF ROME. [CNAP. XLIV him into the town; and his expected reinforcement of cavalry and elephants frorm Carthage had landed safely in Bruttium, and was on its way to join him, which the position of Fabius and Marcellus might render difficult, if he made no movement to favor it. He therefore left Tifata, advanced upon Nola, and timed his operation so well that his reinforcements arrived at the moment when he was before Nola; and neither Fabius nor Marcellus attempted to prevent their junction.‘3 Thus encouraged, and perhaps not aware of the strength of the garrison, Hannibal not only overran the territory of Nola, but surrounded the Advantages gained by l.ar.ellus. Hannibal town with his soldiers, in the hope of taking it by escalade. Marares into pulia. cellus was alike watchful and bold; he threw open the gates and made a sudden sally, by which he drove back the enemy within their camp; and this success, together with his frank’ and popular bearing, won him, it is said, the affections of all parties at Nola, and put a stop to all intrigues within the walls.84 A more important consequence of this action was the desertion of above 1200 men, Spanish foot, and Numidian horse, from Hannibal’s army to the Romans;85 as we do not find that their example was followed by others, it is probable that they were not Hannibal’s old soldiers, but some of the troops which had just joined him, and which could not, as yet, have felt the spell of his personal ascendency. Still their treason naturally made him uneasy, and would for the moment excite a general suspicion in the army: the summer too was drawing to a close; and wishing to.relieve Capua from the burden of feeding his troops, he marched away into Apulia, and fixed his quarters for the winter near Arpi. Gracchus, with one consular army, followed him; while Fabius, after having ravaged the country round Capua, and carried off the green corn, as soon as it was high enough out of the ground, to his camp above Suessula, to furnish winter food for his cavalry, quartered his own army there for the winter, and ordered Marcellus to retain a sufficient force to secure Nola, and to send the rest of his men home to be disbanded.“6 Thus the campaign was ended, and Hannibal had not marked it with a victory. Complete successeofthe The Romans had employed their forces so wisely, that they had Romansin Sardinia. forced him to remain mostly on the defensive: and his two offensive operations, against’ Cumae and against Nola, had both been baffled. In Sardinia their success had been brilliant and decisive.

Mucius, the proetor, fell ill soon after he arrived in the island; upon which the senate ordered Q. Fabius, the city praetor, to raise a new legion, and to send it over into Sardinia, under any officer whom he might think proper to appoint. He chose a man, in age, rank, and character, most resembling himself, T. Manlius Torquatus, who in his first consulship, twenty years before, had fought against the Sardinians, and obtained a triumph over them.: Manlius’ second command in the island was no less brilliant than his first: he totally defeated the united forces of the Sardinians and Carthaginians, took their principal generals prisoners, reduced the revolted towns to obedience, levied heavy contributions of corn and money as a punishment of their rebellion, and then embarked with’

the troops which he had brought out with him, only leaving the usual force of a single legion in the island, and returned to Rome to report the complete submission of Sardinia. The money of his contributions was paid over to the quaestors, for the payment of the armies; the corn was given to the mdiles to supply the markets of Rome.8” Fortune in another quarter served the Romans no less effectually. The Macedonian ambassadors, after having concluded their treaty with C: pturc of the Macedonianambassadors.

Ex-Hannibal at Tifata, made their way back into Bruttium in safety, and embarked to return to Greece. But their ship was taken off the Calabrian coast by the Roman squadron on that station; and the ambassa. sLivy, XXIII. 43.‘E Livy, XXIII. 46, 48. 84 Livy, XXIII. 44, 45, 46. 87 Iivy, XXIII. 34, 41. 6 Livy, XXIII. 46.

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CHAP. XLIV.] MEASURES TO RAISE MONEY. 517 dors, with all their papers, were sent prisoners to Rome.ss A vessel which had been of their company escaped the Romans, and informed the king what had happened. He was obliged, therefore, to send a second embassy to Hannibal, as the former treaty had never reached him; and although this second mission went and returned safely, yet the loss of time was irreparable, and nothing could be done till another year.s9 Meanwhile the Romans, thus timely made aware of the king’s intentions, resolved to find such employment for him at home as should prevent his invading Italy. M. Valerius Loevinus was to take the command of the fleet at Tarentum and Brundisium, and to cross the Ionian Gulf, in order to rouse the JEtolians, and the barbarian chiefs whose tribes bordered on Philip’s western frontier, and, with such other allies as could be engaged in the cause, to form a Greek coalition against Macedon.”~ These events, and the continued successes of their army in Spain, revived the spirits of the Romans, and encouraged them to make still greater Mean.r.. of the sacrifices, in the hope that they would not be made in vain. The t.s.atR.i.e money. distress of the treasury was at its height: P. Scipio, in announcing - his victories, reported that his soldiers and seamen were in a state of utter destitution; that they had no pay, corn, or clothing; and that the two latter articles must at any rate be supplied from Rome.9l His demands were acknowledged to be reasonable; but the republic had lost so large a portion of her foreign revenue, that her chief resource now lay in the taxation of her own people: this had been doubled in the present year, yet was found inadequate; and to increase it, or even to continue it at its present amount, was altogether impossible. Accordingly the city prmtor, Q. Fulvius, addressed the people from the rostra, explained the distress of the government to them, and appealed to the patriotism of the moneyed class to assist their country with a loan. Fabius did not mean to hold out an opportunity to the public creditor of investing his money to advantage, subject only to the risk of a national bankruptcy: on this Roman loan no interest was to be paid; the creditors were simply assured that, as soon as the treasury was solvent, their demands should be discharged before all others; in the mean time their money was totally lost to them. But, on the other hand, opportunities of investing money profitably must have been greatly diminished by the war; to lend it to the government was not, therefore, so great a sacrifice. Still a public spirit was shown in the ready answer to the praetor’s appeal, such as merchants have often honorably displayed in seasons of public danger; mixed up, however -for when are human motives altogether pure?-with a considerable regard to personal advantage. Three companies were formed, each, as it seems, composed of eighteen members and a president, or chairman; and these were to supply the corn and clothing Which the armies might require. But in return they demanded an exemption from military service, whilst they were thus serving the state with their money; and they also required the government to undertake the whole sea risk, whether from storms, or from the enemy: whatever articles were thus lost were to be the loss of the nation, and not of the companies.” It will be seen hereafter how some of the contractors abused this equitable condition, and wilfully destroyed cargoes of small value, in order to recover the insurance upon them from the government. That a citizen should enrich himself by frauds practised: on his country in such a season of distress and danger is sufficiently monstrous; but the spirit of what is so emphatically called jobbing is inveterate in human nature; and we: cannot wonder at its existence among Roman citizens, while Rome was struggling for life or death, when it has been known to find its way into the prison of Christian martyrs.93 Yet neither the ordinary taxation, nor the loan in addition to it, were sufficient Livy, XXIII. 88.: 9 Livy, XXIII. 48. 89 Livy, XXIII. 39. 92 Livy, XXIII. 49.,o Livy, XXIII. 38, 48.

XXIV. 10. Zonaras, “9 See Cyprian, Epp. X. XXII. Ed. Pligalt. IX. 4.

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518. HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XL1V for the vast expenditure of the war. The hostility of Macedon had Property tLx. made it necessary to raise an additional fleet; for the coasts of Italy must be protected; and Hannibal’s free communications with Africa must be restrained; and now another fleet was required, by the threatening aspect of affairs in Sicily. Accordingly a graduated property tax for the occasion was imposed on all citizens whose property amounted to or exceeded 100,000 ases; that is, they were required to furnish a certain number of their slaves as seamen, to arm and equip them, and to provide them with dressed provisions for thirty days, and with pay, in some cases for six months, in others for a whole year.94 The senators, who were rated higher than all other citizens, were obliged in this manner each to provide eight seamen, with pay for the longer term of the whole year. Whilst the commonwealth was making these extraordinary efforts, it was of A. U. C. 540. A. c the last importance that they should not be wasted by incompe214. Fabius holds the tent leaders, either at home or abroad. Gracchus was watching com.itit.

Hannibal in Apulia; so that Fabius went to Rome to hold the comitia., It was not by accident; doubtless, that he had previou -y sent home to fix the day of the meeting, or that his own arrival was so nicely timed, that he reached Rome when the tribes were actually met in the Campus Martius; thus, without entering the city, he passed along under the walls, and took his place as presiding magistrate at the comitia,95 while his lictors still bore the naked axe in the midst of their fasces, the wellknown sign of that absolute power which the consul enjoyed everywhere out of Rome.

Fabius, in concert no doubt with Q. Fulvius and T. Manlius, and other leading senators, had already determined who were to be consuls: when the first century, in the free exercise of its choice, gave its vote in favor of T. Otacilius and M..Emilius Regillus, he at once stopped the election, and told the people that this was no time to choose ordinary consuls; that they were electing generals to oppose Hannibal, and should fix upon those men under whom they would most gladly risk their sons’ lives and their own, if they stood at that moment on the eve of battle. “Wherefore, crier,” he con. eluded, ” call back the century to give its votes over again.“96 Otacilius, who was present, although he had married Fabius’

niece, protested Fablus and Marcellus loudly against this interference with the votes of the people, and re elected consuls. charged Fabius with trying to procure his own re-election. The old man had always been so famous for the gentleness of his nature, that he was commonly known by the name of ” the Lamb;““7 but now he acted with t,;u decision of Q. Fulvius or T. Manlius; he peremptorily ordered Otacilius to be silent, and bade him remember that his lictors carried the naked axe: the century was called back, and now gave its voice for Q. Fabius and M. Marcellus. All the centuries of all the tribes unanimously confirmed this choice.98 Q.

Fulvius was also reelected preetor; and the senate, by a special vote, continued him in the prmetorship of the city, an office which put him at the head of the home government. The election of the other three prators, it seems, -was left free: so the people, as they could not have Otacilius for their consul, gave him one of the remaining proetorships, and bestowed the other two on Q. Fabius, the consul’s son, who was then curule mdile, and on P. Cornelius Lentulus. Great as the exertions of the commonwealth had been in the preceding year, they were still greater this year. Ten legions were to be employed Great exertions of the. Romans; armies a-in different parts of Italy, besides the reserve army of the two city brood.

legions, which was to protect the capital. Two legions were to 94 Livy, XXIV. 11. Comp. XXVI. 86. 38 aX6.tov abroV Kai &Ytr)62V Kt pEra rosXni EuAaXXXIV. 6. 13ea tv r 7rasetcv hrrl6pevov 1c1ovwv, Bpahos &, 95 Livy, XXIV. 7. Kai JLar.r3s EXs6ysvov Urag saOicEtS, EiKOsOV &E &pbS 9 Livy, XXIV. 8. ros atvroets5 Ksa KarriKoov adfEXrepia Tv rr5o Kai yVa9 Ovicula, see Aurelius Victor de Vir. Illustr. Op6rsyros z7r6votav cEXS rapa TOL8

EKr6S g3iyoL i’ c. 48. Plutarch, Fabius, c 1.‘O A’OovtKouoXag tzrav o rTO
vtrcrK[Vsrov iLrrd tdOaovt KaiCts r eyaAdocvXok alp#aivet rb rpoaTdrov’

iciOre del srpa; rv rpadrrlra Kait A)oerieotS iv rj 0p6SC t iaOeopivrtEg aroV. ai 3api’r-rra roVu i}ovsrt wL raftsb dvros. Tb ycp 0s Livy, XXIV. 9.

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CHAP. XLIV.] CAMPAIGN OF 540. 519 hold Sardinia, where the sparks of revolt were probably not altogether extinguished: two were sent to Sicily, with. a prospect of no inactive service; and two were stationed in Cisalpine Gaul, there being some likelihood, we must suppose, that the Gauls would soon require a force in their neighborhood; or possibly the colonies of Placentia and Cremona were thought insecure, if they were left to their own resources, insulated as they were in the midst of the enemy’s country. Finally, the Scipios still commanded their two legions in Spain; and the naval service in Sicily, and on the coast of Calabria, required no fewer than a hundred and fifty ships of war.” The Italian armies were disposed as follows: Cales, and the camp above Suessula and Nola, were again to be the headquarters of the two conDistribution of thoseoin suls, each of whom was to command a regular consular army of Italy. two legions. Gracchus, with proconsular power, was to keep?‘As own two legions, and was at present wintering near Hannibal in the north of Apulia. Q. Fabius, one of the new prwetors, was to be ready to enter ADulia with an army of equal strength, so soon as Gracchus should be called into Lucania and Samnium, to take part in the active operations of the campaign. C. Varro, with his single legion, was still to hold Picenum; and M. Lmevinus, also with proconsular power, was to remain at Brundisium with another single legion.‘0~ The two city legions served as a sort of depot, to recruit the armies in the field in case of need; and there was a large armed population, serving as garrisons in the Latin colonies, and in other important posts in various parts of the country, the amount of which it is not possible to estimate. Nor can we calculate the numbers of the guerilla bands, which were on foot in Lucania, Bruttium, and possibly in Samniumrn, and which hindered Hannibal from having the whole resources of those countries at his disposal. The Roman party was nowhere probably altogether extinct: wealthy Lucanians, who were attached to Rome, would muster their slaves and peasantry, and either by themselves, or getting some Roman officer to head them, would’ravage the lands of the Carthaginian party, and carry on a continued harassing warfare against the towns or districts which had joined Hannibal. Thus the whole south of Italy was one wide flood of war, the waters were everywhere dashing and eddying, and running in cross-currents innumerable; whilst the regular armies, like the channels of the rivers, held on their way, distinguishable amidst the chaos by their greater rapidity and power.

Hannibal watched this mass of war with the closest attention. To make head against it directly being impossible, his business was to mark his Hannibal norches into opportunities, to strike wherever there was an opening; and campania. being sure that the enemy would not dare to attack him on his own ground, he might maintain his army in Italy for an indefinite time, whilst Carthage, availing herself of the distraction of her enemy’s power, renewed her efforts to conquer Spain and recover Sicily. He hoped ere long to win Tarentum; and, if left to his own choice, he would probably have moved hither at once, when heabroke up from his winterquarters: but the weakness or fears of the Campanians hung with encumbering weight upon him; and an earnest request was sent to him from Capua, calling on him to hasten to its defence, lest, the two consular armies should besiege it.’~’ Accordingly he broke up from his winterquarters at Arpi, and marched once more into Campania, where he established his army as before on the summit of Tifata. The perpetual carelessness and omissions in Livy’s narrative, drawn as it is from various sources, with no pains to make one part correspond Fbius collecta the R with another, render it a work of extreme difficulty to present an.n aiates.roundd account of these operations, which shall be at once minute and in-H…. telligible. We also miss that notice of chronological details, which is essential to the history of a complicated campaign. Even the year in which important “I Livy, XXIV. 11. 100 Livy, XXIV. 12, 10. 1‘0

Livy, XXIV. 12.

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520 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. XLIV events happened is sometimes doubtful; yet we want, not to fix the year only, but the month, that we may arrange each action in its proper order. WVhen Hannibal set out on his march into Campania, Fabius was still at Rome; but the two new legions, which were to form his army, were already assembled at Cales; and Fabius, on hearing of Hannibal’s approach, set out instantly to take the conimand. His old army, which had wintered in the camp above Suessula, had apparently been transferred to his colleague, Marcellus; and a considerable force had been left at the close of the last campaign to garrison Nola. Fabius, how-,ver, wished to have three Roman armies cooperating with each other, as had been the case the year before; and he sent orders to Gracchus to move forwards from Apulia, and to occupy Beneventum; while his son Q. Fabius, the praetor, with a fourth army, was to supply the place of Gracchus at Luceria.‘02 It seemed as if Hannibal, having once entered Campania, was to be hemmed in on every side, and not permitted to escape: but these movements of the Roman armies induced him to call Hanno to his aid, the officer who commanded in Lucania and Bruttium, and who, with a small force of Numidian cavalry, had an auxiliary army under his orders consisting chiefly of Italian allies. Hanno advanced accordingly in the direction of Beneventum, to watch Cile army of Gracchus, and if an opportunity offered, to bring it to action.‘03 Meanwhile Hannibal, having left some of his best troops to nmaintain his camp Hannibaloffers sencrific at Tifata, and probably to protect the immediate neighborhood of at the lake Avernus.

Capua, descended into the plain towards the coast, partly in the hope of surprising a fortified post which the Romans had lately established at Puteoli,.and partly to ravage the territory of Cumin and Neapolis. But the avowed object of his expedition was to offer sacrifice to the powers of the unseen world, on the banks of the dreaded lake of Avernus.‘04 That crater of an old volcano, where the very soil still seemed to breathe out fire, while the unbroken rim of its basin was covered with the uncleared masses of the native woods, was the subject of a thousand mysterious stories, and was regarded as one of those spots where the lower world approached most, nearly to the light of day, and where offerings paid to the gods of the dead were most surely acceptable. Such worship was a main part of the national religion of the Carthaginians; and Hannibal, whose latest act before he set out on his great expedition, had been a journey to Gades to sacrifice to the god of his fathers, the Hercules of Tyre, visited the lake of Avernus, it is probable, quite as much in sincere devotion, as in order to mask his design of attacking Puteoli. Whilst he was engaged in his sacrifice, five noble citizens of Tarentum came to him, entreating him to lead his army into their country, and engaging that the city should be surrendered as soon as his standard should be visible from the walls. He listened to their invitation gladly; they offered him one of the richest cities in Italy, with an excellent harbor, equally convenient for his own communication with Carthage, and for the reception of the fleet of his Macedonian allies, whom he was constantly expecting to welcome in Italy. He promised that he would soon be at Tarentum; and the Tarentines returned home to prepare their plans against his arrival.‘0~

With this prospect before him, it is not likely that he would engage in any.e marches agaiant serious enterprise in Campania. Finding that he could not surTarentuem, prise Puteoli, he ravaged the lands of the Cumaeans and Neapolitans. According to the ever suspicious stories of the exploits of Marcellus, he made a third attempt upon Nola, and was a third time repulsed; Marcellus having called down the army from the camp above Suessula to assist him in defending the town. Then, says the writer whom Livy copied, despairing of taking a place which he had so often attacked in vain, he marched off at once towards Tarentum.‘06 The truth probably is, that, finding a complete consular army in Nola, and’l0 Livy, XXIV. 12.

105 Livy, XXIV. 13.‘10 Livy, XXIV. 14. lOg Livy, XXIV. 17. o4” Livy, XXIV.

12, 18.

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CHAP. XLIV] MARCH AGAINST TARENTUM. 521 having left his light cavalry, and some of the flower of his infantry, in the camp on Tifata, he had no thought of attacking the town, but returned to Tifata to take the troops from thence; and having done this, and stayed long enough in Campania for the Capuans to get in their harvest safely, he set off on his march for Tarentum. None of the Roman armies attempted to stop him, or so much as ventured to follow him. Fabius and Marcellus took advantage of his absence to besiege Casilinum with their united forces;7”’ Gracchus kept wisely out of his reach, whilst he swept on like a fiery flood, Jaying waste all before him, from Tifata tb the shores of the Ionian sea.‘08 He certainly did not burn or plunder the lands of his own allies, either in Samnium or Lucania; but his march lay near the Latin colony of Venusia; and the Lucanians and Samnites in his army would carefully point out those districts which belonged to their countrymen of the Roman party; above all, those ample tracts which the Romans had wrested from their fathers, and which were now farmed by the Roman publicani, or occupied by Roman citizens. Over all these, no doubt, the African and Numidian horse poured far and wide; and the fire and sword did their work. Yet, after all, Hannibal missed his prey. Three davs before he reached Tarentum, a Roman officer arrived in the city, whom Vi. Valerius Leevinus had sent in haste from Brundisium to provide forits de-bt fi fence.‘09 There was probably a small Roman garrison in the citadel, to support him in case of need; but the aristocratical party in Tarentum itself, as elsewhere, was attached to Rome; and with their aid Livius, the officer whom Leevinus had sent, effectually repressed the opposite party, embodied the population of the town, and made them keep guard on the walls, and selecting a certain number of persons whose fidelity he most suspected, sent them off as hostages to Rome. When the Carthaginian army therefore appeared before the walls, no movement was made in their favor; and after waiting a few days in vain, Hannibal was obliged to retreat. His disappointment, however, did not make him lose his temper; he spared the Tarentine territory, no less when leaving it, than when he first entered it, in the hope of winning the city; a moderation which doubtless produced its effect, and confirmed the Tarentines in the belief that his professions of friendship had been made in honesty. But he carried off all the corn which he could find in the neighborhood of Metapontum and Heraclea, and then returned to Apulia, and fixed his quarters for the winter at Salapia. His cavalry overran all the forest country above Brundisium, and drove off such numbers of horses which were kept there to pasture, that he was enabled to have four thousand broken in for the service of his army.‘10 Meanwhile the Roman consuls in Campania were availing themselves of his absence, to press the siege of Casilinum. The place was so The Romans take Casiclose to Capua, that it was feared the Capuans would attempt to linU. relieve it; Marcellus, therefore, with a second consular army, advanced from Nola to cover the siege. The defence was very obstinate; for there were seven hundred of Hannibal’s soldiers in the place, and two thousand Capuans; and Fabius, it is said, was disposed to raise the siege; but his colleague reminded him of the loss of reputation, if so small a town were allowed to baffle two consular armies; and the siege was continued. At last the Capuans offered to Fabius to surrender the town, on condition of being allowed to retire to Capua; and it appears that he accepted the terms, and that the garrison had begun to march out, when Marcellus broke in upon them, seized the open gate from which they were issuing, cut them down right and left, and forced his way into the city. Fabius, it is said, was able to keep his faith to no more than fifty of the garrison, who had reached his quarters before Marcellus arrived, and whom he sent unharmed to Capua. The rest of the Capuans and of Hannibal’s soldiers were sent prisoners 107 Livy, XXIV. 19. 109 Livy, XXIV. 20.‘ts Livy, XXIV. 20.‘O

Livy, XXIV. 20.

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522 IIISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV to Rome; and the inhabitants were divided amongst the neighboring cities, to be kept in custody till the senate should determine their f’ate.”’ After this scandalous act of treachery, Marcellus returned to Nola, and there Fabi.u ravages Sal-remained inactive, being confined, it was said, by illness,”’ till the nium. senate, before the end of the summer, sent him over to Sicily to meet the danger that was gathering there. Fabius advanced into Samnium, combining his operations, it seems, with his son, who commanded a prietorian army in Apulia, and with Gracchus, who was in Lucania, and whose army formed the link between the prietor in Apulia and his father in Samnium. These three armies were so formidable, that Hanno, the Carthaginian commander in Lucania, could not maintain his ground, but fell back towards Bruttium, leaving his allies to their own inadequate means of defence. Accordingly the Romans ravaged the country far and wide, and took so many towns that they boasted of having killed or captured 25,000 of the enemy.“3 After these expeditions, Fabius, it seems, led back his army to winterquarters in the camp above Suessula Gracchus remained in Lucania; and Fabius the praetor wintered at Luceria. I have endeavored to follow the operations of the main armies on both sides throughout the campaign, without noticing those of Gracchus and Gracchus defeats Han-p*i-n- w *
no, and enfranchisesthe Hanno in Lucania. But the most important action of the year, if his we believe the Roman accounts, was the victory obtained by Gracchus near Beneventum, when he moved thither out of Apulia to cooperate with the consuls in Campania, and Hanno was ordered by Hannibal to march to the same point out of Lucania. Hanno, it is said, had about 17,000 foot, mostly Bruttians and Lucanians, and 1200 Numidian and Moorish horse; and Gracchus, encountering him near Beneventum, defeated him with the loss of almost all his infantry; he himself and his cavalry being the only part of the army that escaped.“‘4 The numbers, as usual, are probably exaggerated immensely; but there is no reason to doubt that Gracchus gained an important victory; and it was rendered famous by his giving liberty to the volunteer slaves, by whose valor it had mainly been won.

Some of these had behaved ill in the action, and were afraid that they should be punished, rather than rewarded; but Gracchus first set them all fiee without distinction, and then, sending for those who had misbehaved, made them severally swear that they would eat and drink standing, so long as their military service should last, by way of penance for their fault.

Such a sentence, so different from the usual merciless severity of the Roman discipline, added to the general joy of the army; the soldiers marched back to Beneventum in triumph; and the people poured out to meet them, and entreated Gracchus that they might invite them all to a public entertainment. Tables were set out in the streets; and the freed slaves attracted every one’s notice by their white caps, the wellknown sign of their enfranchisement, and by the strange sight of those who, in fulfilment of their penance, ate standing, and waited upon their worthier comrades. The whole scene delighted the generous and kind nature of Gracchus: to set free the slave and to relieve the poor appear to have been hereditary virtues in his family: to him, no less than to his unfortunate den scendants, beneficence seemed the highest glory. He caused a picture to be painted, not of his victory over Hanno, but of the feasting of the enfranchised slaves in the streets of Beneventum, and placed it in the temple of Liberty on the Aventine, which his father had built and dedicated.“a The battle of Beneventum obliged Hanno to fall back into Lucania, and perIa.no retrieves his haps as far as the confines of Bruttium. But he soon recruited his loan, - army, the Lucanians and Bruttians, as well as the Picentines, who lived on the shores of the gulf of Salerno, being very zealous in the cause; and ”’ Livy, XXIV. 19. 114

Livy, XXIV. 14, 15, 16. 112 Livy, XXIV. 20. 115 Livy, XXIV. 16. 113 Livy, XXIV. 20.

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CHAP. XLIV.] SEVERE MEASURES OF THE CENSORS. 523 ere.long he revenged his defeat by a signal victory over an army of Lucanians of the Roman party, whom Gracchus had enlisted to act as an irregular force against their countrymen of the opposite faction. Still Hanno was not tempted to risk another battle with a Roman consular army; and when Gracchus advanced from Beneventum into Lucania, he retired again into Bruttium.‘5 There seems to have been no further dispute with regard to the appointment of consuls.

Fabius and the leading members of the senate appear Comiti, for no.w of.to have nominated such men as they thought most equal to the.er.. emergency; and no other candidates came forward. Fabius again held the comitia; and his son, Q. Fabius, who was preetor at the time, was elected consul together with Gracchus. The preetors were entirely changed. Q. Fulvius was succeeded in the city preetorship by M. Atilius Regulus, who had just resigned the censorship, and who had already been twice consul; the other three;prators were M. Amilius Lepidus, Cn. Fulvius Centumalus, and P.

Sempronius Tuditanus. The two former were men of noble families: Sempronius appears to have owed his appointment to his resolute conduct at Cannne, when he cut his way from.he camp through the surrounding enemies, and escaped in safety to Canusium.I” Thus another year passed over; and although the state of affairs was still darkl, the tide seemed to be on the turn. Hannibal had gained no new victory; Tarentum had been saved from his hands; and Ca-Public spirit slown oby silinum had been wrested from him. Public’ spirit was rising theRomans. daily; and fresh instances of the patriotic devotion which possessed all classes of the commonwealth were continually occurring. The owners of the slaves whom Gracchus had enfranchised refused to receive any price for them: the wealthy citizens who served in the cavalry determined not to take their pay; and their example was followed by the centurions of the legions. Trust moneys belonging to minors, or to widows and unmarried women, were deposited in the treasury; and whatever sums the trustees had occasion to draw for, were paid by the qumestor in bills on the banking commissioners, or triumviri mensarii: it is probable that these bills were actually a paper currency, and that they circulated as money, on the security of the public faith. In the same way we must suppose that the government contracts were also paid in paper; for the censors, we are told, found the treasury unable to supply the usual sums for public works and-entertainments; there was no money to repair or keep up the temples, or to provide horses for the games of the circus. Upon this the persons who were in the habit of contracting for these purposes, came forward in a body to the cen sors, and begged them to make their contracts as usual, promising not to demand payment before the end of the war. This must mean, I conceive, that they were to be paid in orders upon the treasury, which orders were to be converted into cash, when the present difficulties of the government should be at an end.“s While such was the spirit of the people, any severity exercised by the government towards the timid or the unpatriotic was sure to be generally Severe measures oftho acceptable. The censors, M.

Atilius Regulus and P. Furius Philus,.ensor.. summoned all those persons, most of them members of noble, and all of wealthy families, who had proposed to fly from Italy after the battle of Cannae. L. Metellus, who was said to have been the first author of that proposal, was at this time questor; but he and all who were concerned in it were degraded from the equestrian order, and removed from their respective tribes. Two thousand citizens of lower rank were also removed from their tribes, and deprived of their political franchise, for having evaded military service during the last four years; and the senate inflicted an additional punishment by ordering that they should serve as foot soldiers in Sicily, along with the remains of the army of Cann,, and -‘ Livy, XXIV. 20.. Livy, XXIV;. 18. 17

Liyy, XXIV. 43.

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524 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV should continue to serve so long as the enemy was in Italy.”’ The case of Metellus seems to;have been considered a hard one: in spite of the censor’s sentence, he was elected one of the tribunes in the following year. He then imipeached the censors before the people; but the other nine tribunes interposed, and would not allow the trial to proceed.‘20 If Metellus had been wronged, the people had madie up for it by electing him tribune; but it was thought a dangerous precedent to subject the censors -to a trial for the exercise of their undoubted prerogative, when there was no reason to suspect the honesty of their motives. The forces to be employed in Italy in the approaching campaign were to conDistribution of the Ro-sist of nine legions, three fewer than in the year before. The conman. ar.ie suls were each to have their two legions, Gracchus in Lucania, and Fabius in Apulia. M. zEmiliu~ was to command two legions also in Apulia, having his headquarters at Luceria; Cn. Fulvius with two more was to occupy the camp aboVe Suessula; and Varro was to remain with his one legion in Picenum. Two consular armies of two legions each were required in Sicily; one commanded by Marcellus as proconsul, the other’by P. Lentulus as proprietor: two legions were employed in Cisalpine Gaul under P. Sempronius, and two in Sardinia under their old commander, Q. Mucius. M. Yalerius Luevinus retained his single legion and his fleet, to act against-Philip on the eastern side of the Ionian sea; and P. Scipio and his brother were still continued in their command in Spain.“‘2 Hannibal passed the winter at Salapia, where, the Romans said, was a lady Opening of the cam-whom he loved, and who became famous from her influence over palgn. him.‘22 Whether his passion for her made him careless of every thing else, or whether he was really taken by surprise, we know not; but the neighboring town of Arpi was attacked by the consul Fabius, and given up to him by the inhabitants; and some Spaniards, who formed part of the garrison, entered into the Roman service.l3 Gracchus obtained some slight successes in Lucania; and some of the Bruttian towns returned to their old alliance with Rome; but a Roman contractor, T. Pomponius Veientanus, who had been empowered by the government to raise soldiers in Bruttium, and to employ them in plundering the enemies’ lands, was rash enough to venture a regular action with Hanno, in which he was defeated and made prisoner.‘24 This disaster checked the reaction in Bruttium for the present. Meanwhile Hannibal’s eyes were still fixed upon Tarentum; and thither he Hannibal lingers near marched again as soon as hlie took the field, leaving Fabius behind Tarentunm. him in Apulia. He passed the whole summer in the neighborhood of Tarentum, and reduced several small towns in the surrounding country: but his friends in Tarentum made no movement; for they dared not compromise the safety of their countrymen and relations, who had been carried off as hostages to Rome. Accordingly the season wore away unmarked by any memorable action. Hannibal still lingered in the country of the Sallentines, unwilling to give up all hope of winning the prize he had so long sought; and to lull the suspicions of the Romans, he gave out that he was confined to his camp by illness, and that this had prevented his army from returning to its usual winterquarters in Apulia.‘25 Matters were in this state, when tidings arrived at Tarentum, that the hostages, Conspirney to betrayit for whose safety their friends had been so anxious, had been all Lo Hannibal. cruelly put to death at Rome for having attempted to escape from their captivity.‘20 Released in so shocking a manner from their former hesitation, and burning to revenge the blood of their friends, Hannibal’s partisans no longer ”’ Livy, XXIV. 18. 1as Livy, XXIV. 46, 47. 22U Livy, XXIV. 43. ” Livy, XXV. 1. 121 Livy, XXIV. 44.’

Polybins, VIII. 28. Livy, XXV. 8. Appian, VII. 43. Pliny III. 16. See Livy, XXV. 7. Lucian, Dial. Mortuor. XII. and Remsterhuis’ Etde.

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CHAP. XLIV.] CONSPIRACY AT TARENTUM. 525 delayed. They communicated secretly with him, arranged the details of their attempt, and signed a treaty of alliance, by which he bound himself to respect the independence and liberty of the Tarentines, and only stipulated for the plunder of such houses as were occupied by Roman citizens.‘27 Two young men, Philemenus and Nicon, were the leaders of the enterprise. Philemenus, under pretence of hunting, had persuaded the officer at one of the gates to allow him to pass in and out of the town by night without interruption. He was known to be devoted to his sport; he scarcely ever returned without having caught or killed some game or other; and by liberally giving away what he had caught, he won the favor and confidence, not only of the officer of the gate, but also of the Roman governor himself, M. Livius Macatus, a relation of M. Livius Salinator, who afterwards defeated Hasdrubal, but a man too indolent and fond of good cheer to be the governor of a town threatened by Hannibal. So little did Livius suspect any danger, that on the very day which the conspirators had fixed for their attempt, and when Hannibal with ten thousand men was advancing upon the town,:he had invited a large party to meet him at the Temple of the Muses near the market-place, and was engaged from an early hour in festivity.2”” The city of Tarentum formed a triangle, two sides of which were washed by the water; the outer or western side by the Mediterranean; the Situation of Tarentum inner or northeastern side by that remarkable land-locked basin, f.ble to the connow called the Little Sea, which has a mouth narrower than the spirato.s. entrance into the Norwegian Fiords, but runs deep into the land, and spreads out into a wide surface of the calmest water, scarcely ruffled by the hardest gales. Exactly at the mouth of this basin was a little rocky knoll, forming the apex of the triangle of the city, and occupied by the citadel: the city itself stood on low and mostly level ground; and its southeastern wall, the base of the triangle, stretched across from the Little Sea to the Mediterranean.l29 Thus the citadel commanded the entrance into the basin, which was the port of the Tarentines; and it was garrisoned by the Romans, although many of the officers and soldiers were allowed to lodge in the city. All attempts upon the town by land must be made then against the southeastern side, which was separated from the citadel by the whole length of the city: and there was another circumstance which was likely to favor a surprise; for the Tarentines, following the direction of an oracle, as they said, buried their dead within the city walls; and the street of the tombs was interposed between the gates and the inhabited’ parts of the town.“3’ This the conspirators turned to their own purposes: in this lonely quarter two of their number, Nicon and Tragiscus, were waiting for Hannibal’s arrival without the gates. As soon as they perceived the signal which was to announce his presence, they, with a party of their friends, were to surprise the gates from within, and put the guards to the sword; while others had been left in the city to keep watch near the museum, and prevent any communication from being conveyed to the Roman governor.3’ The evening wore away; the governor’s party broke up; and his friends attended him to his house. On their way home they met some of Carelesnoes, of the the conspirators, who, to lull all suspicion, began to jest with goveror.

them, as though themselves going home from a revel, and joining the party amidst riotous shouts and loud laughter, accompanied the governor to his own door. He went to rest in joyous and careless mood; his friends were all gone to their quarters; the noise of revellers returning from their festivities died away through the city; and when midnight was come, the conspirators alone were abroad. They now divided into three parties: one was posted near the governor’s house,: a second secured the approaches to the market-place, and the third hastened to the quarter of the tombs, to watch for Hannibal’s signal.‘32’ Polybius, VIII. 26, 27. Livy, XXV. 8. 130

Polybius, VIII. 80. 128 Polybius, VIII. 28, 29. Livy, XXV. 8, 9. 131

Polybius, VIII. 29, 30. Livy, XXV. 9. 129 Strabo, VI. p. 278. 132

Polybius, VIII. 29.

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526 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV They did not watch long in vain; -a fire in a particular spot without the walls Hannibal enters ono of assured them that Hannibal was at hand. They lit a fire in answer; the galtcs. and presently, as had been agreed upon, the fire without the walls disappeared. Then the conspirators rushed to the gate of the city, surprised it with ease, put the guards to the sword, and began to hew asunder the bar by which the gates were fastened. No sooner was it forced, and the gates opened, than Hannibal’s soldiers were seen ready to enter; so exactly had the time of the operations been calculated. The cavalry were left without the walls as a reserve; but the infantry, marching in regular column, advanced through the quarter of the tombs to the inhabited part of the city.‘33 Meantime Philemenus with a thousand Africans had been sent to secure anAnother is opened to other gate by stratagem. The guards were accustomed to let him by Phileaenus. him in at all hours, whenever he returned from his hunting expeditions; and now, when they heard his usual whistle, one of them went to the gate to admit him. Philemenus called to the guard from without to open the wicket quickly; for that he and his friends had killecd a huge wild boar, and could scarcely bear the weight any longer. The guard, accustomed to have a share in the spoil, opened the wicket; and Philemenus and three other conspirators, disguised as countrymen, stepped in, carrying the boar between them. They instantly killed the poor guard, as he was admiring and feeling their prize; and then let in about thirty Africans, who were following close behind. With this force they mastered the gate-house and towers, killed all the guards, and hewed asunder the bars of the main gates to admit the whole column of Africans, who marched in on this side also in regular order, and advanced towards the market-place.134 No sooner had both Hannibal’s columns reached their destination, and as it Slauhter of the Ro-seems without exciting any general alarm, than he detached three man troops. bodies of Gaulish soldiers to occupy the principal streets which led to the market-place.

The officers in command of these troops had orders to kill every Roman who fell in their way; but some of the Tarentine conspirators were sent with each party to warn their countrymen to go home and remain quiet, assuring them that no mischief was intended to them. The toils being thus spread, the prey was now to be enticed into them. Philemenus and his friends had provided some Roman trumpets; and these were loudly blown, sounding the wellknown call to arms to the Roman soldier. Roused at this sum. mons, the Romans quartered about the town armed themselves in haste, and poured into the streets to make their way to the citadel. But they fell in scattered parties into the midst of Hannibal’s Gauls, and were cut down one after another. The governor alone had been more fortunate; the alarm had reached him in time; and being in no condition to offer any resistance,-for he felt, says Polybius, that the fumes of wine were still overpowering him, he hastened to the harbor, and getting on board a boat, was carried safely to the citadel.‘35 Day at last dawned, but did not quite clear up the mystery of the night’s alarm to the mass of the inhabitants of Tarentum. They were safe Hannibal addresses the Tarentines, and prolm-in their houses, unmassacred, unplundered; the only blast of war Istoprotectthem. had been blown by a Roman trumpet; yet Roman soldiers were lying dead in the streets; and Gauls were spoiling their bodies.

Suspense at length was ended by the voice of the public crier summoning the citizens of Tarentum, in Hannibal’s name, to appear without their arms in the market-place; and by repeated shouts of i’ Liberty! Liberty!”

uttered by some of their own countrymen, who ran round the town calling the Carthaginians their deliverers. The firm partisans of Rome made haste to escape into the citadel, while the multitude crowded to the market-place. They found it regularly occupied by Car. 3 Polybius, VIII.

o,0 81. 35Polybius, VIII. 82. Livy, XXV. 10.‘34 Polybius, VIII, 81.

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CHAP. XLIV.] CAMPAIGN OF 541. 527 thaginian troops; and the great general, of whom they had heard so much, was preparing to address them. He spoke to them, in Greek apparently, declaring, as usual, that he was come to free the inhabitants of Italy from the dominion of Rome. “The Tarentines therefore had nothing to fear; they should go home, and write each over his door, a Tarentine’s house; those words would be a sufficient security; no door so marked should be violated. But the mark must not be set falsely upon any Roman’s quarters; a Tarentine guilty of such treason would be put to death as an enemy; for all Roman property was the lawful prize of the soldiers.” Accordingly all houses where Romans had been quartered were given up to be plundered; and the Carthaginian soldiers gained a harvest, says Polybius, which fully answered their hopes. This can only be explained by supposing that the Romans were quartered generally in the houses of the wealthier Tarentines, who were attached to the Roman alliance; and that the plunder was not the scanty baggage of the legionary soldiers, but the costly furniture of the richest citizens in the greatest city of southern Italy.‘3 Thus Tarentum was won; but the citadel on its rocky knoll was still held by the Romans; and its position at once threatened the town, and shut up the Tarentine fleet useless in the harbor. Hannibal pro-feet through the town, ceeded to sink a ditch, and throw up a wall along the side of the andreturns intoApuli town towards the citadel, in order to repress the sallies of the garrison. While engaged in these works he purposely tempted the Romans to a sally, and having lured them on to some distance from their cover, turned fiercely upon them, and drove them back with such slaughter, that their effective strength was greatly reduced. He then hoped to take the citadel: but the garrison was reinforced by sea from Metapontum, the Romans withdrawing their troops fiom thence for this more important service; and a successful night-sally destroyed the besiegers’ works, and obliged them to trust to a blockade. But as this was hopeless, while the Romans were masters of the sea, Hannibal instructed the Tarentines to drag their ships overland, through the streets of the city, from the harbor to the outer sea; and this being effected without difficulty, as the ground was quite level, the Tarentine fleet became at once effective, and the sea communications of the enemy were cut off. Having thus, as he hoped, enabled the Tarentines to deal by themselves with the Roman garrison, he left a small force in the town, and returned with the mass of his troops to his winterquarters in the country of the Sallentines, or on the edge of Apulia.‘“l It will be observed that the only events recorded of this year, 541, are the reduction of Arpi by Fabius, the unimportant operations of Grac-what were the Ro. chus in Lucania, and Hannibal’s-surprise of Tarentum; which last mans doing! action, however, did not happen till the end of the campaign, about the middle of the winter. According to Livy, Hannibal had passed the whole summer near Tarentum; he must therefore have been some months in that neigborhood; and what was going on elsewhere the while? Gracchus, we are told, was engaged in Lucania; but where was the consul Fabius, with his father? and what was done by the four Roman legions, Fabius’ consular army, and the prmtorian army of M. 2Emilius, which were both stationed in Apulia? Allowing that Cn. Fulvius, with his two legions in the, camp above Suessula, was busied in watching the Campanians, yet Fabius and IEmilius had nearly forty thousand men at their disposal; and yet Capua was not besieged; nor was Hannibal impeded in his attempts upon Tarentum. Is it to be conceived that so large a portion of the power of Rome, directed by old Fabius himself, can have been totally wasted during a whole summer, useless alike for attack or defence? The answer to this question depends upon another point, which is itself not easy to fix; the true date, namely, of the surprise of Tarentum. Chronologicat dlleuI Livy tells us that it was placed by different writers in different tie.’ Polybius, VIII.

33. Livy, XXV. 10.’” Polybius, VIII. 34-36. Li’vy, XXV. 11.

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528 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV years; and he himself prefers the later date,‘3s yet does not give it correctly. For, as Tarentum was surprised in the winter, the doubt must have been, whether to fix it towards the end of the consulship of Fabius and Gracchus, or of Fulvius and Appius Claudius: it could never have been placed so early as the consulship of Fabius and Marcellus. Livy describes it after, he has mentioned the coming into office of Fulvius and Claudius, as if it belonged to their year; yet he places it before the opening of the campaign, which implies that it must have occurred in the preceding winter, whilst Fabius and Gracchus were still in office. Polybius evidently gave the later date, that is, the year of Fulvius and Appius, but the end of it: according to him, it followed the death of Gracchus, and the various events of the summer of 542. And there are some strong reasons for believing this to be the more probable position. If this were so, we must suppose that the summer of 541 was passed without any important action, because Hannibal, after the loss of Arpi, continued to watch the two Roman armies in Apulia; and that either the fear of losing Tarentum, or the hope of recovering Salapia and other Apulian towns, detained Fabius in the southeast, and delayed the siege of Capua. In the mean time men’s minds at Rome were restless and uneasy; and the Disorders at Rome. government had enough to do to prevent their running wild in one direction or another. The city had suffered from a fire, which lasted. a whole day and two nights, and destroyed all the buildings along the river, with many of those on the slope of the Capitoline hill, and between it and the Palatine.‘39 The distress thus caused would be great; and the suspicions of treason and incendiarism, the constant attendants of great fires in large cities, would be sure to imbitter the actual suffering. At such a time every one would crave to know what the future had in store for him; and whoever professed to be acquainted with the secrets of fate found many to believe him. Faith in the gods of Rome was beginning to be shaken: if they could not, or would not save, other powers might be more propitious; and sacrifices and prayers to strange gods were offered in the Forum and Capitol; while prophets, deceiving or deceived, were gathering crowds in every street, making a profit of their neighbors’ curiosity and credulity.‘40 Nor were these vagabond prophets the only men who preyed upon the public distress: the wealthy merchants, who had come forward with patriotic zeal to supply the armies when the treasury was unable to bear the burden, were now found to be seeking their own base gain out of their pretended liberality. M.

Postumius, of Pyrgi, was charged by public rumor with the. grossest frauds: he had demanded to be reimbursed for the loss of stores furnished by him at sea, when no such loss had occurred; he had loaded old rotten vessels with cargoes of trifling value; the sailors had purposely sunk the ships, and had escaped in their boats; and then Postumius magnified the value of their cargo, and prayed to be indemnified for the loss.‘4’ Even the virtue of Roman matrons could not stand the contagion of this evil time: more than one case of shame was brought by the ediles before the judgment of the people.‘42 Man’s spirit failed with woman’s modesty: the citizens of the military age were slow to enlist; and many from the country tribes would not come to Rome when the consuls summoned them.‘43

All this unsoundness at home may have had its effect on the operations of the war, and tended to make Fabius more than usually cautious, as another defeat at such a moment might have extinguished the Roman name. Against this weight of evils the senate bore up vigorously. The superstitions A.

U. C. 542. A. C of the people, their worship of strange gods, and their shrinking 212. Vigorous cns-from military service, required to be noticed without delay. The ures of the senate. city praetor, M. Atilius, issued an edict forbidding all public sacrifices’I’ Livy, XXV. 11. 141 Livy, XXV. 8, 4.”9 Livy, XXIV. 47. 142 Livy, XXV. 2. i4 Livy, XXV. 1, 12. 143 Livy, XXV. 5.

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LJU. XLIV.] PUNISHMENT OF POSTUMIUS. 529 to strange gods, or with any strange rites. All books of prophecies, all formularies of prayer or of sacrifice, were to be brought to him before the first of April; that is, before he went out of office.‘44 The great ceremonies of the national religion were celebrated with more than usual magnificence; the great games of the circus were kept up for an additional day; two days were added to the celebration of the games of the commons; and they were further marked by a public entertainment given in the precincts of the temple of Jupiter on the capitol to all the poorer citizens.T‘4 A great military effort was to be made the ensuing campaign; old Q. Fulvius Flaccus, one of the ablest as well as severest men in Rome, was chosen consul for the third time; and Appius Claudius was elected as his colleague.‘49 The armies, notwithstanding the difficulty of enlisting soldiers, were to be augmented; two extraordinary:commissions, of three members each, were appointed, one to visit all the country tribes within fifty miles of Rome, and the other such as were more remote. Every free-born citizen was to be passed in review; and boys under seventeen were to be enlisted, if they seemed strong enough to bear arms; but their years of service were to count from their enlistment; and if they were called out before the military age began, they might claim their discharge before it ended.147 While dealing thus strictly with the disorders and want of zeal of the multitude, the senate, it might have been supposed, would not spare the P,,ish.ment of Postufraud of the contractor Postumius.

But with that neglect of m”i’ equal justice, which is the habitual sin of an aristocracy, they punished the poor, but were afraid to attack the wealthy; and although the city prmetor had made an official representation of the tricks practised by Postumius, no steps were taken against him.

Amongst the new tribunes, however, were two of the noble house of the Carvilii, who, indignant at the impunity of so great an offender, resolved to bring him to trial. They at first demanded no other penalty than that a fine of 200,000 ases should be imposed on him; but when the trial came on, a large party of the moneyed men broke up the assembly by creating a riot, and no sentence was passed. This presumption, however, overshot its mark; the consuls took up the matter and laid it before the senate: the senate resolved that the peace of the commonwealth had been violently outraged; and the tribunes now proceeded against Postumius and the principal authors of the disturbance capitally. Bail was demanded of them; but they deserted their bail, and went into exile; upon which the people, on the motion of the tribunes, ordered that their property should be sold, and themselves outlawed.`48 Thus the balance of justice was struck; and this, doubtless, contributed to conciliate the poorer citizens, and to make them more ready to bear their part in the war. It was resolved that Capua should be besieged without delay. In the preceding year, 112 noble Capuans had left the city, and’ come over Resolution to bosiege to the Romans, stipulating for nothing but their lives and proper-CaIpu. ties.‘49 This shows that the aristocratical party in Capua could not be depended on: if the city were hard pressed, they would not be ready to, make any extraordinary sacrifices in its behalf. Hannibal was far away in the farthest corner of Italy; and as long as the citadel of Tarentum held out, he would be unwilling to move towards Campania. Even if he should move, four armies were ready to oppose him; those of the two consuls, of the consul’s brother, Cn. Fulvius, who was praetor in Apulia, and of another prsetor, C. Claudius Nero, who commanded two legions in the camp above Suessula.

Besides this mass of forces, Ti. Gracchus, the consul of the preceding year, still retained his army as proconsul in Lucania, and might be supposed capable of keeping Hanno and. the army of Brut, tium in check. ”’

Livy, XXV. 1. 147 Livy, XXV. 5.‘15 Livy, XXV. 2. 140 Livy, XXV. 4.

140Livy, XXV. 8. 14 Livy, XXIV. 47. 34

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530 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV It was late in the spring before the consuls took the field. One of them sucThe Cmpanins.pply ceeded to the army of the late consul, Fabius; the other took the to nnibal for aid. two legions with which Cn. Fulvius Centumulas had held the camp above Suessula.u5~ These armies marching, the one from Apulia, the other from Campania, met at Bovianum: there, at the back of the Matese, in the country of the Pentrian Samnites, the faithful allies of Rome, the consuls were making preparations for the siege of Capua, and, perhaps, were at the same time watching the state of affairs in the south, and the movements of Hannibal. The Campanians suspected that mischief was coming upon them, and sent a deputation to Hannibal praying him to aid them. If they were to stand a siege, it was important that the city should be well supplied with provisions; and their own harvest had been so insufficient, owing to the devastation caused by the war, that they had scarcely enough for their present consumption. Hannibal would therefore be pleased to order that supplies should be sent to them from the country of his Samnite and Lucanian allies, before their communications were cut off by the presence of the Roman armies.16’ Hannibal was still near Tarentum, whether hoping to win the town or the citaHe sends Hanno to re-del, the doubtful chronology of this period will not allow us to eve themn, weho fail, decide. He ordered Hanno, with the army of: Bruttium, to move gence.

forward into Samnium; a most delicate operation, if the two consuls were with their armies at Bovianum, and Gracchus in Lucania itself, in the very line of Hanno’s march, and if C. Nero, with two legions more, was lying in the camp above Suessula. But the army from Suessula had been given to one of the consuls, and the legions which were to take its place were to be marched from the coast of Picenum, and perhaps had hardly reached their destination. The Lucanians themselves seem to have found sufficient employment for Gracchus; and Hanno moved with a rapidity which friends and enemies were alike unprepared for. He arrived safely in the neighborhood of Beneventum, encamped his army in a strong position about three miles from the town, and dispatched word to the Capuans that they should instantly send off every carriage and beast of burden in their city, to carry home the corn which he was going to provide for them. The towns of the Caudine Samnites emptied their magazines for the purpose, and forwarded all their corn to Hanno’s camp. Thus far all prospered; but the negligence of the Capuans ruined every thing: they had not carriages enough ready; and Hanno was obliged to wait in his perilous situation, where every hour’s delay was exposing him to destruction.‘52 Beneventum was a Latin colony, in other words, a strong Roman garrison, watching all his proceedings; from thence, information was sent to the consuls at Bovianum; and Fulvius with his army instantly set out, and entered Beneventum by night. There he found that the Capuans with their means of transport were at length arrived; and all disposable hands had been pressed into the service; that Hanno’s camp was crowded with cattle and carriages, and a mixed multitude of unarmed men, and even of women and children; and that a vigorous blow might win it with all its spoil: the indefatigable general was absent, scouring the country for additional supplies of corn. Fulvius sallied from Beneventum a little before daybreak, and led his soldiers to assault Hanno’s position. Under all disadvantages of surprise and disorder, the Carthaginians resisted so vigorously, that Fulvius was on the point of calling off his men, when a brave Pelignian officer threw the standard of his cohort over the enemy’s wall, and desperately climbed the rampart and scaled the wall to recover it. His cohort rushed after him; and a Roman centurion then set the same example, which was followed with equal alacritv. Then the Romans broke into the camp on every side, even the wounded men struggling on with the mass, that they might die within the enemy’s ramparts. The slaughter was great, and the prisoners many; but above all, the “~ Livy, XXV. 3. G1

Livy, XXV. 13..52 Livy, XXV. 13.

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CHAP. XLIV.] DEATH OF GRACCHUS 531 whole of the corn which Hanno had collected for the relief of Capua was lost, and the object of his expedition totally frustrated. He himself, hearing of the wreck of his army, retreated with speed into Bruttium.“53 Again the Capuans sent to Hannibal requesting him to aid them ere it was too late. Their negligence had just cost him an army, and had frustrated The capuans again apall his plans for their relief; but, with unmoved temper, he assured ply for aid.

them that he would not forget them, and sent back 2000 of his invincible cavalry with the deputation, to protect their lands from the enemy’s ravages. It was important to him not to leave the south of Italy till the very last moment; for since he had taken Tarentum, the neighboring Greek cities of Metapontum, Heraclea, and Thurii, had joined him; and as he had before won Croton and Locri, he was now master of the whole coast from the straits of Messana to the mouth of the Adriatic, with the exception of Rhegium and the citadel of Tarentuml. Into the latter the Romans had lately thrown supplies of provisions; and the garrison was so strong, that Hannibal was unwilling to march into Campania, while such a powerful force of the enemy was eft behind in so favorable a position.‘54 The consuls meanwhile, not content with their own two armies, and with the two legions expected, if not yet arrived, in the camp above Sues-Deth f sula, sent to Gracchus in Lucania, desiring him to bring up his Cententens raises an arcavalry and light troops to Beneventum, to strengthen them in yinLuca ia that kind of force, in which they fully felt their inferiority. But before he could leave his own province, he was drawn into an ambuscade by the treachery of a Lucanian in the Roman interest, and perished.l5 His quaestor, Cn. Cornelius, marched with his cavalry towards Beneventum, according to the consul’s orders; but the infantry, consisting of the slaves whom he had enfranchised, thought that their services were ended by the death of their deliverer, and immediately dispersed to their homes.‘56

Thus Lucania was left without either a Roman army or general; but M.

Centenius, an old centurion, distinguished for his strength and courage, undertook the command there, if the senate would intrust him with a force equal to a single legion. Perhaps, like T. Pomponius Veientanus, he was connected with some of the contractors and moneyed men, and owed his appointment as much to their interest as to his own reputation. But he was a brave and popular soldier; and so many volunteers joined him on his march, hoping to be enriched by the plunder of Lucania, that he arrived there with a force, it is said, amounting to near sixteen thousand men.

His confidence and that of his followers was doomed to be wofully disappointed.“‘57 The consuls knew that Hannibal was far away; and they did not know that any of his cavalry were in Capua. They issued boldly, therefore, from the Caudine Forks on the great Campanian plain, and scat-TheR by a nallyfro tered their forces far and wide to destroy the still green corn. To as f their astonishment the gates of Capua were thrown open; and with the Campanian infantry they recognized the dreaded cavalry of Hannibal. In a moment their foragers were driven in; and as they hastily formed their legions in order of battle to cover them, the horsemen broke upon them like a whirlwind, and drove them with great loss and confusion to their camp.‘58 This sharp lesson taught them caution; but their numbers were overwhelming; and their two armies, encamped before Capua, cut off the communications of the city,. and had the harvest of the whole country in their power. But ere many days had elapsed, an unwelcome sight was seen on the summit of Tifata; Hannibal was there once more with his army. He Hannibal returns descended into Capua; two days afterwards he marched out to’ifata. 153 Livy, XXV. 14. Valerius Maximuw, III. 1 Livy, XXV. 20. 2, 20. 157 Livy, XXV. 19. in4 Livy, XXV. 15, Appian, VII. 35.‘1

Livy, XXV. 18. “5 Livy, XXV. 16.

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532 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV battle; again his invincible Numidians struck terror into the Roman line, when the sudden arrival of Cn.

Cornelius with the cavalry of Graccbus’ army broke of! the action; and neither side, it is, said, knowing what this new force might be, both, as if by common consent, retreated.‘5 How Hannibal so outstripped Cornelius as to arrive from Tarentum on the scene of action two or three days before him, who was coming from Lucania, we are not told, and can only conjecture. But the arrival of this reinforcement, though it had saved the consuls from defeat, did not embolden them to hold their ground: they left their camps as soon as night came on; Fulvius fell down upon the coast, near Cumin; Appius Claudius retreated in the direction of Lucania. Few passages in history can offer a parallel to Hannibal’s campaigns; but this confident gathering of the enemies’ overflowing numbers round the city of his nearest allies, his sudden march, the unlookedfor appearance of his dreaded veterans, and the instant scattering of the besieging armies before him, remind us of the deliverance of Dresden in 1813, when Napoleon broke in upon the allies’ confident expectations of victory, and drove them away in signal defeat. And like the allies in that great campaign, the Roman generals knew their own strength; and though yielding to the shock of their adversary’s surpassing energy and genius, they did not allow themselves to be scared from their purpose, but began again steadily to draw the toils which he had once broke through. Great was the joy in Capua, when the people rose in the morning and saw the Roman camps abandoned: there needs no witness to tell us with what sincere and deep admiration they followed and gazed on their deliverer; how confident they felt that, with him for a shield, no harm could reach them. But almost within sight and hearing of their joy, the, stern old Fulvius was crouching, as it were, in his thicket, watching the moment for a second spring upon his prey; and when Hannibal left that rejoicing and admiring multitude to follow the traces of Appius, he passed through the gates of Capua, to enter them again no more. Appius retreated in the direction of Lucania: this is all that is reported of his march; and then, after a while, having led his’enemy in the direcOn bi return into Lucaa hfe destroys the ar-tion which suited his purposes, he turned off by another road, and my o made his way back to Campania.’”~ With such a total absence of details, it is impossible to fix the line of his march exactly. It was easy for Appius to take the round of the Matese; retiring first by the great road to Beneventum, then turning to his left and regaining. his old quarters at Bovianum, from whence, the instant that Hannibal ceased to follow him, he would move along under the north side of the Matese to _zEsernia, and descend again upon Campania by the valley of the Vulturnus.

Hannibal’s pursuit was necessarily stopped as soon as Appius moved northwards from Beneventum: he could not support his army in the country of the Pentrian Samnites, where every thing was hostile to him; nor did he like to abandon his line of direct communication with southern Italy. He had gained a respite for Capua, and had left an auxiliary force to aid in its defence: meanwhile other objects must not be neglected; and the fall of the citadel of Tarentum might of itself prevent or raise the siege of Capua. So he turned off from following Appius, and was marching back to the south, when he was told that a Roman army was attempting to bar his passage in Lucania. This was the motley multitude commanded by Centenius, which had succeeded, as we have seen, to the army of Gracchus. ~ With what mad hope, or under what false impression, Centenius could have been tempted to rush upon certain destruction, we know not: but in the number, no less than in the quality of his troops, he must have been far inferior to his adversary. His men fought bravely; and he did a centurion’s duty well, however he may have failed’- Livy, XXV. 19. lIo Livy, XXV. 19.

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CHAP. XLIV] HANNIBAL’S SITUATION. 533 as a general; but he was killed, and nearly fifteen thousand men are said to have perished with him.t”’ Thus Lucania was cleared of the Romans; and as the firmest partisan of the Roman interest among the Lucanians had been the very man who,,ndthat ofCn.

Fulvi had betrayed Gracchus to his fate, it is likely that the Carthaginian Apulia. party was triumphant through the whole country. Only one Roman army was left in the south of Italy, the two legions commanded by Cn. Fulvius Flaccus, the consul’s brother, in Apulia. But Cn. Fulvius had nothing of his brother’s ability; he was a man grown old in profligacy; and the discipline of his army was said to be in the worst condition. Hannibal, hoping to complete his work, moved at once into Apulia, and found Fulvius in the neighborhood of Herdonea. The Roman general’ met him in the open field without hesitation, and was presently defeated; he himself escaped from the action, but Hannibal had occupied the principal roads in the rear of the enemy with his cavalry; and the greatest part of the Roman army was cut to pieces.‘62 We naturally ask what result followed from these two great victories; and to this question we find no recorded answer. Hannibal, we are told, hat were the res.lt, returned to Tarentum; but finding that the citadel still held out, of these victories. and could neither be forced nor surprised, and that provisions were still introduced by sea, a naval blockade in ancient warfare being always inefficient, he marched off towards Brundisium, on some prospect that the town would be betrayed into his hands. This hope also failed him; and he remained inactive in Apulia, or in the country of the Sallentines, during the rest of the year. Meantime the consuls received orders from the senate to collect the wrecks of the two beaten armies, and to search for the soldiers of Gracchus’ army, who had dispersed, as we have seen, after his death. The city praetor, P.

Cornelius, carried on the same search nearer Rome; and these duties, says Livy, were all performed most carefully and vigorously.‘63 This is all the information which exists for us in’he remains of the ancient writers; but assuredly this is no military history of a campaign. It is always to be understood that Hannibal could not remain long in an enemy’s country, from the difficulty of feeding his men, especially Difficulties of IIanihis’cavalry. But the country’round Capua, was not all hostile; bhl’ssituation. Atella and Calatia, in the plain of Campania itself, were still his allies; so were many of the Caudine Samnites, from whose cities Hanno had collected the corn early in this year for the relief of Capua.

Again, we can conceive how the number of the Roman armies sometimes oppressed him; how he dared not stay long in one quarter, lest a greater evil should befall him in another. But at this moment three great disasters, the dispersion of the army of Gracchus, and the destruction of those of Centenius and Fulvius, had cleared the south of Italy of the Romans; and his friends in Apulia, in Lucania, at Tarentum, and in Bruttium, could have nothing to fear, had he left them for the time to their own resources. Why, after defeating Fulvius, did he not retrace his steps towards Campania, hold the field with the aid of his Campanian and Samnite allies till the end of the military season, and then winter close at hand, on the-shores of the gulf of Salerno, in the country of his allies, so as to make it impossible for the Romans either to undertake or to maintain the siege of Capua? That his not doing this was not his own fault, his extraordinary ability and energy may sufficiently assure us.

But where the hindrance was, Hisprobable resonsfor we cannot for certain discover. His army must have been worn winterig in Apulia. by its long and rapid march to and from Campania, and by two battles fought with so short an interval. His wounded must have been numerous; nor can we tell how such hard service in the heat of summer may have tried the health of l’l Livy, XXV. 19. 16 Livy, XXV. 22.‘62 Livy, XXV. 20, 21.

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534 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV his soldiers. His horses, too, must have needed rest; and to overstrain the main arm of his strength would have been fatal. Perhaps, too, great as was Hannibal’s ascendency over his army, there was a point beyond which it could not be tried with safety.

Long marches and hard-fought battles gave the soldier, especially the Gaul and the Spaniard, what in his eyes was a rightful claim to a season of rest and enjoyment: the men might have murmured had they not been permitted to taste some reward of their victories. Besides all these reasons, the necessity of a second march into Campania may not have seemed urgent: the extent of Capua was great; if the Roman consuls did encamp before it, still the city was in no immediate danger; after the winter another advance would again enable him to throw supplies into the town, and to drive off the Roman armies. So Capua was left for the present to its own resources, and Hannibal passed the autumn and winter in Apulia.

Immediately the Roman armies closed again upon their prey. Three grand The HRomns surround magazines of corn were established, to feed the besieging army cp.a. with a double during the winter, one at Casilinum within three miles of Capua; another at a fort built for the purpose at the mouth of the Vulturnus; and a third at Puteoli. Into these two last magazines the corn was conveyed by sea from Ostia, whither it had already been collected from Sardinia and Etruria.‘64 Then the consuls summoned C. Nero from his camp above Suessula; and the three armies began the great work of surrounding Capua with double continuous lines, strong enough to repel the besieged on one side, and Hannibal on the other, when he should again appear in Campania. The inner line was carried round the city, at a distance of about a quarter of a mile from the walls; the outer line was concentric with it; and the space between the two served for the cantonments and magazines of the besiegers. The lines, says Appian,‘65
looked. like a great city, inclosing a smaller city in the middle; like the famous lines of the Peloponnesians before Plataea. What time was employed in completing them we know not; they were interrupted by continual sallies of the besieged; and Jubellius Taurea and the Capuan cavalry were generally too strong for the Roman horsemen.‘66 But their infantry could do nothing against the legions; the besieging army must have amounted nearly to sixty thousand men; and slowly but surely the imprisoning walls were raised, and their circle completed, shutting out the last gleams of light from the eyes of the devoted city. Before the works were closed all round, the consuls, according to the senate’s Their offertoallowany directions signified to them by the city prretor, announced to the of the citizns rto come Capuans, that whoever chose to come out of the city with his A.U.C. 543. AC. 211. family and property before the ides of March, might do so with safety, and should be untouched in body or goods.‘67 It would seem then that the works were not completed till late in the winter; for we cannot suppose that the term of grace would have been prolonged to a remote day, especially as the ides of March were the beginning of the new consular year; and it could not be known long beforehand whether the present consuls would be continued in their command or no. The offer was received by the besieged, it is said, with open scorn; their provisions were as yet abundant, their cavalry excellent; their hope of aid from Hannibal, as soon as the campaign should open, was confident. But Fulvius waited his time; nor was his thirst for Capuan blood to be disappointed by his removal from the siege at the end of the year: it would seem as if the new consuls were men of no great consideration, appointed probably for that very reason, that their claims might not interfere with those of their predecessors. One of them, P.

Sulpicius Galba, had filled no curule office previously: the other, Cn.

Fulvius Centumalus, had been prmtor two years before, but was not distinguished by any remarkable action. The siege of Capua was still to be conI” Livy, XXV. 22. 106 Appian VII. 37. Livy, XXVI. 4. lob VII. So. 167

Livy, XXV. 22.

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CIAr. XLIV.] HANNIBAL TRIES TO RELIEVE CAPUA. 532 ducted by Appius Claudius and Fulvius; and they were ord(red not to retire from their positions till they should have taken the city.‘68 What was the state of affairs in Capua meantime, we know not. The Roman stories are little to be credited, which represent all the richer and nobler citizens as abandoning the government, and leaving the e ofp office of chief magistrate, Meddix Tuticus, to be filled by one Seppius Lesius, a man of obscure condition, who offered himself as a candidate.l69 Neither Vibius Virrius nor Jubellius Taurea wanted resolution to abide by their country to the last; and it was expressly said that, down to the latest period of the siege, there was no Roman party in Capua; no voice was heard to speak of peace or surrender; no citizen had embraced the consul’s offers of mercy.‘0 Even when they had failed to prevent the completion of the Roman lines, they continued to make frequent sallies; and the proconsuls could only withstand their cavalry by mixing lightarmed foot soldiers amongst the Roman horsemen, and thus strengthening that weakest arm in the Roman service. Still, as the blockade was now fully established, famine must be felt sooner or later: accordingly a Numidian was sent to implore Hannibal’s aid, and succeeded in getting through the Romain lines, and carrying his message safely to Bruttium.”’ Hannibal listened to the player, and leaving his heavy baggage and the mass of his army behind, set out with his cavalry and light infantry, and Hannibal comes to its with thirty-three elephants.12 Whether his Samnite and Lucanian ““relief allies joined him on the march is not stated; if they did not, and if secrecy and expedition were deemed of more importance than an addition of force, the troops which he led with him must have been more like a single corps than a complete army. Avoiding Beneventum, he descended the valley of the Calor towards the Vulturnus, stormed a Roman post, which had been built apparently to cut off the communications of the besieged with the upper valley of the Vulturnus, and encamped immediately behind the ridge of Tifata. From thence he descended once more into the plain of Capua, displayed his cavalry before the Roman lines in the hope of tempting them out to battle, and finding that this did not succeed, commenced a general assault upon their works. Unprovided with any artillery, his best hope was, that the Romans might be allured to make some rash sally: his cavalry advanced by squad-Hannibal attnacts the rons up to the edge of the trench, and discharged showers of mis-oRoY-an lines inefe.ct” ally, and resolves ti siles into the lines; while his infantry assailed the rampart, and rch against Rome. tried to force their way through the palisade which surmounted it. From within, the lines were attacked by the Campanians and Hannibal’s auxiliary garrison; but the Romans were numerous enough to defend both fronts of their works; they held their ground steadily, neither yielding nor rashly pursuing; and Hannibal, finding his utmost efforts vain, drew off his army.t7’ Some resolution must be taken promptly; his cavalry could not be fed where he was, for the Romans had previously destroyed or carried away every thing that might serve for forage; nor could he venture to wait till the new consuls should have raised their legions, and be ready to march from Rome and threaten his rear. One only hope remained; one attempt might yet be made, whichn should either raise the siege of Capua or accomplish a still greater object: Hannibal resolved to march upon Rome. A Numidian was again found, who undertook to pass over to the Roman lines as a deserter, and from thence to make his escape into Capua, bear-Ho sets out suddenly ing a letter from Hannibal, which explained his purpose, and con-bynight. jured the Capuans patiently to abide the issue of his attempt for a little while.‘7

When this letter reached Capua, Hannibal was already gone; his camp-fires had.98 LiTvy, XXVI. 1. Frontinus, III. 18, 3. 12 Livy, XXVI. 5. 16’ Livy, XXVI. 6. 173 Polybius, IX. 3. Livy, XXVI. 5. o Livy, XXVI. 12. 174

Polybius, IX. 5. Livy, XXVI. 7. - Livy, XXVI. 4. Frontinus, IV. 7, 29.

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HISTORY OF ROME. [CArP. XLIV been seen burning, as usual, all night in his accustomed position on Tifata; but he had begun his march the preceding evening, immediately after dark, while the Romans still thought that his army was hanging over their heads, and were looking for a second assault.‘5 His army disappeared from the eyes of the Romans behind Tifata; and they Difficlltyofmakingout knew not whither he was gone. Even so it is with us at this day; is lin of march. we lose him from Tifata; we find him before Rome; but we know nothing of his course between. Conflicting and contradictory accounts have made the truth undiscoverable: what regions of Italy looked with fear or hope on the march of the great general and his famous soldiers, it is impossible from our existing records to determine.

Whether he followed the track of Pyrrhus, and spread havoc through the lands of the numerous colonies on the Latin road, Cales, Casinum, Interamna, and Fregelle;17 or whether, to baffle the enemy’s pursuit, and avoid the delay of crossing the Vulturnus, he plunged northwards into the heart of Samnium,17T astonished the Latin colonists of (Esernia with his unlookedfor passage, crossed the central Apennines into the country of the Pelignians, and then, turning suddenly to his left, broke down into the land of the Marsians, passing along the glassy waters of Fucinus, and under the ancient walls of.Alba, and scaring the upland glades and quiet streams of the aboriginal Sabines, with the wild array of his Numidian horsemen; we cannot with any confidence decide. Yet the agreement of all the stories as to the latter part of his march seems to point out the line of its beginning. All accounts say that, descending nearly by the old route of the Gauls, he kept the Tiber on his right, and the Anio on his left; and that, finally, he crossed the Anio, and encamped at a distance of less than four miles from the walls of Rome.‘78 Before the sweeping pursuit of his Numidians, crowds of fugitives were seen Terror in Rome; forti-flying towards the city, while the smoke of burning houses arose tude of the senate. far and wide into the sky. Within the walls the confusion and terror were at their height: he was come at last, this Hannibal, whom they had so long dreaded; he had at length dared what even the slaughter of Cannas had not emboldened him to venture; some victory greater even than Cannae must have given him this confidence; the three armies before Capua must be utterly destroyed; last year he had destroyed or dispersed three other armies, and had gained possession of the entire south of Italy; and now he had stormed the lines before Capua, had cut to pieces the whole remaining force of the Roman people, and was come to Rome to finish his work. So the wives and mothers of Rome lamented, as they hurried to the temples; and there, prostrate before the gods, and sweeping the sacred pavement with their unbound hair-in the agony of their fear, they remained pouring forth their prayers for.deliverance. Their sons and husbands hastened to man the walls and the citadel, and to secure the most important points without the city; whilst the senate, as calm as their fathers ot old, whom the Gauls massacred when sitting at their own doors, but with the energy of manly resolution, rather than the resignation of despair, met in the Forum, and there remained assembled, to direct every magistrate on the instant how he might best fulfil his duty.‘lm But God’s care watched over the safety of a people whom he had chosen to Rome i preserved from work out the purposes of his providence: Rome was not to perish. an.nssault. Two city legions were to be raised, as usual, at the beginning of the year; and it so happened that the citizens from the country tribes were to meet at Rome on this very day for the enlistment for one of these legions; while the soldiers of the other, which had been enrolled a short time before, were to appear at Rome on this same day in arms, having been allowed, as the custom was, to return home for a few days after their enlistment, to prepare for active service. 15 Polybius, IX. 5. 178 Polybius, IX. 6. Livy, XXVI. 9. Ap’ ~” Livy, XXVI. 9. plan, VII. 38. n7 Polybius, IX. 5. i Polybius, IX. 6. Livy, XXVI. 9.

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ClAr. XLIV.] THE ROMANS MARCH TO. -HECK HANNIBAL. 537 Thus it happened that ten thousand men were brought together at the very moment when they were most needed, and were ready to repel any assault upon the walls.Ls0

The allies, it seems, were not ordinarily called out to serve with the two city legions; but on this occasion it is mentioned that the Latin colony of Alba, having seen Hannibal pass by their walls, and guessing the object of his march, sent his whole force to assist in the defence of Rome; a zeal which the Greek writers compared to that of Platsea, whose citizens fought alone by the side of the Athenians on the day of Marathon.‘s1 To assault the walls of Rome was now hopeless; but the open country was at Hannibal’s mercy, a country which had seen no enemy for near a Hannibal ravages the hundred and fifty years, cultivated and inhabited in the full secu-country round. rity of peace. Far and wide it was overrun by Hannibal’s soldiers; and the army appears to have moved about, encamping in one place after another, and sweeping cattle and prisoners and plunder of every sort, beyond numbering, within the inclosure of its camp.is2 It was, probably, in the course of these excursions, that Hannibal, at’he head of a large body of cavalry, came close up to the Colline gate, rode He rides up theall along leisurely under the walls to see all he could of the city, and of R.olle. is said to have cast his javelin into it as in defiance.‘t3 From farthest Spain he had come into Italy; he had wasted the whole country of the Romans and their allies with fire and sword for more than six years, had slain more of their citizens than were now alive to bear arms against him; and at last he was shutting them up within their city, and riding freely under their walls, while none dared meet him in the field. If any thing of disappointment depressed his mind at that instant; if he felt that Rome’s strength was not broken, nor the spirit of her people quelled, that his own fortune was wavering, and that his last effort had been made, and made in vain; yet thinking where he was, and of the shame and loss which his presence was causing to his enemies, he must have wished that his father could have lived to see that day, and must have thanked the gods of his country that they had enabled him so fully to perform his vow. For some time, we know not how long, this devastation of the Roman territory lasted without opposition. Meanwhile the siege of Capua was not Flviu,, returns to raised; and Fabius, in earnestly dissuading such a confession of Rome., and the…Rom. fear, showed that he could be firm no less than cautious, when Haunibal. boldness was the highest prudence. But Fulvius, with a small portion of the besieging army, was recalled to Rome: Fabius had ever acted with him, and was glad to have the aid of his courage and ability; and when he arrived, and by a vote of the senate was united with the consuls in the command, the Roman forces were led out of the city, and encamped, according to Fabius’ old policy, within ten stadia of the enemy, to check his free license of plunder.‘84

At the same time, parties acting on the rear of Hannibal’s army had broken down the bridges over the Anio, his line of retreat, like his advance, being on the right bank of that river, and not by the Latin road. Hannibal had purposely waited to allow time for his movement to produce its intended effect in the raising of the siege/ of Capua. That time, Hannibal retires. according to his calculations, was now come: the news of his arrival before Rome must have reached the Roman lines before Capua; and the armies from that quarter, hastening by the Latin road to the defence of their city, must have left the communication with Capua free. The presence of Fulvius with his army in Latium, which Hannibal would instantly discover, -by the thrice-repeated sounding of the watch, as Hasdrubal found out Nero’s arrival in the camp of Livius near Sena, would confirm him in his expectation that the other proconsul was on his march with the mass of the army; and he accord”O Polybius, IX. 6.‘1s Livy, XXVI.

10. Pliny, XXXIV. 15. 18’ Appian, VII. 39.‘lt Livy, XXVI. 8, 9, 10.

Polybius, IX. 7,. 102 Polybins, IX. 6. Appian, VII. 40.

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538 IISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLIV ingly commenced his retreat by the Tiburtine road, that he:night not encounter Appius in front, while the consuls and Fabius were pressing on his realr. Accordingly, as the bridges were destroyed, he proceeded to effect his pasThe Reomas follonwhim sage through the river, and carried over his army under the proft a dietaece.

tection of his cavalry, although the Romans attacked him during the passage, and cut off a large part of the plunder which he had collected from the neighborhood of Rome.‘85 He then continued his retreat; and the Romans followed him, but at a careful distance, and keeping steadily on the higher grounds, to be safe from the assaults of his dreaded cavalry.‘86 In this manner Hannibal marched with the greatest rapidity for five days, Ee mearhees down into which, if he was moving by the Valerian road, must have brought Bruttiune. him at least as far as the country of the Marsians, and the shores of the lake Fucinus.‘87 From thence he would again have crossed by the Forca Carrosa to the plain of the Pelignians, and so retraced his steps through Samnium towards Capua. But at this point he received intelligence that the Roman armies were still in their lines, that his march upon Rome had therefore failed, and that his communications with Capua were as hopeless as ever. Instantly he changed all his plans; and feeling obliged to abandon Capua, the importance of his operations in the south rose upon him in proportion. Hitherto he had not thought fit to delay his march for the sake of attacking the army which was pursuing him; but now he resolved to rid himself of this enemy; so. he turned fiercely upon them, and assaulted their camp in the night. The Romans, surprised ad and confounded, were driven from it with considerable loss, and took refuge in a strong position in the mountains. Hannibal then resumed his march, but, instead of turning short to his right towards Campania, descended towards the Adriatic and the plains of Apulia, and from thence returned to what was now the stronghold of his power in Italy, the country of the Bruttians.‘88 The citadel of Tarentum still held out against him; but Rhegium, confident in He maie.es takling Re-its remoteness, had never yet seen his cavalry in its territory, and gium. was now less likely than ever to dread his presence, as he had so lately been heard of in the heart of Italy, and under the walls of Rome. With a rapid march therefore he hastened to surprise Rhegium. Tidings of his coming reached the city just in time for the Rhegians to shut their gates against him; but half their people were in the country, in the full security of peace; and these all fell into his power.‘89 We know not whether he treated them kindly, as hoping through their means to win Rhegium, as he had won Tarentum; or whether disappointment was now stronger than hope, and, despairing of drawing the allies of Rome to his side, he was now as inveterate against them as against the Romans. HLe retired from his fruitless attempt to winl Rhegium only to receive the tidings of the loss of Capua. The Romans had patiently waited their time, and were now to reap their reThe Romans press the ward. The consuls were both to command in Apulia with two stee of Capue. consular armies; one of them therefore must have returned to Rome, to raise the two additional legions which were required. Fulvius hastened back to the lines before Capua. His prey was now in his power; the straitness of the blockade could no longer be endured, and aid from Hannibal was not to be hoped. It is said that mercy was still promised to any Capuan who should come over to the Romans before a certain day, but that none availed themselves of the offer, feeling, says Livy, that their offence was beyond forgiveness.‘90 This can only mean that they believed the Romans to be as faithless as they were cruel, and felt sure that every promise of mercy would be evaded or openly broken. One last attempt was made to summon Hannibal again to their aid; but the Numidians employed on the service were detected this time in the is5 Polybius, IX. 7.‘18

Polybins, IX. 7. Appian, VII. 41-43. 180 Appian, VII. 40.‘83 Polybius, IX.

7. s Polybius, IX. 7. i0o Livy, XXVI. 12.

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CHAP. XLIV.] PUNISHMENT OF THE CAPUANS. 539 Roman lines, and were sent back torn with stripes, and with their hands cut ofl into the city.‘9’ No Capuan writer has survived to record the last struggle of his country; and never were any people less to be believed than the Romans, when The cuef enetoin e l speaking of their enemies. Yet the greatest man could not have Cpua pison therm. supported the expiring weakness of an unheroic people; and we hear of no great man in Capua. Some of the principal men in the senate met, it is said, at the house of one of their number, Vibius Virrius, where a magnificent banquet had been prepared for them; they ate and drank, and when the feast wasover, they all swallowed poison. Then, having done with pleasure and with life, they took a last leave of each other; they embraced each other, lamenting with many tears their own and their country’s calamity; and some remained to be burned together on the same funeral pile, while others went away to die at their own homes. All were dead before the Romans entered the city.‘92 In the mean while the Capuan government, unable to restrain their starving people, had been obliged to surrender to the enemy. In modern r0~ 1 1 i: r D. X. 1

~~~~~~Surrender of the city. warfare the surrender of a besieged town involves no extreme suffering; even in civil wars, justice or vengeance only demands a certain number of victims, and the mass of the population scarcely feels its condition affected. But surrender, deditio, according to the Roman laws of war, placed the property, liberties, and lives of the whole surrendered people at the absolute disposal of the conquerors; and that not formally, as a right, the enforcement of which were monstrous, but as one to abate which in any instance was an act of free mercy. In this sense Capua was surrendered; in the morning after Vibius Virrius’

funeral banquet, the gate of Jupiter, which looked towards the Roman headquarters, was thrown open; and a Roman legion, with its usual force of cavalry doubled, marched in to take possession. It was commanded by C.

Fulvius, the brother of the proconsul, who immediately placed guards at all the gates, caused all the arms in the city to be brought to him, made prisoners of the Carthaginian garrison, and sent all the Capuan senators into the Roman camp, to abide his brother’s sentence. No Roman family has preserved a more uniform character of pride and cruelty through successive generations than the Claudii; but in the treat-Fuivitu, pUt al the son.

ment of the Capuans, Q. Fulvius was so much the principal act-as to death or, that, according to some of the annals, Appius Claudius was no longer alive, naving been mortally wounded some time before the end of the siege.‘93 His daughter had been married to a Campanian: and the senators of Capua might perhaps seem to him worthier of regard than the commons of Rome. But whether Appius was living or dead, he was unable to arrest the course of his colleague’s vengeance. The Capuan senators were immediately chained as bondslaves, were commanded to give up all their gold and silver to the qumstors, and were then sent in custody, five-and-twenty to Cales, and twentyeight to Teanum. Ere the next night was over, Fulvlus, with 2000 chosen horsemen, left the camp, and arrived at Teanum by daybreak. He took his seat in the Forum, ordered the magistrates of Teanum to bring forth their prisoners, and saw them all scourged and beheaded in his presence. “Then he rode off to Cales, and repeated the same tragedy there.‘94 Atilla and Calatia followed the example of Capua, and surrendered at discretion to the Romans. There, also, about twenty senators were Sere tratment of all executed, and about three hiundred persons of noble birth, in the c““lpanians. one or other of the three cities, were sent to Rome, and thrown into the Mamertine prison, there to die of starvation and misery, while others met a similar fate” Ilivy, XXVI. 12. “4 Livy, XXVI. 15. Valerius Maximus, IIL 19” Livy, XXVI. 14. 8, 1.‘s Livy, XXVI. 15. Zonaras, IX. 6.

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540 HISTORY OF ROME [CHAP. XLIV in the various allied cities whither they were sent prisoners.~5H The besieging army was then relieved from its long services; part of it was probably sent home, or transferred to one of the consuls to formhis army in Apulia. C. Nero, the propreetor, was sent with about 13,000 men into Spain, where the Roman affairs were in a most’critical state;196 while Q. Fulvius remained still as proconsul in Capua, exercising the utmost severity of conquest over the remnant of the unfortunate people. A few months afterwards, on the night of the 18th of March in the following year, a fire broke out at Rome in several places at once, in the neighborhood of the Forum. The temple of Vesta, and its eternal fire, the type of the life of the commonwealth, were saved with great difficulty. This fire was said to be the work of some noble Capuans whose fathers had been beheaded by Q. Fulvius; they were accused by one of their slaves; and a confession of the charge having been forced from their other slaves by torture, the young men were put to death.‘97 Fulvius made this a pretence for fresh severities against the Capuans; and no doubt it had an influence upon the senate when the fate of the three revolted cities of Campania was finally decided. As the Capuans had enjoyed the franchise of Roman citizens, the senate was obliged to obtain an act of the comitia, empowering them to determine their future condition. A number of decrees were passed accordingly, as after the great Latin war, distinguishing the punishment of different classes, and even of different individuals. All who had been senators, or held any office, were reduced to utter beggary, their lands being forfeited to Rome, together with the whole’ Campanian territory, and their personal property of every kind being ordered to be sold. Some were sold, besides, for slaves, with their wives and children; and it wa’s especially ordered that they should be sold at Rome, lest some of their countrymen or neighbors should purchase them for the purpose of restoring their liberty. All who had been in Capua during the siege were transported beyond the Tiber, and forbidden to possess lands or houses above a certain measure, or out of certain specified districts; those who had not been in Capua, or in any other revolted city, during the war, were only transported beyond the Liris; while those who had gone over to the Romans before Hannibal entered Capua, were removed no further than across the Vulturnus.’ in their exiled state, however, they were still to be personally free, but were incapable of enjoying either the Roman franchise or the Latin.‘9s The city of Capua, bereaved of all its citizens, was left to be inhabited by that mixed multitude of resident foreigners, freedmen, and half-citizens, who, as shopkeepers and mechanics, had always formed a large part of the population; and all political organization was strictly denied to them; and they were placed under the government of a prsefect sent thither every year from Rome.‘99 The Campanian plain, the glory of Italy, and all the domain lands which Capua had won in former wars, when she was the ally of Rome, as her share of the spoils of Samnium, were forfeited to the Roman people. In the domain lands some colonies were planted soon after the war;200 but the Campanian plain was held in occupation by a number of Roman citizens; and the vectigal,‘or rent, which they paid to the state, was for a hundred and fifty years an important part of the Roman revenue.20’ Only two individuals were found deserving of favor, it is said, among the whole Capuan people: these were two women, one of whom had daily sacrificed in secret during the siege for the success of thie Romans; and the other had secretly fed some Roman prisoners. These had their property restored to them by a special decree of the senate; and they were desired to go to Rome and to petition the senate, if they thought proper, for some additional reward.202 L’b ivy, XXVI. 16. l1 Livy, XXVI. 16. 193 Livy, XXVI. 17.‘00 Livy, XXVI. 45.;’. Livy, XXVI. 27. 201

Cicero, IDe Leg. Agrar. II. 39. 18 Livy, XXVI. 33, 34. 202 Livy, XXVI, 33, 34.

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OHAP. XLIV.] CONCLUSION. 541 I have given the settlement of Campania and the fate of the Capuans in detail, because it seems taken from authentic sources, and is character-Fulvius is refused a istic of the stern determination with which the Roman government triumph. went through its work. It is no less characteristic that when Q. Fulvius applied for a triumph, after his most important and splendid success, the senate refused to grant it, because he had only recovered what had belonged to Rome before; and the mere retrieving of losses, and restoring the dominion of the commonwealth to its former extent, was no subject of extraordinary exultation.203 But although not rewarded by a triumph, the conquest of Capua was one of the most important services ever rendered by a Roman general Importance of the,ta to his country, It did not merely deprive Hannibal of the great-ignof Capua. est fruit of his greatest victory, and thus seem to undo the work of CannMe; but its effect was felt far and wide, encouraging the allies of Rome, and striking terror into her enemies; tempting the cities which had revolted to return without delay to their allegiance, and filling Hannibal with suspicions of those who were still true to him, as if they only waited to purchase their pardon by some act of treachery towards his garrisons. By the recovery of Capua his great experiment seemed decided against him. It appeared impossible, under any circumstances, to rally such a coalition of the Italian states against the Roman power in Italy, as might be able to overthrow it. We almost ask, with what reasonable hopes could Hannibal from this time forward continue the war? or why did he not change the seat of it from Southern Italy to Etruria and Cisalpine Gaul? But with whatever feelings of disappointment and grief he may have heard-of the fall of Capua, of the ruin of his allies, and the bloody death Hannibal’ favorable of so many of the Capuan senators, and of the brave Jubellius prospects. Taurea, whom he had personally known and honored, yet the last campaign. was not without many solid grounds of encouragement. Never had the invincible force of his army been more fully proved. He had overrun half Italy, had crossed and recrossed the passes of the Apennines, had plunged into the midst of the Roman allies, and had laid waste the territory of Rome with fire and sword. Yet no superiority of numbers, no advantage of ground, no knowledge of the country, had ever emboldened the Romans to meet him in the field, or even to beset his road, or to obstruct and harass his march. Once only, when he was thought to be retreating, had they ventured to follow him at a cautious distance; but he had turned upon them in his strength; and the two consuls, and Q. Fulvius with them, were driven before him as fugitives to the mountains, their camp stormed, and their legions scattered. It was plain, then, that he might hold his ground in Italy as long as he pleased, supporting his army at its cost, and draining the resources of Rome and her allies, year after year, till in mere exhaustion the Roman commons would probably join the Latin colonies and the allies in forcing the senate to make peace. At this very moment Etruria was restless, and required an army of two legions to keep it quiet:204 the Roman commons, in addition to their heavy Unfavorable circ.mtaxation and military service, had seen their lands laid waste, and ~tancesof the Ropans. in Italy and n Spain. yet were called upon to bear fresh burdens: and there was a spirit of discontent working in the Latin colonies, which a little more provocation might excite to open revolt. Spain, besides, seemed at last to be freed from the enemy; and the recent defeats and deaths of the two Scipios there held out the hope to Hannibal, that now at length his brother Hasdrubal, having nothing to detain him in Spain, might lead a second Carthaginian army into Italy, and establish himself in Etruria, depriving Rome of the resources of the Etruscan and Umbrian states, as she had already lost those of half Samnium, of Lucania, Bruttium, and Apulia.

~’ Valerius Maximus, II. 8, 4. 24 Livy, XXVI. 1, 28; XXVII. 7. Comp.

XXVII. 21, 22, 24.

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542 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLV. Then, assailed at once by two sons of Hamilcar, on the north and the south, the Roman power, which one of them singly had so staggered, must, by the joint efforts of both, be beaten to the ground and destroyed. With such hopes, and with no unreasonable confidence, Hannibal consoled himself for the loss of Capua, and allowed his army, after its severe marching, to rest for the remainder of the year in Apulia.20 And now, as we have brought the war in Italy to this point, it is time to look abroad, and to observe the course of this mighty contest in Qtpain, in Greece, and in Sicily. CHAPTER XLV,.PROGRESS OF THE

WAR IN SPAIN, SICILY, AND GREECE-OPERATIONS OF T’iln SCIPIOS IN

SPAIN-THEIR DEFEAT AND DEATH-MACEDON AND GREECEREVOLUTIONS OF

SYRACUSE-MARCELLUS IN SICILY-SIEGE OF SYRACUSEARCHIMEDES-SACK OF SYRACUSE, AND REDUCTION OF SICILY-MUTINES, THE NUMIDIAN, IN SICILY.-A. U. C. 538 TO

543. WARS must of necessity form a large part of all history; but in most wars the When wars ought to be narrative of military operations is without interest for posterity, and related circumstanti-should only be given by contemporary writers. It was right for Thucydides to relate every little expedition of the Peloponnesian war at length; but modern writers do wrong in following his example; for the details of petty warfare are unworthy to survive their own generation. And there are also wars conducted on a great scale, and very important in their consequences, the particulars of which may safely be forgotten. For military events should only be related circumstantially to after ages, when they either contain a great lesson in the art of war, or are so striking in their incidents, as to acquire the interest of a romance, and thus retain their hold on the imaginations and moral feelings of all ages and countries. Hannibal’s campaigns in Italy have this double claim on our notice: they are a most valuable study for the soldier, whilst for readers in general they are a varied and eventful story, rich in characters, scenes, and actions. But the war in Spain, although most important in its results, and still more the feeble bickerings rather than wars of the decayed states of Greece, may and ought to be related summarily. A closer attention must be given to tke war in Sicily: there again the military and the general interest of the story are great; we have the ancient art of defence exhibited it its highest perfection; we have the immortal names of Syracuse and Archimedes. There Is another reason, however, why we should not give a minute account Campaign of 541 in of the Spanish war: because we really know nothing about it. Splain. - The Roman annalists, whom Livy has copied here, seem to have outdone their usual exaggerations in describing the exploits of the two Scipios; and what is the truth concealed beneath this mass of fiction, we are wholly unable to discover. Spain, we know, has in later wars been overrun victoriously and lost again in a single summer; and no one can say how far the Scipios may at times have penetrated into the heart of the country: but it is certain that in the first years of their command they made no lasting impression south of the Ihberus. Still their maintaining their ground at all in Spain was of signal service to Rome. 24

Compare Livy, XXVI. 83(.

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CHAP. XLV~.] CAMPAIGN OF 543. 543 The Carthaginians, on the other hand, knew the importance of ex-A.U.C.t1. A.C.2 pelling them; but it appears that in the year 541, they became engaged in a war with Syphax, one of the kings or chiefs of the Numidians; and a war in Africa was always so alarming to them, that they recalled Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, from Spain, with a part of their forces employed in that country, and thus took off the pressure from the Romans at a most critical monment.’ The Scipios availed themselves of this relief ably; and now they seemed to have advanced into the heart of Spain with effect, to have drawn over many of the Spanish tribes to the Roman alliance, and thus to have obtained large recruits for their own army, which received but slight reinforcements from Rome. It is said that 20,000 Celtiberians were raised to serve under the Scipios, and that at the same time 300 noble Spaniards were sent into Italy to detach their countrymen there from Hannibal’s service.’ Cn.

Scipio, we are told, was greatly loved and reverenced by the Spaniards;3
and his influence probably attracted the Celtiberians to the Roman armies; but we know not where he found money to pay them, as the Roman treasury was in no condition to supply him, and he was obliged to make war support war. However, careful economy of the plunder which he may have won from some of the allies of Carthage, assisted perhaps by loans from some of the Spanish chiefs attached to himself and to Rome, had enabled him to raise a large army; so that, when Hasdrubal returned from Africa, apparently late in 542, although there were two other Carthaginian generals in Spain,4
each commanding a separate army, yet the Roman generals thought themselves strong enough to act on the offensive; and they concerted a grand plan for the campaign of 543, by which they hoped to destroy all the armies opposed to them, and to drive the Carthaginians out of Spain. With this confidence they divided their forces, and having crossed the Iberus, marched each in pursuit of a separate enemy. Cn. Scipio was to attack Hasdrubal, while his brother.was to fall on the other two Carthaginian generals, Hasdrubal the son of Giscon, and Mago.5 They had wintered, it seems, in the country of their new auxiliaries, or, according to one account, even further to the south, in the valley of Campaign of 5: dethe Bmtis or Guadalquiver.6 But it is as impossible to disentangle feat and death of the the geography of this war as its history. The Carthaginian gen-Scips.erals owed their triumph-and more than this we cannot ascertain-to the ascendency of Hasdrubal’s name and personal character; for the Celtiberians, when brought into his neighborhood, were unable to resist his influence, and abruptly left the Roman camp, and returned home.1 Thus abandoned, and at a great distance from aftf their resources, the two Roman generals were sucA. U. C. 543. A. C. cessively attacked by the Carthaginians, defeated and killed.8 Of a”l the wreck of their armies, some fled to the towns of their Spanish allies for refuge, and were in some instances slain by them, or betrayed* to the Carthaginians: a remnant, which had either been left behind the Iberus before the opening of the campaign, or had effected its retreat thither, was still held together by Scipio’s lieutenant, T.

Fonteius, and by L. Marcius.9 Marcius was only a simple Roman knight, that is, a man of good fortune, who therefore served, not in the infantry of the legions, but in the cavalry: he had a natural genius for war, and was called irregularly, it seems, by the common voice of the soldiers to take the command; and we need not doubt that by some timely advantages gained over some of the enemies’ parties, he raised the spirits of the men, and preserved the Roman cause in Spain from utter extinction. But the extravagant fables of his victories over the victorious Carthaginians, and of his storming their camps, Appian, VI. 15. Livy, XXIV. 48. Appian, VI.

16. 2 Livy, XXV. 32. XXIV. 49. 7 Livy, XXV. 83. 8 Livy, XXV. 36. Appian, VI. 15. 8 Livy, XXV. 34-36. Appian, VI. 1. ~ Livy, XXV. 32. Appian, VI.

16. 9 Livy, XXV. 36-39. Livy, XXV. 32.

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544 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLV show too clearly out of what wretched materials the Roman history has to be written.?l If the defeat of the Scipios took place, as seems probable, early in the year The Romn. are driven 543, that is, a few weeks before the fall of Capua, we may again to the foot of the Pyr-admire the wonderful disposal of events by which the ruin of the enees. Roman cause in Spain was delayed till their affairs in Italy had passed over their crisis; and were beginning to mend. The Scipios’ army was replaced by that of C. Nero, which the fall of Capua set at liberty:” a year earlier this resource would not have been available.

Still the Carthaginians immediately recovered all the states-south of the Ebro, which had before revolted, and the Romans were confined to a narrow strip of coast between the Iberus and the Pyrenees,‘2 from which the overwhelming force of their enemies was likely ere long to drive them. And so it would, had not the external weakness of the Roman cause been now upheld for the first time by individual genius; so that a defeated and dispirited army became, in the hands of the young P. Scipio, the instrument by which all Spain was conquered. Seventy years before this period, a Greek army under Pyrrhus had shaken the Strane inefficiency of whole power of, Rome: yet the kingdom of Pyrrhus was little more MaIcedon, than a dependency of Macedon, and Pyrrhus had.struggled against the arms of the Macedonain kings vigorously, but without success. Now a young, warlike, and popular king was seated on the throne of Macedon:3 he had just concluded a war victoriously with.the only state in Greece which seemed capable of resisting his power. What Pyrrhus had almost done alone, would surely be easy for Philip to accomplish, with Hannibal and his invincible army. to aid him; and what could Rome have done, if to the irresistible African cavalry there had been joined a body of heavyarmed Macedonians, and a force of artillery and engineers such as: Greek science alone could furnish? The strangest and most unaccountable blank in history is the early period of the Macedonian war, before the zEtolians became the allies of Rome and a coalition was formed against Philip in Greece itself.

Philip’s treaty with Hannibal was concluded in the year 539, or early enough, at any rate, to allow of his com-. mencing operations in the year 540.‘4 The zEtolians concluded their treaty with Rome in 543, after the fall of Capua.‘5 More than three precious years seem to have been utterly wasted; and during all this time M. Valerius Lsevinus, commanding at Brundisium with a single legion and a small fleet, was allowed to paralyze the whole power of Macedon.’” The cause of this is to be Iound in that selfish attention to separate objects arising fromn Philip’s which has so often been the ruin of coalitions. Philip’s object, or selfishness. rather that of Demetrius of Pharos, whose influence appears plainly in all this war with Rome, was to undo the work of the late Roman victories in Illyria, and to wrest the western coast of Epirus from their dominion. In his treaty with Hannibal, Philip had especially stipulated that the Romans should not be allowed to retain their control over Corcyra, Apollonia, Epidamnus, Pharus, Dimalla or Dimalus, the country of the Parthinians, and Atintania;17 places which in the Illyrian wars had either submitted to, or been conquered by the Romans. Philip does not appear to have understood that all these were to be reconquered most surely in Italy; that it was easier to crush Lsevinus at Brundisium, than to repel him from Epirus; more prudent to march against him’o Livy, XXV. 39. According to one ac- “2

Appian, VI. 17. coflnt, 37,000 men were slain on the Carthagin-i9 Philip was not more than seventeen yearn ian side. Valerius Antias returned 17,000 old in the archonship of Ariston, A. U. C. 534. killed, and 4330
prisoners. Appian (XI. 17) Polybius, IV. 5. For his popular and warlike substitutes Marcellus by mistake for Marcins, character see Polybius, IV.

77, 82, 1. hut says he did nothing brilliant, so that the 14 Livy, XXIII.

33, 39. Above, p. 514. Carthaginian power increased, and spread al-‘5

Livy, XXVI. 24. most over the whole of Spain. 16 Livy, XXIV. 10, 44. XXV.

3. XXVI. 24, II Livy, XXVI. 17. 17 Polybius, VII. 9.

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CmJiP. XLV.] SICILY. 545 at the head of the Greeks of Italy, than to let him come to the aid of the Greek. on the coast of Illyria. Thus he trifled away his strength in petty enterprises, and those not always successful, till the Romans found the time come to carry on the war against him in earnest; and they were not apt either to neglect their opportunities or to misuse them. Philip was personally brave, and could on occasion show no common activity and energy. But he had not that steadiness of purpose, without He wastes,i time.. which energy in political affairs is worthless.

Thus he was lightly petty objects. deterred from an enterprise by dangers which he was not afraid of, but rather did not care to encounter. The naval power of Greece had long since sunk to nothing; Philip had no regular navy, and the small vessels which he could collect were no match for the Roman quinqueremes; so that a descent upon Italy appeared hazardous, while various schemes opened upon him nearer home, which his own temper, or the interests of his advisers, led him to prefer. Hence, he effected but little during three years. He neither took Epidamnus, nor Apollonia, nor Corcyra; but he won Lissus, and the strong fortress which served as its citadel;“8 and he seems also to have conquered Dimalus or Dimallus, and to have enlarged his dominion more or less nominally with the countries of the Parthinians and Atintanians, of which the sovereignty had belonged to the Romnans.‘9 From all this Hannibal derived no benefit, and Rome sustained no serious injury. In the year of Rome 491, in the second year of the first Punic war, Hiero, ming of Syracuse, had made peace with the Romans, and had be-Hiero’s faithful friendcome their ally.20 Forty-seven years had passed away since, when ship to the Roma.n:.

the tidings of the battle of Cannue arrived at Syracuse, and seemed his death; to announce that a great part of Sicily was again to change its masters, and to be subjected once more to the Carthaginian dominion. But Hiero, although about ninety years of age, did not waver. Far from courting the friendship of Carthage, he increased his exertions in behalf of Rome: he supplied the Roman army in Sicily with money and corn at a time when all supplies from home had failed;2` and about a year afterwards, when a fleet was prepared to meet the hostile designs of Philip of Macedon, Hiero again sent 50,000 medimni of wheat and barley to provision it.22 This must nearly have been his last A. U. c. 539. A.C.

public act. Towards the close of the year 539, after a life of 2‘5. ninety years, and a reign of fifty-four, but still retaining all his faculties, sound in mind and vigorous in body, Hiero died.23 He had enjoyed and deserved the constant affection of his people, and had seen his kingdom flourishing more and more under his government. preceded by that of hi, One only thing had marred the completeness of his fortune: his 5on Gelon.

son Gelon had died before him, with whom he had lived in the most perfect.

harmony, and who had ever rendered him the most devoted and loving obedience.24 He had still two daughters, Damarata and Heraclea, who were married to two eminent Syracusans, Andranodorus and Zoippus; and he had one grandson, a boy of about fifteen, the son of Gelon, Hieronymus.25 It is the most difficult problem in an hereditary monarchy, how to educate the heir to the throne, when the circumstances of his condition, so He is succeeded by his much more powerful than any instruction, are apt to train him for grandson Hieronymusa: evil far more surely than the lessons of the wisest teachers can train him for good. In the ancient world, moreover, there was no fear of God to sober the mind, which was raised above all fear or respect for man; and if the philosophers spoke of the superiority of virtue and wisdom over all the gifts of ” Polybius, VIII. 15, 16. 2

Livy XXIII. 38. lo In L1vy, XXIX. 12, we find these attacked 23 Polybius, VII. 8. by the Romans, as being subject to Macedon. 24 Polybius, VII. 8.

yt0 See p. 427. 25 Livy, XXIV. 4. X” Livy, XXIII. 22. See above, p. 508.

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546 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLV fortune, their 6wn example, when they were seen to sue for the king’s favor, and to dread his anger, no less than ordinary men, made their doctrines regarded either as folly or hypocrisy.

Hieronymus at fifteen becafme king of Syracuse; a child in understanding, but with passions precociously vigorous, because he had such large means of indulging them; insolent, licentious, and cruel, yet withal so thoughtless and so mere a slave of every impulse, that he was sure to be the instrument of his own ruin. We have already noticed his early communication with Hannibal, and the lIe joins the Cnrtha-arrival of Hippocrates and Epicydes at Syracuse, Syracusans by ginlinnl, extraction, but born at Carthage, and by education and franchise Carthaginians, whom Hannibal had sent to Hieronymus to confirm him in his alienation from Rome.26 They won the youth’s ear by telling him of Hannibal’s marches and victories; for in those days events that were two or three years old were still news to foreigners; common fame had reported the general facts, but the details could only be gathered accidentally; and Hieronymus listened eagerly to Hippocrates and Epicydes, when they told him stories of their crossing the Rhone, of their passage of the Alps and Apennines, of the slaughter of the Romans at Thrasymenus, and of their late unequalled victory at Cannme, of all which they had themselves been eye-witnesses.”

And when they saw Hieronymus possessed with a vague longing that he too might achieve such great deeds, they asked him who had such claims as he to be king of all Sicily. His mother was the daughter of Pyrrhus; his father was Hiero’s son; with this double title to the love and homage of all Sicilians, he should not be contented to divide the island either with Rome or Carthage: by his timely aid to Hannibal he might secure it wholly to himself. The youth accordingly insisted that the sovereignty of all Sicily should be ceded to him as the price of his alliance with Carthage; and the Carthaginians were well content to humor him, knowing that if they could drive the Romans out of the islands, they had little to fear from the claims of Hieronymus.28 Appius Claudius, the Roman prmtor in Sicily, aware of what was going on, and deserts the Ro-sent some of his officers to Syracuse, to warn the king not to break tmnns. off his grandfather’s long friendship with Rome, but to renew the old alliance in his own name.’

Hieronymus called his council together, and Hippocrates and Epicydes were present. His native subjects, afraid to oppose his known feelings, said nothing; but three of his council, who came from old Greece, conjured him not to abandon his alliance with Rome. Andranodorus alone, his,uncle and guardian, urged him to seize the moment, and become sovereign of all Sicily. He listened, and then, turning to Hippocrates and Epycides, asked them, “And what think you?” ” We think,” they answered, ” with Andranodorus.” “Then,” said he, “the question is decided; we will no longer be dependent on Rome.” He then called in the Roman fAmbassadors, and told them that ” he was willing to renew his grandfather’s league with Rome, if they would repay him all the money and corn with which Hiero had at various times supplied them; if they would restore the costly presents which he had given them, especially the golden statue of Victory, which he had sent to them only three years since, after their defeat at Thrasymenus; and, finally, if they would share the island with him equally, ceding all to the east of the river Himeras.“30 The Romans considered this answer as a mockery, and went away without thinking it worthy of a serious reply. Accordingly, from this moment Hieronymus conceived himself -to be at war with Rome: he began to raise and arm soldiers, and to form magazines; and the Carthaginians, according to their treaty with him, prepared to send over a fleet and army to Sicily.

Meanwhile his desertion of the Roman alliance was most unwelconme to a strong’” Polybius, VII. 34. Livy, XXIV. 6. See 2s Polybius, VII. 4. Livy, XXIV. 6. atbove, p. 514. HU Polybius, VII. 5. Livy, XXIV. 6. 27 Polybius, VII. 4. Hs Polybins, VII. 5. See Livy, XXII. 37.

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CHAP. XLV.] INSURRECTION AT SYRACUSE. 547 party in Syracuse. A conspiracy had already been formed against He is murdered by his life, which was ascribed, whether truly or not, to the intrigues ““onpiray. of this party;31 and now that he had actually joined the Carthaginians, they became more bitter against him; and a second conspiracy was formed with better success. He had taken the field to attack the cities in the Roman part of the island. Hippocrates and Epicydes were already in the enemy’s country; and the king, with the main body of his army, was on his marcll to support them, and had just entered the town of Leontini.32 The road, which was also the principal street of the city, lay through a narrow gorge, with abrupt cliffs on each side; and the houses ran along in a row, nestling under the western cliff, and facing towards the small river Lissus, which flowed through the gorge between the town and the eastern cliff.33 An empty house in this street had been occupied by the conspirators: when the king came opposite to it, one of their number, who was one of the king’s guards, and close to his person, stopped just behind him, as if something had caught his foot; and whilst he seemed trying to get free, he checked the advance of the following multitude, and left the king to go on a few steps unattended. At that moment the conspirators rushed out of the house and murdered him. So sudden was the act, that his guards could not save him: seeing him dead, they were seized with a panic and dispersed. The murderers hastened, some into the market-place of Leontini, to raise the cry of liberty there, and others to Syracuse, to anticipate the king’s friends, and secure the city for themselves and the Romans.34 Their tidings, however, had flown before them; and Andranodorus, the king’s uncle, had already secured the island of Ortygia, the oldest part Insurrection at Syraof Syracuse, in which was the citadel, and where Hiero and Hie-eu… ronymus had resided.35 The assassins arrived just at nightfall, displaying the bloody robe of Hieronymus, and the diadem which they had torn from his head, and calling the people to rise in the name of liberty. This call was obeyed: all the city, except the island, was presently in their power; and in the island itself a strong building, which was used as a great corn magazine for the supply of the whole city, was no sooner seized by those whom Andranodorus had sent to occupy it, than they offered to deliver it up to the opposite party.36 The general feeling being thus manifested, Andranodorus yielded to it. He surrendered the keys of the citadel and of the treasury; and in M,,rderof Andanodo.

return he and Themistus, who had married a sister of Hieronymus, us.and Themistus, were elected among the captainsgeneral of the commonwealth, to whom, according to the old Syracusan constitution, the executive government was to be committed. But their colleagues were mostly chosen from the assassins of Hieronymus; and between such opposites there could be no real union. Suspicions and informations of plots were not long wanting. An actor told the majority of the captainsgeneral, that Andranodorus and Themistus were conspiring to massacre them and the other leaders of their party, and to re-establish the tyranny: the charge was made out to the satisfaction of those who were so well disposed to believe it: they stationed soldiers at the doors of the council-chamber; and as soon as Andranodorus and Themistus entered, the soldiers rushed in and murdered them.3 The members of the council decided that they were rightfully slain; but the multitude were inclined to believe them less guilty than their murderers, and beset the council, calling for vengeance.

They were persuaded, however, to hear what the perpetrators of the deed could say in its defence; and Sopater, one of the captainsgeneral, who was concerned both in the recent murder and in that of Hieronymus, arose to justify himself and his party. The tyrannies in the ancient world were so hateful, that they were put by common 3’ Polybius, VII. 2. Livy, XXIV.

5. 35 Livy, XXIV. 21. 32 Livy, XXIV. 7. 36 Livy, XXIV. 21, 22..3 Polybius, VII. 6. 37 Livy, XXIV. 23, 24. 34 Livy, XXIV. 7.

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‘548 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAr. XLV feeling out of the pale of ordinary law: when Sopater accused Andranodorus and Themistus of having been the real authors of all the outrages committed by the boy Hieronymus; when he inveighed against their treacherous submission tc their country’s laws, and against their ingratitude in plotting the deaths of those who had so nobly forgiven all their past offences; and when he said, finally, that they had been instigated to all these crimes by their wives, that Hiero’s daughter and grand-daughter could not condescend to live in a private station; there arose a cry from some, probably of their own tutored partisans, which the whole multitude, in fear or in passion, immediately echoed, “Death to the whole race of the tyrants; not one of them shall be suffered to live.“3s They who had purposely roused the multitude to fury, were instantly ready and of all the descend-to secure it for their own bloody ends. The captainsgeneral proantsof Hiero. posed a decree for the execution of every person of the race of the tyrants; and the instant it was passed, they sent parties of spldiers to carry it into effect. Thus the wives of Andranodorus and Themistus were butchered: but there was another daughter of Hiero, the wife of Zoippus, who was so far from sharing in the tyranny of Hieronymus, that when sent by him as his ambassador to Egypt, he had chosen to live there in exile. His innocent wife, with her two young maiden daughters, were included in the general proscription. They took refuge at the altar of their household gods, but in vain: the mother was dragged from her sanctuary and murdered; the daughters fled wildly into the outer court of the palace, in the hope of escaping into the street, and appealing to the humanity of the passers-by; but they were pursued and cut down by. repeated wounds. Ere the deed was done, a messenger came to say that the people had revoked their sentence; which seems to show that the captainsgeneral had taken advantage of some expressions of violence, and had done in the people’s name what the people had nOver in earnest agreed to. At any rate, their rage was now loud against their bloody government;‘and they insisted on having a free election of captainsgeneral to supply the places of Andranodorus and Themistus; a demand which implies that some preceding resolutions or votes of the popular assembly had been passed under undue influence.39 The party which favored the Roman alliance had done all that wickedness The Carthaginian party could to make themselves odious. The reaction against them was rallies, natural; yet the same foreign policy which these butchers supported, hbad been steadily pursued by the wise and moderate Hiero. Every party in that corrupt city of Syracuse wore an aspect of evil: the partisans of Carthage were in nothing better than those of Rome.

When Hieronymus had been murdered, Hippocrates and Epicydes were at the moment deserted by their soldiers, and returned to Syracuse as private individuals. There they applied to the government for an escort to convey them back to Hannibal in safety: but the escortwas not provided immediately; and in the interval they perceived that they could serve Hannibal better by remaining in Sicily. They found many amongst the mercenary soldiers of the late king, and amongst the poorer citizens, who readily listened to them, when they accused the captainsgeneral of selling the independence of Syracuse to Rome; and their party was so strengthened by the atrocities of the government, that, when the election was held to choose two new captainsgeneral in the place of Andranodorus and Themistus, Hippocrates and Epicydes were nominated and triumphantly elected.40 Again, therefore, the government was divided within itself; and Hippocrates and Epicydes had been taught by the former conduct of their colleagues that one party or the other must perish. The Roman party had immediately suspended hostilities with Rome, obtained a truce from Appius Claudius renewable every ten days, and sent ambassadors tc 3” Livy, XXIV.

25. Livy, XXIV. 28, 27. 89 Liv’y, XXIV. 26.

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CHAP. XLV.] MARCELLUS ARRIVES IN SICILY. 549 him to solicit the revival of Hiero’s treaty. A Roman fleet of a The Roman fleet saill hundred ships was lying off the coast a little to the north of Syr-to he rmouth of the acuse, which the Romans, on the first suspicion of the defection of harbor. Hieronymus, had manned by the most extraordinary exertions, and sent to Sicily. On the other hand, Himilco, with a small Carthaginian fleet, was at Pachynus, Rome and-Carthage each anxiously watching the course of events in Syracuse, and each being ready to support its party there. Matters were nicely balanced; and the Roman fleet, in the hope of turning the scale, sailed to Syracuse, and stationed itself at the mouth of the great harbor.4’ Strengthened by this powerful aid, the Roman party triumphed; even moderate men not wishing to provoke an enemy who was already at their The Romeo partybegates. The old league with Rome was renewed, with the stipu-cToesthe more power. lation, that whatever cities in Sicily had been subject to king Hiero ful. should now in like manner be under the dominion of the Syracusan people. It appears that, since the murder of Hieronymus, his kingdom had gone to pieces, many of the towns, and Leontini in particular, asserting their independence. These were, like Syracuse, in a state of hostility against Rome, owing to Hieronymus’

revolt; but they had no intention of submitting again to the Syracusan dominion. Still, When the Romans threatened them, they sent to Syracuse for aid; and as the Syracusan treaty with Rome was not yet ratified or made public, the government could not decline their request. Hippocrates accordingly was sent to Leontini, with a small army, consisting chiefly of deserters from the Roman fleet: for, in the exigency of the time, the fleet had been manned by’aves furnished by private families in a certain proportion, according to their census; and the men thus provided, being mostly unused to the sea, and forced into the service, deserted in unusually large numbers, insomuch that there were two thousand of them in the party which Hippocrates led to the defence of Leontini.42 This auxiliary force did good service; and Appius Claudius, who commanded the Roman army, was obliged to stand on the defensive. Mean-Marcell. arrives in while M. Marcellus had arrived in Sicily, having been sent over teary of,eeo Crnthgih thither, as we have seen, after the close of the campaign in Italy, ian party. to take the supreme command. As the negotiations with Syracuse were now concluded, Marcellus required that Hippocrates should be recalled from Leontini, and that both he and Epicydes should be banished from Sicily.’ Epicydes upon this, feeling that his personal safety was risked by remaining longer at Syracuse, went also to Leontini; and both he and his brother inveighed loudly against the Roman party who were in possession of the government; they had betrayed their country to Rome, and were endeavoring, with the help of the Romans, to enslave the other cities of Sicily, and to subject them to their own dominion. Accordingly, when some officers arrived from Syracuse, requiring the Leontines to submit, and announcing to Hippocrates and Epicydes their sentence of expulsion from Sicily, they were answered, that the Leontines would not acknowledge the Syracusan government, nor were they bound by its treaties. This answer being reported to Syracuse, the leaders of the Roman party called upon Marcellus to fulfil his agreement with them, and to reduce Leontini to submission.43 That city was now the refuge and centre of the popular party in Sicily, as Samos had been in Greece, when the four hundred usurped the government of Athens; and Hippocrates and Epicydes looked upon their army as the true representative of the Syracusan people, just as Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus, and the Athenian fleet at Samos, regarded themselves, during the tyranny of the aristocratical party at home, as the true people of Athens. But, as we have noticed more than once before, nothing could less resemble 41 Livy, XXIV. 27. 43 Livy, XXIV. 29. 42 Livy, XXIV. 28, 29.

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550 HISTORY OF ROME. [CrAP. XLV Mar.ellus takes Leon-the slowness and feebleness of Sparta than the tremendous energy tint; hisctrueltiesthere of Rome. The prsetor’s army in Sicily at the beginning of the year consisted of two legions; and it is probable that Marcellus had brought one at least of the two legions which had formed his consular army. With this powerful force Marcellus instantly attacked Leontini, and stormed it; and in addition to the usual carnage on the sack of a town, he scourged and in cold blood beheaded two thousand of the Roman deserters, whom he found bearing arms in the army of Hippocrates; Hippocrates and his brother escaping only with a handful of men, and taking refuge in the neighboring town of Herbessus.44 For nearly thirty years war had been altogether unknown in Sicily; fifty years excite general indigna-bad passed since a hostile army had made war in the territory of Syracuse. All men therefore were struck with horror at the fate of Leontini: if A.Etna had rolled down his lava flood upon the town, its destruction would scarcely have been more sudden and terrible. But with horror indignation was largely mingled: the bloodiness of the Romans in the sack of towns went far beyond the ordinary practice of the Greeks; the Syracusan government had betrayed their countrymen of Leontini to barbarians more cruel than the Mamertines.

The tidings spread far and wide, and met a Syracusan army, which two of The Syracusan armny the captainsgeneral, Sosis and Dinomenes, both of them assassins refsesto march, of Hieronymus, and devoted to the cause of Rome, were leading out to cooperate with Marcellus. The soldiers, full of grief and fury, refused to advance a step further: their blood, they said, would be sold to the Romans, like that of their brethren at Leontini. The generals were obliged to lead them back to Megara, within a few miles of Syracuse: then hearing that Hippocrates and Epicydes were at Herbessus, and dreading their influence at a moment like this, they led their troops to attack the town where they had taken refuge.45 Hippocrates and his brother threw. open the gates of Herbessus, and came out and to actagainst ip. to meet them. At the head of the Syracusan army marched six pocrates and Epicydes. hundred Cretans, old soldiers in Hiero’s service, whom he had sent over into Italy to act as light troops in the Roman army against Hannibal’s barbarians, but who had been taken prisoners at Thrasymenus, and with the other allies or auxiliaries of Rome had been sent home by Hannibal unhurt. They now saw Hippocrates and Epicydes coming towards them with no hostile array, but holding out branches of olive tufted here and there with wool, the wellknown signs of a suppliant. They heard them praying to be saved from the treachery of the Syracusan generals, who were pledged to deliver up all foreign soldiers serving in Sicily to the vengeance of the Romans. The Cretans felt that the cause of Hippocrates and Epicydes was their own, and swore to protect them. In vain did Sosis and Dinomenes ride forward to the head of the column, and trying what could be done by authority, order the instant arrest of the two suppliants. They were driven off with threats; the feeling began to spread through the army; and the Syracusan generals had no resource but to march back to Megara, leaving the Cretan auxiliaries, it seems, with Hippocrates and Epicydes in a state of open revolt.46 Meantime the Cretans sent out parties to beset the roads leading to Leontini; Triumph of the popular and a letter was intercepted, addressed by the Syracusan generals partyn Syracuse. to Marcellus, congratulating him on his exploit at Leontini, and urging him to complete his work by the extermination of every foreign soldier in the service of Syracuse. Hippocrates took care that the purport of this letter should be quickly made known to the army at Megara; and he followed closely with the Cretans to watch the result. The army broke out into mutiny: Sosis and Dinomenes, protesting in vain that the letter was a mere forgery of the “Livy, XXITV. 30. Livy, XXIV. 30, 31. 4 Livy, XXIV.

30.

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OInAp. XLV.] DISSENSIONS IN SYRACUSE. 551 enemy, were obliged to escape for their lives to Syracuse: even the Syracusar soldiers were accused of sharing in their generals’ treason, and were for a time in great danger front the fury of the foreigners, their comrades. But Hippocrates and Epicydes prevented this mischief, and being received as leaders by the whole army, set out forthwith for Syracuse. They sent a soldier before them, most probably a native Syracusan, who had escaped from the sack of Leontini, and could tell his countrymen as an eye-witness what acts of bloodshed, outrage, and rapine the Romans had committed there. Even in moderate men, who for Hiero’s sake were well inclined to Rome, the horrors of Leontini overpowered all other thoughts and feelings: within Syracuse and without, all followed one common impulse. When IHippocrates and Epicydes arrived at the gates, the citizens threw them open: the captainsgeneral in vain endeavored to close them; they fled to Achradina, the lower part of the city, with such of the Syracusan soldiers as still adhered to them, whilst the stream of the hostile army burst down the slope of Epipole, and, swelled by all the popular party, the foreign soldiers, and the old guards of Hiero and Hieronymus, came sweeping after them with irresistible might. Achradina was carried in an instant; some of the captainsgeneral were massacred; Sosis escaped to add the betrayal of his country hereafter to his multiplied crimes. The confusion raged wild and wide; slaves were set free; prisoners were let loose; and amidst the horrors of a violent revolution, under whatever name effected, the popular party, the party friendly to Carthage, and adverse to aristocracy and to Rome, obtained the sovereignty of Syracuse.4” Sosis, now in his turn a fugitive, escaped to Leontini, and told Marcellus of the violence done to the friends of Rome. The fiery old man, as ve-A.. c. 541. A. C. hement at sixty against his country’s enemies, as when he slew the 213.

Mercellusbesiege. Gaulish king in single combat in his first consulship, immediately Syracuse, moved his army upon Syracuse. He encamped by the temple of Olympian Jupiter, on the right bank of the Anapus, where two solitary pillars still remain, and serve as a sea-mark to guide ships into the great harbor. Appius Claudius with the fleet beset the city by sea; and Marcellus did not doubt that in the wide extent of the Syracusan walls some unguarded spot would be found, and that the punishment of Leontini would soon be effaced by a more memorable example, of vengeance.48 Thus was commenced the last sieoe of Syracuse; a siege not inferior in interest to the two others which it had already undergone, from the Athenians, and f’)!om the Carthaginians. It should be remem-by e end by s; bered that the city walls now embraced the whole surface of Epipolm, terminating, like the lines of Genoa, in an angle formed by the converging sides of the hill or inclined tableland, at the point where it becomes no more than a narrow ridge, stretching inland, and connecting itself with the hills of the interior. The Romans made their land attack on the south front of the walls, while their fleet, unable, as it seems, to enter the great harbor, carried on its assaults against the sea-wall of Achradina. The land attack was committed to Appius Claudius, while Marcellus in person conducted the operations of the fleet. The Roman army is spoken is baffled byArchime. of as large, but no details of its force are given: it cannot have des. been less than twenty thousand men, and was probably more numerous. No force in Sicily, whether of Syracusans or Carthaginians, could have resisted it in the field; and it had lately stormed the walls of Leontini as easily, to use the Homeric comparison, as a child tramples out the towers and castles which he has scratched upon the sand of the sea-shore. But at Syracuse it was checked by an artillery such as the Romans had never encountered before, and which, had Hannibal possessed it, would long since have enabled him to bring the war to a 47 Livy, XXIV. 31, 32. 4s Livy, XXIV.

33.

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552 InIiISTORY OF ROME. [CHIAP. XLV triumphant issue. An old man of seventy-four, a relation and friend of king Hiero, long known as one of the ablest astronomers and mathematicians of his age, now proved that his science was no less practical than deep; and amid all the crimes and violence of contending factions, he alone won the pure glory of defending his country successfully against a foreign enemy. This old man was Archimedes.49 Many years before, at Hiero’s request, he had contrived the engines which His extraordinary en-were now used so effectively.50

Marcellus brought up his ships ginesto efendthecity-against the sea-wall of Achradina, and endeavored by a constant discharge of stones and arrows to clear the walls of their defenders, so that his men might apply their ladders, and mount to the assault. These ladders rested on two ships lashed together broadside to broadside, and worked as one by their outside oars; and when the two ships were brought close up under the wall, one end of the ladder was raised by ropes passing through blocks affixed to the two mast-heads of the two vessels, and was then let go, till it rested on the top of the wall. But Archimedes had supplied the ramparts with an artillery so powerful, that it overwhelmed the Romans before they could get within the range which their missiles could reach; and when they came -closer, they found that all the lower part of the wall was loopholed; and their men were struck down with fatal aim by an enemy whom they could not see, and who shot his arrows in perfect security. If they still persevered, and attempted to fix their ladders, on a sudden they saw long poles thrust out from the top of the wall, like the arms of a giant; and enormous stones, or huge masses of lead, were dropped from these upon them, by which their ladders were crushed to pieces, and their ships were almost sunk. At other times machines like cranes, or such as are used at the turnpikes in Germany, and in the market-gardens round London, to draw water, were thrust out over the wall; and the end of the lever, with an iron grapple affixed to it, was lowered upon the Roman ships. As soon as the grapple had taken hold, the other end of the lever was lowered by heavy weights, and the ship raised out of the water, till it was made almost to stand upon its stern; then the grapple was suddenly let go, and the ship dropped into the sea with a violence which either upset it, or filled it with water. With equal power was the assault on the land side repelled; and the Roman soldiers, bold as they were, were so daunted by these strange and irresistible devices, that if they saw so much as a rope or a stick hanging or projecting from the wall, they would turn about and run away, crying, “that Archimedes was going to set one of his engines at work against them.” Their attempts, indeed, were a mere amusement to the enemy, till Marcellus, in despair, put a stop to his attacks; and it was resolved merely to blockade the town, and to wait for the effect of famine upon the crowded population within.51 Thus far, keeping our eyes fixed upon Syracuse only, we can give a clear and Diictiosihe histo-probable account of the course of events. But when we would V-ofthe sicilianw-ar.

extend our view further, and connect the war in Sicilv with that tm Italy, and give the relative dates of the actions performed in the several countries involved in this great contest, we see the wretched character of our materials, and must acknowledge that, in order to give a comprehensive picture of the whole war, we have to supply, by inference or conjecture, what no actual testimony has recorded. We do not know for certain when Marcellus came into Sicily, when he began the siege of Syracuse, or how long the blockade was continued. We read of Roman and Carthaginian fleets appearing and disappearing at different times in the Sicilian seas; but.of the naval operations on either side we can give no connected report. Other difficulties present themselves, of no great importance, but perplexing because they shake our confidence in the narraO Livy,’ XXIV. 34. Polybius, VIII. 7. 5 Polybius, VIII. 6-9. Livy, XXIV. 34. 60 Plutarch, Marcellus, 14. Plutarch, Marcellus, 15-17.

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CHAP. XLV.j WAR IN SICILY. 553 tive which contains them. So easy is it to transcribe the ancient writers; so hard to restore the reality of those events of which they themselves had no clear conception. The first attacks upon Syracuse are certainly misplaced by Livy, when he classes them among the events of the year 540.52 The Sicilian. war belongs to the year following, to the consulship of Q. Fabius, Chl thr the dictator’s son, and of Ti. Gracchus. Even when this is set right, it is difficult to reconcile Polybius’ statement,53 “that the blockade of Syracuse lasted eight months,” with the account which places the capture of the city in the au: tumn of 542. Instead of eight months, the blockade would seem to have lasted for more than twelve: nor is there any other solution of this difficulty, than to suppose that the blockade was not persevered in to the end, and was in fact given up as useless, as the assaults had been before.

I notice these points, because the narrative which follows is uncertain and unsatisfactory, and no care can make it otherwise. The year 541 saw the whole stress of the war directed upon Sicily. Little or nothing, if we can trust our accounts, was done in Italy; there was Sicily becomes the a pause also in the operations in Spain; but throughout Sicily the ain s.t ofwar. contest was raging furiously. Four Roman officers were employed there: P. Cornelius Lentulus held the old Roman province, that is, the western part of the island; and his headquarters %ere at Lilybzeum: T.

Otacilius had ihe command of the fleet:54 Appius Claudius and Marcellus carried on the war in the kingdom of Syracuse; the latter certainly as proconsul; the former as proprsetor, or possibly only as the lieutenant, legatus, of the proconsul. Marcellus, however, as proconsul, must have had the supreme command over the island; and all its resources must have been at his disposal; so that the fleet which he conducted in person at the siege of Syracuse, was probably a part of that committed to T. Otacilius, Otacilius himself either serving under the proconsul, or possibly remaining still at Lilybeeum. It is remarkable that, although he is said to have had the command of the fleet continued to him for five successive years,55 yet his name never occurs as taking an active part in the siege of Syracuse; and how he employed himself we know not. Nor is it less singular that he should have retained his naval command year after year, though he was so meanly esteemed by the most influential men in Rom.e, that his election to the consulship was twice stopped in the most decided manner, first by Q. Fabius in 540, and again by T. Manlius Torquatus in 544.56 But the clue to this, as to other things which belong to the living knowledge of these times, is altogether lost. While the whole of Sicily was become the scene of war, an army of nine or ten thousand old soldiers was purposely kept inactive by the Ro-Wiso oonduct of the man government, and was not even allowed to take part in any senate towards the fu. active operations. These were the remains of the army of Canna, gitevos from Canon. and a number of citizens who had evaded their military service: as we have seen they had been all sent to Sicily in disgrace, not to be recalled till the end of the war.51 Now, however, that there was active service required in Sicily itself, these condemned soldiers petitioned Marcellus that they might be employed in the field, and have some opportunity of retrieving their character. This petition was presented to him at the end of the first year’s campaign in Sicily, and was referred by him to the senate. The answer was remarkable: “The senate could see no reason for intrusting the service of the commonwealth to men who had abandoned their comrades at Cannm, while they were fighting to the death: but if M. Claudius thought differently, he might use his discretion; provided always that none of these soldiers should receive any honorary exemption or reward, *’ Livy, XXIV. 34. i Livy, XXII. 32. XXIV. 10, 44.

XXV a 0n Polybius, VIII. 9. XXVI. 1. 64 Lijy, XXIV. 10. 68 Livy, XXIV. 9.

XXVI. 22. b7 Livy, XXIII. 25. See alove, p. 523.

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554 HISTORY OF ROME. CHAP. XLV however they might distinguish themselves, nor be allowed to return to Italy till the enemy had quitted it.“5s Here was shown the consummate policy of the Roman government, in holding out so high a standard of military duty, while, without appearing to yield to circumstances, they took care not to push their severity so far as to hurt themselves. Occasions might arise, when the services of these disgraced soldiers could not be dispensed with; in such a case Marcellus nighlt employ them. Yet even then their penalty was not wholly remitted; it was grace enough to let them serve their country at all; nothing that they could do was more than their bounden duty of gratitude for the mercy shown them; they could not deserve exemption or reward. It was the glory and happiness of Rome that her soldiers could bear such severity. Sicily was full of mercenary troops, whose swords were hired by foreigners to fight their battles; and if these disgraced Romans had chosen to offer their services to Carthage, they might have enjoyed wealth and honors, with full vengeance on their unforgiving country. Greek soldiers at this time would have done so: the proudest of the nobility of France in the sixteenth century did not scruple to revenge his private wrongs by treason. But these ten thousand Romans, although their case was not only hard, but grievously unjust, inasmuch as their rich and noble countrymen, who had escaped like them from Cannae, had received no punishment, still bowed with entire submission to their country’s severity, and felt that nothing could tempt them to forfeit the privilege of being Romans. We must not suppose, however, that these men were useless, even while they Use of thee roop. were kept at a distance from the actual field of war. As soon as Syracuse became the enemy of Rome, it was certain that the Carthaginians would renew the struggle of the first Punic war for the dominion of Sicily; and the Roman province, from its neighborhood to Carthage, was especially exposed to invasion. Lilybaeum, therefore, and Drepanum, Eryx, and Panormus, required strong garrisons for their security; and the soldiers of Cannee, by forming these garrisons, set other troops at liberty who must otherwise have been withdrawn from active warfare. As it was, these towns were never attacked; and the keys of Sicily, Lilybqeum at one end of the island, and Messana at the other, remained throughout in the hands of the Romans. Yet the example of Syracuse produced a very general effect. The cities Efforts of the Crtha.- which had belonged to Hiero’s kingdom mostly followed it, ungmiius in Sicly. less where the Romans secured them in time with sufficient garrisons. Himilconi, the Carthaginian commander, who had been sent over to Pachynus with a small fleet to watch the course of events, sailed back to Carthage, as soon as the Carthaginian party had gained possession of Syracuse, and urged the government to increase its armaments in Sicily.“9 Hannibal wrote from Italy to the same effect; for Sicily had been his father’s battle-field for five years; he had clung to it till the last moment; and his son was no less sensible of its importance. Accordingly, Himilcon was supplied with an army, notwithstanding the pressure of the Numidian war in Africa, and landing on the south coast of Sicily, he presently reduced Heraclea, Minoa, and Agrigentum, and encouraged many of the smaller towns in the interior of the island to declare for Carthage. Hippocrates broke out of Syracuse and joined him. Marcellus, who had left his camp to quell the growing spirit of revolt among the Sicilian cities, was obliged to fall back again; and the enemy, pursuing him closely, encamped on the banks of the Anapus. Meanwhile a Carthaginian fleet ran over to Syracuse, and entered the great harbor; its object being apparently to provision the place, and thus render the Roman blockade nugatory.60 It was clear that Marcellus could not make head against a Carthaginian army Difficulties of the Ro-supported by Syracuse and half the other cities of Sicily,…ns.

The fleet also was unequal to the service required of it; many 68 Livy, XXV. 5-7. b Livy, XXIV. 35. au Livy, XXIV. 35, 36.

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CArP. XLV.] REVOLT OF THE SICILIANS. 55X ships had probably been destroyed by Archimedes; Lilybumn could not be left unguarded, and some ships were necessarily kept there; and in the general revolt of the Sicilian cities, the Roman army could not always depend on being supplied by land, and would require corn to be brought sometimes from a distance by sea.

Besides, the reinforcements which Marcellus so needed must be sent in ships and embarked at Ostia; for Hannibal’s army cut off all communication by the usual line, through Lucania to Rhegium, and over the strait to Messana. Thirty ships therefore had to sail back to Rome, to take on board a legion and transport it to Panormus; from whence, by a circuitous route along the south coast of the island, the fleet accompanying it all the way, it reached Marcellus’ headquarters safely. And now the Romans again had the superiority by sea; but by land Himilcon was still master of the field; and the Roman garrison at Margantia, a little to the north of Syracuse, was betrayed by the inhabitants into his hands.61 This example was no doubt likely to be followed, and should have increased the vigilance of the Roman garrisons. But it was laid hold of by Massacre of theinhabL. Pinarius, the governor of Enna, as a pretence for repeating the itant of Ena. crime of the CGampanians at Rhegium, and of the Praenestines more recently at Casilinum. Standing in the centre of Sicily on the top of a high mountain platform, and fenced by precipitous cliffs on almost every side, Enna was a stronghold nearly impregnable, except by treachery from within; and whatever became of the Roman cause in Sicily, the holders of Enna might hope to retain it, as the Mamertines had kept Messana.

Accordingly Pinarius, having previously prepared his soldiers for what was to be done, on a signal given ordered them to fall upon the people of Enna, when assembled in the theatre, and massacred them without distinction. The plunder of the town Pinarius and his soldiers kept to themselves, with the consent of Marcellus, who allowed the necessity of the times to be an apology for the deed.6” The Romans alleged that the people of Enna were only caught in their own snare; that they had invited Hippocrates and Himilcon to at-Revolt of the Silian. tack the city, and had vainly tried to persuade Pinarius to give Marellus ewinters bethem the keys of the gates, that they might admit the enemy to destroy the garrison. But the Sicilians saw that, if the people of Enna had meditated treachery, the Romans had practised it: a whole people had been butchered, their city plundered, and their wives and children made slaves, when they were peaceably met in the theatre in their regular assembly; and this new outrage, added to the sack of Leontini, led to an almost general revolt.

Marcellus having collected some corn from the rich plains of Leontini, carried it to the camp before Syracuse, and made his dispositions for his winterquarters. Appius Claudius went home to stand for the consulship, and was succeeded in his command by T. Quinctius Crispinus, a brave soldier, who was afterwards Marcellus’ colleague as consul, and received his death-wound by his side, when Marcellus was killed by Hannibal’s ambush. Crispinus lay encamped near the sea, not far from the temple of Olympian Jupiter, and also commanded the naval force employed in the siege; while Marcellus, with the other part of the army, chose a position on the northern side of Syracuse, between the city and the peninsula of Thapsus, apparently for the purpose of keeping up his communications with Leontini.63 As to the blockade of Syracuse, it was in fact virtually raised; all the southern roads were left open; and as a large part of the Roman fleet was again called away either to Lilybseum or elsewhere, supplies of all sorts were freely introduced into the town by sea from Carthage. The events of the winter were not encouraging to the Romans.

Hannibal had taken Tarentum; and the Tarentine fleet was employed in besieg-A. U. C. 54f. A. c ing the Roman garrison, which still held the citadel. Thus the R32.;,Intignes. ftha Roman naval force was still further divided, as it was necessary 00… “1 Livy, XXIV. 36. ” Livy, XXIV. 37-39.

G’ Livy, XXIV. 89.

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556 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHaP. XLV. to convey supplies by sea to the garrison; so that, when spring returned, Marcellus was at a loss what to attempt, and had almost resolved to break up from Syracuse altogether, and to carry the war to the other end of Sicily. But Sosis, and other Syracusans of the Roman party, were intriguing actively with their countrymen within the city; and although one conspiracy, in which eighty persons were concerned, was detected by Epicydes, and the conspirators all put to death, yet the hopes they had held out of obtaining easy terms from the Romans were not forgotten; and the lawlessness of the Roman deserters, and of the other foreign soldiers, made many of the Syracusans long’ for a return of the happy times under Hiero, when Rome and Syracuse were friends.G4 Thus the spring wore away; and the summer had come, and had reached its Thi Syrac.s.an send prime, and yet the war in Sicily seemed to slumber: for the The syrtcusans send tosoliitaid from Ia-greater part of the cities which had revolted to Carthage were don undisturbed by the Romans; vet the Carthaginians were not strong enough to assail the heart of the Roman province, and to besiege Drepanum or Lilybseum. In this state of things, the Syracusans turned their eyes to Greece, and thought that the king of Macedon, who was the open enemy of Rome, and the covenanted ally of Carthage, might serve his own cause no less than theirs by leaving his ignoble warfare on the coast of Epirus, and crossing the Ionian sea to deliver Syracuse. Damippus, a Lacedsemonian, and one of the counsellors of Hieronymus and of Hiero, was accordingly chosen as ambassador, and put to sea on his mission to solicit the aid of king Philip.“5 Again the fortune of Rome interposed to delay the interference of Macedon in the contest.

The ship which was conveying Damippus was taken to soals the wall t by the Romans on the voyage. The Syracusans valued him Wte festival of Diana..i highly, and opened a negotiation with Marcellus to ransom him. The conferences were held between Syracuse and the Roman camp; and a Roman soldier, it is said, was struck with the lowness of the wall in one particular place, and having counted the rows of stones, and so computed the whole height, reported. to Marcellus that it might be scaled with ladders of ordinary length. Marcellus listened to the suggestion; but the low point was for that very reason more carefully guarded, because it seemed to invite attack; he therefore thought the attempt too hazardous, unless occasion should favor it.6” But the great festival of Diana was at hand, a three days’ solemnity, celebrated with all honors to the guardian goddess of Syracuse. It was a season of universal feasting; and wine was distributed largely among the multitude, that the neighborhood of the Roman army might not seem to have banished all mirth and enjoyment. One vast revel prevailed through the city; Marcellus, informed of all this by deserters, got his ladders ready; and soon after dark two cohorts were marched in silence and in a long thin column to the foot of the wall, preceded by the soldiers of one maniple, who carried the ladders, and were to lead the way to the assault. The spot selected for this attempt was in the wall which ran along the northThey gain possessionof ern edge of Epipole, where the ground was steep, and where apTycegand Neoplis; parently there was no gate, or regular approach to the city. But the vast lines of Syracuse inclosed a wide space of uninhabited ground; the new quarters of Tyche and Neapolis, which had been added to the original town since the great Athenian siege, were still far from reaching the top of the hill; and what was called the quarter of Epipole only occupied a small part of the sloping ground known in earlier times by that name. Thus, when the Romans scaled the northern line, they found that all was quiet and lonely; nor was there any one to spread the alarm, except the soldiers who garrisoned the several towrers of the wall itself. These however, heavy with wine, and dreaming of no 6 Livy, XXV. 23. en Livy, XXV. 23. Plutarch, Marcellus, 18. $ Livy, XXV. 23. Polybius, Vol. V. p. 32, 33.

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CHAP. XLV.] SIEGE OF SYRACUSE. 557 danger, were presently surprised and killed; and the assailants, thus clearing their way as they went, swept the whole line of the wall on their right, following it up the slope of the hill towards the angle formed at the summit by the meeting of the northern line with the southern. Here was the regular entrance into Syracuse from the 1 and side; and this point, being the key of the whole fortified inclosure, was secured by the strong work called Hexapylon, or the Six Gates; probably from the number of barriers which must be passed before the lines could be fully entered. To this point the storming party made their way in the darkness, not blindly, however, nor uncertainly, for a Syracusan was guid. ing them, that very Sosis,67 who had been one of the assassins of Hieronymus, and one of the murderers of Hiero’s daughters, and who, when he was one of the captainsgeneral of Syracuse, must have become acquainted with all the secrets of the fortifications.

Sosis led the two Roman cohorts towards Hexapylon: from that commanding height a fire-signal was thrown up, to announce the success of their attempt; and the loud and sudden blast of the Roman trumpets from the top of the walls called the Romans to come to the support of their friends, and told the bewildered Syracusans that the key of their lines was in the hands of the enemy.” Ladders were now set, and the wall was scaled in all directions; for the main gates of Hexapylon could not be forced till the next morning; and.nd tak the Hexapy. the only passage immediately opened was a small side-gate at no Ion. great distance from them. But when daylight came, Hexapylon was entirely taken, and the main entrance to the city was cleared; so that Marcellus marched in with his whole army, and took possession of the summit of the slope of Epipolhe. From that high ground he saw Syracuse at his feet, and, he doubted not, in his power. Two quarters of the city, the new town as it was Marcellus looking don called, and Tyche, were open to his first advance; their only for-eon SySac..e, shed tification being the general inclosure of the lines, which he had tears. already carried. Below, just overhanging the sea, or floating on its waters, lay Achradina and the island of Ortygia, fenced by their own separate walls, which till the time of the first Dionysius had been the limit of Syracuse, the walls which the great Athenian armament had besieged in vain. Nearer on the right, and running so deeply into the land, that it seemed almost to reach the foot of the heights on which he stood, lay the still basin of the great harbor, its broad surface half hidden by tlh hulls of a hundred Carthaginian ships; while further on the right was the camp of his lieutenant, T. Crispinus, crowning the rising ground beyond the Anapus, close by the temple of Olympian Jupiter. So striking was the view on every side, and so surpassing was the glory of his conquest, that Marcellus, old as he was, was quite overcome by it: unable to contain the feelings of that moment, he burst into tears.69 A deputation from the inhabitants of Tyche and Neapolis approached him, bearing the ensigns of suppliants, and imploring him to save them His troops plnderthe from fire and massacre. He granted their prayer, but at the captured parts of the price of every article of their property, which was to be given up to the Roman soldiers as plunder. At a regular signal the army was let loose upon the houses of Tyche and Neapolis, with no other restriction than that of offering no personal violence. How far such a command would be heeded in such a season of license, we can only conjecture. The Roman writers extol the humanity of Marcellus; but the Syracusans regarded him as a merciless spoiler, who had wished to take the town by assault, rather than by a voluntary surrender, that he might have a pretence for seizing its plunder.70 Such a prize, indeed, had never before been won by a Roman army; even the wealth of Taren, e’ Livy, XXVI.

21. ” Livy, XXV. 24. 68 Livy, XXV. 24. Plutarch, Marcellus, 18. 70 Livy, XXVI. 80.

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5538 HISTORY OF ROME. [CnAP. XLT tmn was not to be compared with that of Syracuse. But as yet the appetites oi the Roman soldiers were fleshed rather than satisfied; less than half of Syracuse was in their power; and a fresh siege was necessary to win the spoils of Achradina and Ortygia.

Still what they had already gained gave Marcellus large means of corruption; the fort of Euryalus, on the summit of Epipolse, near Hexapylon, which might have caused him serious annoyance on his rear while engaged in attacking Achradina, was surrendered to him by its governor, Philodemus, an Argive; and the Romans set eagerly to work to complete their conquest. Having formed three camps before Achradina, they hoped soon to starve the remaining quarters of the city into a surrender.7’

Epicydes meanwhile showed a courage and activity worthy of one who had The Cnrthaginin arnmy learned war under Hannibal. A squadron of the Carthaginian fleet attemepting to relieve put to sea one stormy night, when the Roman blockading ships Syracuse, ia destroyed t by a fever. were driven off from the mouth of the harbor, and ran across to Carthage to request fresh succors. These were prepared with the greatest expedition: while Hippocrates and Himilcon, with their combined Carthaginian and Sicilian armies, came from the western end of the island to attack the Roman army on the land side. They encamped on the shore of the harbor, between the mouth of the Anapus and the city, and assaulted the camp of Crispinus, while Epicydes sailed from Achradina to attack Marcellus. But Roman soldiers fighting behind fortifications were invincible; their lines at Capua in the following year repelled Hannibal himself; and now their positions before Syracuse were maintained with equal success against Hippocrates and Epicydes. Still the Carthaginian army remained in its camp on the shore of the harbor, partly in the hope of striking some blow against the enemy, but more to overawe the remains of the Roman party in Syracuse, which the distress of the siege, and the calamities of Neapolis and Tyche, must have rendered numerous and active. Meanwhile the summer advanced; the weather became hotter and hotter; and the usual malaria fevers began to prevail in both armies, and also in Syracuse. But the air here, as at Rome, is much more unhealthy without the city than within; above all, the marshy ground by the Anapus, where the Carthaginian army lay, sas almost pestilential; and the ordinary summer fevers in this situation soon assumed a character of extreme malignity. The Sicilians immediately moved their quarters, and withdrew into the neighboring cities; but the Carthaginians remained on the ground, till their whole army was effectually destroyed. Hippocrates and Himilcon both perished with their soldiers.72 The Rom.nls suffered less; for Marcellus had quartered his men in the houses Their fleet fails in. of Neapolis and Tyche; and the high buildings and narrow streets tlie attempt, of the ancient towns kept off the sun, and allowed both the sick and the healthy to breathe and move in a cooler atmosphere. Still the deaths were numerous; and as the terror of Archimedes and his artillery restrained the Romans from any attempts to batter or scale the walls, they had nothing to trust to save famine or treason. But Bomilcar was on his way from Carthage with 130 ships of war, and a convoy of seven hundred storeships, laden with supplies of every description: he had reached the Sicilian coast near Agrigentum, when prevailing easterly winds checked his further advance, and he could not reach Pachynus. Alarmed at this most unseasonable delay, and fearing lest the fleet should return to Africa in despair, Epicydes himself left Syracuse, and went to meet it, and to hasten its advance. The storeships, which were worked by sails, were obliged to remain at Heraclea; but Epicydes prevailed on Bomilcar to bring on his ships of war to Pachynus, where the Roman fleet, though inferior in numbers, was waiting to intercept his progress. The east winds at length abated,. and Bomilcar stood out to sea to double Pachynus. But when the Ronan fleet advanced against him, he suddenly changed his plans, it is said; and 71

Livy, XXV. 25. 72 Liv, XXV. 26.

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CHAP. XLV.] SIEGE OF SYRACUSE. 559 having dispatched orders to the storeships at Heraclea to return immediately to Africa, he himself, instead of engaging the Romans, or making for Syracuse, passed along the eastern coast of Sicily, without stopping, and continued his course till he reached Tarentum.73 Here again the story in its present state greatly needs explanation. It is true that Hannibal was very anxious at this time to reduce the citadel of Tarentum; and he probably required a fleet to cooperate with’V ich becomes nprey to aarbchy. him, in order to cut off the garrison’s supplies by sea. But Bo-to orcy. milcar had been sent out especially to throw succors into Syracuse; and we cannot conceive his abandoning this object on a sudden, without any intelligible reason. The probability is, that the easterly winds still kept the storeships at Heraclea; and if they could not reach Syracuse, nothing was to be gained by a naval battle. And then, as the service at Tarentum was urgent, he thought it best to. go thither, and to send back the convoy to Africa, rather than wait inactive on the Sicilian coast, till the wind became favorable. After all, Syracuse did not fall for want of provisions: the havoc caused by sickness, both in the city and in the Carthaginian camp on the Anapus, must have greatly reduced the number of consumers, and made the actual supply available for a longer period. It seems to have been a worse mischief than the conduct of Bomilcar, that Epicydes himself, as if despairing of fortune, withdrew to Agrigentum, instead of returning to Syracuse; for from the moment of his departure the city seems to have been abandoned to anarchy. At first the remains of the Sicilian army, which now occupied two towns in the interior, not far from Syracuse, began to negotiate with Marcellus, and persuaded the Syracusans to rise on the generals left in command by Epicydes, and to put them to death. New captainsgenerals were then appointed, probably for the Roman party; and they began to treat with Marcellus for the surrender of Syracuse, and for the general settlement of the war in Sicily.74 Marcellus listened to them readily: but his army was longing for the plunder of Achradina and Ortygia; and he knew not how to disappoint Insurrectionofth.merthem: for we may be sure that no pay was issued at this period cnares in the ity; to any Roman army.serving out of Italy; in the provinces, war was by fair means or foul to support war. Meanwhile the miserable state of affairs in Syracuse was furthering the wish of the Roman soldiers. A besieged city, with no efficient government, and full of foreign mercenaries, whom there was no native force to restrain, was like a wreck in mutiny: utter weakness and furious convulsions were met in the same body. The Roman deserters first excited the tumult, and persuaded all the foreign soldiers to join them; a new outbreak of violence followed; the Syracusan captainsgeneral were massacred in their turn; and the foreign soldiers were again triumphant. Three officers, each with a district of his own, were appointed to command in Achradina, and three more in Ortygia.75 The foreign soldiers now held the fate of Syracuse in their hands; and they began to consider that they might make their terms with the Ro-who betray it to the mans, although the Roman deserters could not. Their blood was Romans. not called for by the inflexible law of military discipline; by a timely treachery they might earn not impunity merely, but reward. So thought Mericus, a Spaniard, who had the charge of a part of the sea-wall of Achradina. Accordingly he made his bargain with Marcellus, and admitted a party of Roman soldiers by night at one of the gates which opened towards the harbor. As soon as morning dawned, Marcellus made a general assault on the land front of Achradina; the garrison of Ortygia hastened to join in the defence; and the Romans then sent boats full of men round into the great harbor, and, effecting a landing under the 7a Livy, XXV.

27. 76 Livy, XXV. 29.‘4 Livy, XXV. 28.

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560 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLV walls, carried the island with little difficulty. Meanwhile Mericus had openly joined the Roman party, whom he had admitted into Achradina; and Marcellus, having his prey in his power, called off his soldiers from the assault, lest the royal treasures, which were kept in Ortygia, should be plundered in the general sack of the town.“6 In the respite thus gained, the Roman deserters found an opportunity to escape out of Syracuse. Whether they forced their way out, or whether Svracuse is taken and plundered. Archimedes the soldiers, hungry for plunder, and not wishing to encounter the resistance of desperate men, obliged Marcellus to connive at their escape, we know not: but with them all wish or power to hold out longer vanished from Syracuse; and a deputation from Achradina came once more to Marcellus, praying for nothing beyond the lives and personal freedom of the citizens and their families. This, it seems, was granted; but as soon as Marcellus had sent his quvestor to secure the royal treasures in Ortygia, the soldiers were let loose upon the city to plunder it at their discretion. They did not merely plunder, however: blood was shed unsparingly, partly by the mere violence of the soldiers, partly by the axes of the lictors, as the punishment of rebellion against the majesty of Rome. Amidst the horrors of the sack of the city, Archimedes was slain.77 The stories of his’death vary; and which, if any of them, is the true one, we cannot determine. But Marcellus, who made it his glory to carry all the finest works of art from the temples of Syracuse to Rome,78 would no doubt have been glad to have seen Archimedes walking amongst the prisoners at his triumph. He is said to have shown kindness to the relations of Archimedes for his sake;‘9 and if this be true, he earned a glory which few Romans ever deserved, that of honoring merit in an enemy. Old as Archimedes was, the Roman soldier’s sword dealt kindly with him, in Miserable condition of cutting short his scanty term of remaining life, and saving him from the Syrnensans.

beholding the misery of his country. It was a wretched sight to see the condition of Syracuse when the sack was over, and what was called a state of peace and safety had returned. Every house was laid bare, every temple stript; and the empty pedestals showed how sweeping the spoiler’s work had been. The Syracusans beheld their captive gods carried to the Roman quarters, or put on shipboard to be conveyed to Rome; the care with which they were handled, lest the conqueror’s triumph should lose its most precious ornaments, only adding to the grief and indignation of the conquered. Those fathers and mothers, who were so happy as to gather all their children safe around them when the plunder was over, had escaped the sword, indeed, and they and their sons and daughters were not yet sold as slaves; but their only choice was still between slavery or death. They had lost every thing. What food was still remaining in the besieged city, the sack had either carried off or destroyed; and if food had been at hand, they had no money to buy it. And this came upon them after a heavy visitation of sickness; when the body, reduced by that weakening malaria fever, needed all tender care and comfort to restore it, instead of being harassed by alarm and anxiety, and exposed to destitution and starvation.

Many therefore sold themselves to the Roman soldiers, to escape dying by hunger; and the family circle, which the sack of the city had spared, was again broken up forever. Those who, being unmarried and childless, had given no hostages to fortune, and who might yet hope to live in personal freedom, were only the more able to feel the ruin and degradation of their country.80 Syracuse, who had led captive the hosts of Athens, and seen the invading armies of Carthage melt away by disease under her walls, till scarce any remained to flySyracuse, where Dionysius had reigned, which Timoleon had freed, which Hiero 76 Livy, XXV. 30. 78 Livy, XXV. 40.

Polybius, IX. 10. Cicero, A7 Livy, XXV. 31. Plutarch, Marcellus, 19. in Verrem, IV. 54. Valerius Maximus, VIII. 7, 7. 79 Livy, XXV. 31. Plutarch, Marcellus, 19. 80 Diodorus, XXVI. Fragm. Mai.

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CHAP. XLV.] MUTINES. 561 had cherished and sheltered under his long paternal rule-was now become subject to barbarians, whom she had helped in their utmost need,.and who were repaying the unshaken friendship of Hiero with the plunder of his city and the subjugation of his people. If there was yet a keener pang to be felt by every noble Syracusan, it was to behold their countrymen, who had fought in the Roman army, returning in triumph, establishing themselves in the empty houses ot the slaughtered defenders of their country, and insulting the general misery by displaying the rewards of their treason. Among these was Sosis, assassin, murderer, and traitor, who was looking forward to the triumph of Marcellus, as one to whom the shame of his country was his glory, and her ruin the making of his fortune.8 Syracuse had fallen; and the cities in the (astern part of Sicily had no other hope now, than to obtain pardon, if it might be, from Rome, by immediate submission. But it was too late: they were treated as conquered enemies;2 that is to say, Marcellus put to death those of their citizens who were most obnoxious, and imposed such forfeitures of land on the cities, and such terms of submission for the time to come, as he judged expedient. It became the fashion afterwards to extol his humanity, and even his refinement,83 because he showed his taste for the works of Greek art by carrying the statues of the Syracusan temples to Rome. But his admiration of Greek art did not make him treat the Greeks themselves with less severity; and the Sicilians taxed him with perfidy as well as cruelty, and regarded him as the merciless oppressor of their country.84

Meantime Hannibal’s comprehensive view had not lost sight of Sicily. When he heard of the havoc caused by the epidemic sickness, and of the Hannibal sends Mutideath of Hippocrates, he sent over another of his officers to share nesto Sicily; his su..with Epicydes, and with the general who came from Carthage, in ceases. the command of the war. This was Mutines, or Myttonus, a half-caste Carthaginian, excluded on that account from civil honors;85 but Hannibal’s camp recognized no such distinctions; and brave and able men, whatever was their race or condition, were sure to be employed and rewarded there. Muti-A. U. C. 843. A. C. nes proved the unerring judgment of Hannibal in his choice of 2”officers. His arrival in Sicily was equivalent to an army: being put at the head of the Numidian cavalry then serving under Epicydes and Hanno, he overran the whole island, encouraging the allies of Carthage, harassing those of Rome, and defying pursuit or resistance by the rapidity and skill of his movements.

HIe renewed the system of warfare which Hamilcar had maintained so long in the last war; and having the strong place of Agrigentum to retire to in case of need, he perplexed the Roman generals not a little. Marcellus was obliged to take the field, and march from Syracuse westward as far as the Himera, where the enemy’s army lay encamped. But he met with a rough reception; the Numidian cavalry crossed the river, and came swarming round his camp, insulting and annoying his soldiers on guard, and confining his whole army to their intrenchments; and when on the next day, impatient of this annoyance, he offered battle in the field, Mutines and his Numidians broke in upon his lines with such fury, that he was fain to retreat with all speed, and seek the shelter of his camp again. It appears that other arms were then tried with better success: the Numidians were tampered with; their irregular habits and impatient tempers made them at all times difficult to manage; and a party of them having left the Carthaginian camp in disgust, Mutines went after them to pacify and win them back to their duty, earnestly conjuring Hanno and Epicydes not to venture a battle till he should return. But Hanno was jealous of Hannibal’s officers; and holding his own commission directly from the government of Carthage, he could not 01 Livy, XXVI. 21. Livy, XXVI. 29-32. Plutarch, Marcellus, a Livy, XXV. 40. 23. 83 Cicero, in Verrem, IV. 52-59. s Livy, XXV. 40.

Polybius, IX. 22. 36

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562 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLV bear to be restrained by a half-caste soldier, sent to Sicily from Hannibal’s camp, by the mere authority of the general. His rank probably gave him a casting vote, when only one other commander was present, so that Epicydes in vain protested against his imprudence.86 A battle was ventured; and not only was the genius of Mutines wanting, but the Numidians whom he had left with Hanno, thinking their commander insulted, would take no active part in the action, and Hanno was defeated with loss. Marcellus, rejoiced at having thus retrieved his honor, had no mind to risk Marcell.us returns to another encounter with Mutines: he forthwith retreated to SyrERome. acuse;87 and as the term of his command was now expired, his thoughts were all turned to Rome, and to his expected triumph. He left Sicily after the fall of Capua, towards the end of the summer of 543, and about a year after the conquest of Syracuse; but he was not allowed to carry his army home with him; and M.

Cornelius Cethegus, one of the preotors, who succeeded him in his command, found that his province was far from being in a state of peace. The Carthaginians had reinforced their army: Mutines, with his Numidians, was A. U. C. 544. A. C. scouring the whole country; the soldiers were discontented because they had not been permitted to return home; and the Sicilians were driven desperate by the oppressions which Marcellus had commanded or winked at, and were ready to break out in revolt again.88 In fact, it appears that in the year 544, nearly two years after the fall of SyrLevinus is sent to Si-acuse, there were as many as sixty-six towns in Sicily in a state cily. of revolt from Rome, and in alliance with Carthage.89 So greatly had Mutines restored the Carthaginian cause, that it was thought necessary to send one of the consuls over with a consular army, to bring the war to an end. Accordingly, M. Valerius Lmvinus, who had been employed for the last three or four years on the coast of Epirus, conducting the war against Philip, and who was chosen consul with Marcellus in the year 544, carried over a regular consular army into Sicily; while L. Cincius, one of the new prmetors, and probably the same man who is known as one of the earliest Roman historians, took the command of the old province, and of the soldiers of Cannae who were still quartered there.90 The army with which Marcellus had won Syracuse was now at last disbanded, and the men were allowed to return home with as much of their plunder as they had not spent or wasted: but four legions were even now employed in Sicily, besides a fleet of one hundred ships; and yet Mutines and his Numidians were overrunning all parts of the island, and the end of the war seemed as distant as ever. Lmevinus advanced towards Agrigentum, with small hope, however, of taking Iutines isinsulted by the place; for Mutines sallied whenever he would, and carried.ll..ne.

sadbtrg’s back his plunder in safety whenever he would: whilst the neighmans. borhood of Carthage made relief by sea always within calculation, whatever naval force the Romans might employ in the blockade.

In this state of things, Lmevinus to his astonishment received a secret communication from Mutines, offering to put Agrigentum into his power. The half-caste African, the officer of Hannibal, the sole stay of the Carthaginian cause in Sicily, was on all these accounts odious to Hanno; and it is likely that Mutines did not bear his glory meekly, and that he expressed the scorn which Hannibal’s soldier was likely to feel for the pride and incapacity of the general sent out by the government at home, and probably by the party opposed to Hannibal, and afraid of his glory.

But whatever was the secret of the quarrel, its effects were public enough: Hanno ventured to deprive Mutines of his command. The Numidians, however, would obey no other leader, while him they would obey in every thing; and at his bidding they rose in open mutiny, took possession of one of the gates F5 Livy, XXV. 40. eg Livy, XXVI. 40. ”’ Livy, XXV. 41. 0

Livy, XXVI. 28. 8Livy, XXVI. 21.

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CHAP. XLV.] DEPLORABLE CONDITION OF SICILY. 563 of the town, and let in the Romans. Hanno and Epicydes had just time to fly to the harbor, to hasten on board a ship, and escape to Carthage; but their soldiers, surprised and panic-struck,, were cut to pieces with little resistance; and Lamvinus won Agrigentum. He treated it more severely than Marcellus had dealt with Syracuse; after executing the principal citizens, he sold all the rest for slaves, and sent the money which he received for them to Rome.“9 This blow was decisive. Twenty other towns, which still held with the Carthaginians, were presently betrayed to the Romans, either by their LTvinus accomplishe garrisons, or by some of their own citizens; six were stormed by the conquestof Sicly, the Roman army; and the remainder, to the number of forty, then submitted at discretion. The consul dealt out his rewards to the traitors who had betrayed their country; and his lictors scourged and beheaded the brave men who had persevered the longest in their resistance: thus at last he was able to report to the senate that the war in Sicily was at an end. Four thousand adventurers of all descriptions, who in the troubled state of Sicily had taken possession of the town of Agathyrna on the north coast and reduces it to entire of the island, and were maintaining themselves there by robbery, submission.

Lcvinus carried over into Italy at the close of the year, and landed them at Rhegium, to be employed in a plundering warfare in Bruttium. Having thus cleared the island of all open disturbers of its peace, he obliged the Sicilians, says Livy, to turn their attention to agriculture, that its fruitful soil might grow corn to supply the wants of Italy and of Rome.92

And he assured the senate, at the end of the year, that the work was thoroughly done; that not a single Carthaginian was left in Sicily; that the towns were repeopled by the return of their peaceable inhabitants, and the land was again cultivated; that he had laid the foundation of a state of things equally happy for the Sicilians and for Rome.93 So Lsevinus said; and so he probably believed. But with the return of peace to the island, there came a host of Italian and Roman speculators; Deplorable condition of who, in the general distress of the Sicilians, bought up large tracts Sicilyof land at a low price, or became the occupiers of estates which had belonged to Sicilians of the Carthaginian party, and had been forfeited to Rome after the execution or flight of their owners. The Sicilians of the Roman party followed the example, and became rich out of the distress of their countrymen. Slaves were to be had cheap; and corn was likely to find a sure market, whilst Italy was suffering from the ravages of war. Accordingly, Sicily was crowded with slaves, employed to grow corn for the great landed proprietors, whether Sicilian or Italian, and so ill-fed by their masters, that they soon began to provide for themselves by robbery. The poorer Sicilians were the sufferers from this evil; and as the masters were well content that, their slaves should be maintained at the expense of others, they were at no pains to restrain their outrages. Thus, although nominally at peace, though full of wealthy proprietors, and though exporting corn largely every year, yet Sicily was teeming with evils, which, seventy or eighty years after, broke out in the horrible atrocities of the Servile War.94 9’ Livy, XXVI. 40. Diodorus, XXXIV. Excerpt. Photii, p. 525,’ Livy, XXVI. 40. &c. and Excerpt. Valesii, p. 599. Florus, III. Li;vy, XXVII. 5.

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564 CHAPTER XLYI. STATE OF ITALY-DISTRESS OF THE PEOPLE-TWELVE COLONIES

REFUSE TO SUPPORT THE WAR-EIGHTEEN COLONIES OFFER ALL THEIR RESOURCES TO

THE ROMANS-EVENTS OF THE WAR-DEATH OF MARCELLUS-FABIUS RECOVERS

TARENTUM-MARCH OF HASDRUBAL INTO ITALY-HE REACHES THE COAST OF THE

ADRIATIC-GREAT MARCH OF C. NERO FROM APULIA TO OPPOSE HIM-BATTLE OF THE

METAURUS, AND DEATH OF HASDRUBAL.A. U. C. 543 TO A. U. C. 547. IN
following the war in Sicily to its conclusion we have a little anticipated the A. U.c. 543. A. C. course of our narrative; for we have been speaking of the consul211. intermiseon oft ship of M. Loevinus, whilst our account of the war in Italy has not ingofCapua. advanced beyond the middle of the preceding year. The latter part of the year 543 was marked, however, by no military actions of consequence; so great an event as the fall of Capua having, as was natural, produced a pause, during which both parties had to shape their future plans according to the altered state of their affairs and of their prospects. Hannibal on his side had retired, as we have seen, into Apulia, after his unHannibal abandons the successful attempt upon Rhegium, and there allowed his soldiers west of Italy. to enjoy an interval of rest. The terrible example of Capua shook the resolution of his Italian allies, and made them consider whether a timely submission to Rome might not be their wisest policy; nay, it became a question whether their pardon might not be secured by betraying Hannibal’s garrisons, and returning to their duty not empty-handed. Hannibal therefore neither dared to risk his soldiers by dispersing them about in small and distant towns; nor could he undertake, even if he kept his army together, to cover the wide extent of country which had revolted to him at different periods of the war. His men would be worn out by a succession of flying marches; and after all, the Roman armies were so numerous, that lie would always be in danger of arriving too late at the point attacked. Accordingly he found it necessary to abandon many places altogether; and from some he obliged the inhabitants to migrate, and made them remove within the limits which he still hoped to protect. In this manner, it is probable, the western side of Italy, from the edge of Campania to Bruttium, was at once left to its fate; including what had been the territory of the Capuans on the shores of the Gulf of Salernum, the country of the Picentians, and Lucania; while Apulia and Bruttium were carefully defended. But in evacuating the towns which they could not keep, and still more in the compelled migrations of the inhabitants, Hannibal’s soldiers committed many excesses; property was plundered, and blood was shed; and thus the minds of the Italians were still more generally alienated.’ We have seen that, immediately after the fall of Capua, C. Nero, with a part Movements of the Ro-of the troops which had been employed on the blockade, had been man arinies. sent off to Spain.2 Q. Fulvius remained at Capua, with another part, amounting to a complete consular army;3 and some were probably sent home. The two consuls marched into Apulia, which was to be their province;4 but no active operations took place during the remainder of the season; and at the end of the year P. Sulpicius was ordered to pass over into Epirus, and succeed M. Leavinus in the command of the war against Philip. The home administration was left in the hands of C. Calpurnius Piso, the city przetor. About the time that the two consuls took the command in Apulia, M. CorneI Livy XXV1. 38. s Livy, XXVI. 28. a ivy, XXVI. 17. Livy, XXVI.

22.

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CHAP. XLVI.] ELECTION OF CONSULS. 565 lius Cethegus, who had obtained that province as protor at the Marcellos is unable to beginning of the year, was sent over to Sicily to command the ohtain a t.rinmph; Iisa army there, Marcellus having just left the island to return to plendid ovation. Rome.

Marcellus was anxious to obtain a triumph for his conquest of Syracuse: but the war in Sicily was still raging; and Mutines was in full activity.

The senate therefore would not grant a triumph for an imperfect victory, but allowed Marcellus the honor of the smaller triumph or ovation. He was highly dissatisfied at this, and consoled himself by going up in triumphal procession to the temple of Jupiter on the highest summit of the Alban hills, and offering sacrifice there, a ceremony which by virtue of his imperium he could lawfully perform: he might go in procession where he pleased, and sacrifice where he pleased, except within the limits of Rome itself. On theday after his triumph on the hill of Alba, he entered Rome with the ceremony of an ovation, walking on foot according to the rule, instead of being drawn in a chariot in kingly state, as in the proper triumph. But the show was unusually splendid: for a great picture of Syracuse with all its fortifications was displayed, and with it some of the very artillery which Archimedes had made so famous in his defence of them; besides an unwonted display of the works of art of a more peaceful kind, the spoils of Hiero’s palace, and of the temples in his city, silver and bronze figures, embroidered carpets and coverings of couches, and, above all, some of the finest pictures and statues. Men also observed the traitor Sosis walking in the procession, with a coronet of gold on his head, as a benefactor of the Roman people: he was further to be rewarded with the Roman franchise, with a house at his own choice out of those belonging to the Syracusans who had remained true to their country, and with five hundred jugera of land, which had either been theirs, or part of the royal domain.’ At the end of the year Cn. Fulvius was summoned to Rome from Apulia to preside at the consular comitia. On the day of the election, the first century of the Veturian tribe, which had obtained the first 2lo. Comit.: nobleo conduct of Manlius; voice by lot, gave its votes in favor of T. Manlius Torquatus and Marce.ll.usad Lsvinus T. Otacilius Crassus. As the voice of the tribe first called was ”’”.lect.dconslls generally followed by the rest, Manlius, who was present, was immediately greeted by the congratulations of his friends: but, instead of accepting them, he made his way to the consul’s seat, and requested him to call back the century which had just voted, and allow him to say a few words. The century was summoned again, all men wondering what was about to happen.

Manlius had been consul five-and-twenty years before, in the memorable year when the temple of Janus was shut in token of the ratification of peace with Carthage; twenty years had passed since he was censor; and though his vigor of body and mind was still great, he was an old man, and age had made him nearly blind. ” I am unfit to command,” he said; ” for I can only see through the eyes of others. This is no time for incompetent generals; let the century make a better choice.” But the century answered unanimously, “that they could not make a better; that they again named Manlius and Otacilius consuls.” ” Your tempers and my rule,” said the old man, ” will never suit. Give your votes over again; and remember that’ the Carthaginians are in Italy, and that their general is Hannibal.” A murmur of admiration burst from all around, and the voters of the century were moved. They were the younger men of their tribe; and they besought the consul to summon the century of their elders, that they might be guided by their counsel. Fulvius accordingly summoned the century of elders of the Veturian tribe; and the two centuries retired to confer on the question.

The elders recommended that Fabius and Marcellus should be chosen; or, if a new consul were desirable, that they should take one of these, and with him elect M. Lmvinus, who for some years past had done good service in,conducting the war against Philip. Their advice was adopted, and the century gave its votes now in favor of Marcellus b Livy, XXVI. 21.

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566 HISTORY OF RONME. [CHAP. XL’LV and Laevinus. All the other centuries confirmed their choice; and thus T. Otacilius was for the second time, by an extraordinary interference with the votes of the centuries, deprived of the consulship, to which some uncommonly amiable qualities, or some peculiar influence, had twice recommended him, in spite of his deficient ability.6 He probably never knew of this second disappointment; for scarcely was the election over, when news arrived from Sicily of his death.’ Cn. Fulvius returned to his army in Apulia; and as M. Lmevinus was still absent in Epirus, Marcellus on the usual day, the ides of March, entered upon the consulship alone. Q. Fulvius was still at Capua; but Q.

Fabius and T. Manlius were at Rome; and their counsels, together with those of Marcellus, were of the greatest influence in the senate, and probably directed the government. There was need for all. their ability and all their firmness, for never had the Alarming post…f posture of affairs been more alarming. Hannibal’s unconquered Roman affairs. Pa-and unconquerable army, although it had.ot saved Capua, had triotic proposition of Lteinus.selfdevotion wasted Italy more widely than ever in the last campaign; and it of the senators: their example followed by had struck particularly at countries which had hitherto escaped the whole people. its ravages, the valleys of the Sabines, and the country of the thirtyfive tribes themselves, up to the very gates of Rome. Many of the citizens had not only lost their standing crops, but their cattle had been carried off, and their houses burned to the ground.8 Actual scarcity was added to other causes of distress; insomuch that the modius of wheat rose to nearly three denarii, which, in a plentiful season eight years afterwards, was sold at four ases, or the fourth part of one denarius.9

The people were becoming unable to bear further burdens; and some of the Latin colonies, which had hitherto been the firmest support of the commonwealth, were suspected to be not only unable, but unwilling. It was probably to meet the urgent necessity of the case that the armies were somewhat reduced this year, four legions, it seems, being disbanded.’~ But this fruit of the fall of Capua was in part neutralized by the necessity of raising fresh seamen; for unless the commonwealth maintained its naval superiority, Sicily would be lost, and Philip might be expected on the coasts of Italy; and the supply of corn which was looked for from Egypt in the failure of all nearer resources, would become very precarious.”

Accordingly a tax was imposed, requiring all persons to provide a certain number of seamen, in proportion to the returns of their property at the last census, with pay and provisions for thirty days. But our own tax of ship-money did not excite more opposition, though on different grounds.

The people complained aloud: crowds gathered in the Forum, and declared that no power could force from them what they had not got;:that the consuls might sell their goods, and lay hold on their persons, if they chose; but they had no means of payment.” The consuls for Laevinus was by this time returned home from Macedonia-with that dignity which the Roman government never forgot for an instant, issued an order, giving the defaulters three days to consider their determination; thus seeming to grant as an indulgence, what necessity obliged them to yield. Meanwhile they summoned the senate; and when every one was equally convinced of the necessity of procuring seamen, and the impossibility of carrying through the tax, Lavinus, in his colleague’s name and his own, proceeded to address the senators. He told them that, before they could call on the people to make sacrifices, they must set the example. “Let each senator,”

he said, “keep his gold ring, and the rings of his wife and children: let him keep the golden bulla worn by his sons under age, and one ounce of gold for ornaments for his wife, and an ounce for each of his daughters.

-All the rest of the gold which we possess, let us offer e Livy, XXVI. 22.

“O Livy XXVI. 28.’ Livy, XXVI. 23. n Polybius IX. 10. 8 Livy, XXVI. 26. 2

Livy, XXVI. 86. 9 Polybius, IX. 44. Livy, XXXI. 5.

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CHAP. XLVI.] SEVERITY OF FULVIUS AND MARCELLUS. 567 for the public service. Next, let all of us who have borne curule offices, reserve the silver used in the harness of our warhorses; and let all others, including those just mentioned, keep one pound of silver, enough for the plate needful in sacrifices, the small vessel to hold the salt, and the small plate or basin: for the libation; and let us each keep five thousand ases of copper money. With these exceptions, let us devote all our silver and copper to our country’s use, as we have devoted all our gold. And let us do this without any vote of the senate, of our own free gift, as individual senators, and carry our contributions at once to the three commissioners for the currency. Be sure that first the equestrian order, and then the mass of the people, will follow our example.” He spoke to hearers who so thoroughly shared his spirit, that they voted their thanks to the consuls for this suggestion. The senate instantly broke up; “he senators hastened home, and thence came crowding to the Forum, their slaves bearing all their stores of copper, and silver, and gold, each man being anxious to have his contribution recorded first; so that, Livy says, neither were there commissioners enough to receive all the gifts that were brought, nor clerks enough to record them. The example, as the consuls knew, was irresistible; the equestrian order and the commons poured in their contributions with equal zeal; and no tax could have supplied the treasury so plentifully as this freewill offering of the whole people.‘3

There is no doubt that the money thus contributed was to be repaid to the contributors, when the republic should see better days; but the value of these sacr. sacrifice consisted in this, that, while the prospect of payment was fi.es. distant and uncertain, the whole profit of the money in the mean time wao lost: for the Roman state creditors received no interest on their loans. Therefore it was at their own cost mainly, and not at the cost of posterity, that the Romans maintained their great struggle; and from our admiration of their firmness and heroic devotion to their country’s cause, nothing is in this case to be abated. Nor is it less striking, that the senate at this very moment listened to accusations brought by vanquished enemies against their conquerors, and ZD- >… >

Complaints of the sever. these conquerors men of the highest name and greatest influence ity of Ftlviu. and Mar in the commonwealth, Marcellus and Q. Fulvius. When LZevinus celus. passed through Capua on his way to Rome, he was beset by a multitude of the Capuans, who complained of the intolerable misery of their condition under the dominion of Q. Fulvius, and besought him to take them with him to Rome, that they might implore the mercy of the senate. Fulvius made them swear that they would return to Capua within five days after they received their answer, telling Luevinus that he dared not let them go at liberty; for if any Capuan escaped from the city, he instantly became a brigand, and scoured the country, burning, robbing, and murdering all that fell in his way; even at Rome, Lwevinus would find the traces of Capuan treason, for the late destructive fire in the city was their work. So a deputation of Campanians, thus hardly allowed to go, followed Lmvinus towards Rome; and when he approached the city, a similar deputation of Sicilians came out to meet him, with like complaints against Marcellus.‘4 The provinces assigned to the consuls were this year to be the conduct of the war with Hannibal, and Sicily; and Sicily fell by lot to Marcellus. The Sicilians entreat The Sicilians present were thrown into despair when this was an-that Marcellus may no nounced to them: they put on mourning and beset the senate-bst into Sicily. house, weeping and bewailing their hard fate, and saying that it would be better,for their island to be sunk in the sea, or overwhelmed with the lava floods of -,Etna, than given up to the vengeance of Marcellus. Their fe,9ling met with much sympathy in the senate; and this was made so intelligible, that Marcellus, without waiting for any resolution on the subject, came to an agreement with his colleague, and they exchanged their provinces.15 This having been settled, the Sicilians were admitted into the senate, and’a Livy, XXVI. 86. 1’ Livy, XXVI. 27. D’

Livy, XXVI. 29,

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568 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLVI Their complaint is brought forward their complaint. It turned principally on the cruoue.brdy theeteo;f elty of making them responsible for the acts, first of Hieronymus, lMareellus. and then of a mercenary soldiery which they had no means of resistingr; while the long and tried friendship of Hiero, proved by the Romans in the utmost extremity of their fortune, had been forgotten. Marcellus insisted that the deputation should remain in the senate, and hear his statement,-answer he would not call it, and far less defence, as if a Roman consul could plead to the accusations:,of a-:set of vanquished Greeks,-but his statement of their offences, which had justly brought on all that they had suffered. He said that they had acted as enemies, had rejected his frequent offers of peace, and had resisted his attacks with all possible obstinacy, instead of doing as Sosis, whom they called a traitor, had done, and surrendering their city into his hands. He then left the senate-house together with the Sicilians, and went to the Capitol’to carry on the enlistment of the newly raised legions.‘t There was a strong feeling in the senate that Syracuse had been cruelly used; Decree f the senate. and old T. Manlius expressed this as became him, especially urging Marcel.ls bec.omes the the unworthy return which had been made to the country of Hiero patronus of Syracuse.. for all his fidelity to Rome. But a sense of Marcellus’ signal services, andi of the urgency of the times, prevailed; and a resolution was passed confirming all that he had done, but declaring that for the time to come the senate would consult the welfare of the Syracusans, and would commend them especially to the care of Lwvinus. A deputation of two senators was then sent to the consul to invite him to return to the senate; the Syracusans were called in, and the decree was read. Then the Syracusan deputies threw themselves at the feet of Marcellus, imploring him to forgive all that they had said against him, to receive them under his protection, and to become the patronus of their city.“7 He gave them a gracious answer, and accepted the office; and from that time forward the Syracusans found it their best policy to extol the clemency of Marcellus; and later writers echoed their language, not knowing, or not remembering, that these expressions of forced praise were their own strongest refutation. The Campanian deputation was heard with less favor; but still it was heard; Severe treatment of the and the senate took their complaint into consideration. But in this Canmlpauians. case no mercy was shown; and it was now that those severe decrees were passed, fixing the future fate of the Campanian people, which I have already mentioned by anticipation, at the end of the story of the siege of Capua.tl The military history of this year is again difficult to comprehend, owing to the Opening of the cam-omissions and incoherence in Livy’s narrative. Two armies, as we paig;a the army of Fu-b have seen, were employed against Hannibal: that of Cn. Fulvius, viuas is destroyed by np d Hannibal. the consul of the preceding year, in Apulia; and that of Marcellus in Samnium. Where Hannibal had passed the winter, or the end of the preceding summer, we know not; not a word being said of his movements after his ineffectual attempt upon Rhegium, till we hear of his march against Fulvius. We may suppose, however, that he had wintered in Apulia; and we are told that, Salapia having been betrayed to the Romans, and a detachment of NumidianE having been cut off in it, Hannibal again retreated into Bruttium.19 With two armies opposed to him, it was of importance not to let either of them advance to attack Tarentunm and the towns on the coast, while he was engaged with the other. He was obliged therefore to abandon his garrisons in Samnium and Apulia to their own resources, and kept his army well in hand, ready to strike a blow whenever opportunity-should offer. As usual, he received perfect information of the enemy’s proceedings through his secret emissaries; and having earned that Fulvius was in the neighborhood of Herdonea,. trying to win the’

Livy, XXVI. 30, 31. 18 Above, p. 540, foll. Livy, XXVI. 88. u’ L1i:, XXVI.

32. “Livy, XXVII. 1.

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CHAP. XLVI.] ALARMING NEWS FROM AFRICA. 509 place, and that, relying on his distance from the Carthaginian army, he was not sufficiently on his guard, Hannibal conceived the hope of destroying this army by an unexpected attack. Again the details are given variously; but the result was, that Hannibal’s attempt was completely successful. The army of Fulvius was destroyed, and the proconsul killed; and Hannibal, having set fire to Herdonea, and executed those citizens who had been in correspondence with the enemy, sent away the rest of the population into Bruttium, and himself crossed the mountains into Lucania, to look after the army of Marcellus.20 Marcellus, on the news of his colleague’s defeat, left Samnium, and advanced into Lucania: his object now was to watch Hannibal closely, lest Macellus adopts tlo he should again resume the offensive; all attempts to recover policyof Fabiuo. more towns in Samnium or elsewhere must for the time be abandoned. And this service he performed with great ability and resolution, never leaving Hannibal at rest, and taking care not to fall into any ambush, but unable, notwithstanding the idle stories of his victories, to do any thing mnore than keep his enemy in sight, as Fabius had done in his first dictatorship. Thus the rest of the season passed away unmarked by any thing of importance: Marcellus wintered apparently at Venusia; Hannibal in his old quarters, in the wuarml plains near the sea.2’ In spite, therefore, of the reduction of Capua, the Roman affairs in Italy had made no progress. On the contrary, another army had been to-Advantages gained by tally destroyed; and the war, with all its burdens, seemed inter-thRomans ou.It of minable. But in other quarters this year had been more success-t ful: Loevinus had ended the war in Sicily, and the resources of that island were now at the disposal of the Romans; while the Carthaginian fleets had no point nearer than Carthage itself to carry on their operations, whether to the annoyance of the enemy’s coasts,‘or the relief of their own garrisons at Tarentum, and along the southern coast of Italy. In addition to this, the alliance which Laevinus had concluded with the,Etolians before he quitted Epirus, had left a far easier task to his successor, P. Sulpicius, and removed all danger of Philip’s cooperating with Hannibal. Meanwhile Loevinus was summoned home to hold the comitia, Marcellus being too busily employed with Hannibal to leave his army; and accordingly he crossed over directly from Lilybaium or Panormus to Ostia, accompanied by the African, Mutines, who was now to receive the reward of his desertion, in being made a citizen of Rome by a decree of the people.2” Before his departure from Sicily, Laevinus had sent the greater part of his fleet over to Africa, partly to make plundering descents on the Alarming news from coast, but chiefly to collect information as to the condition and Africa. plans of the enemy. Messalla, who had succeeded to T. Otacilius in the command:f the fleet, accomplished this expedition in less than a fortnight; and the information which he collected was so important, that, finding Laevinus was gone to Rome, he forwarded it to him without delay. Its substance bore, that the Carthaginians were collecting troops with great diligence, to be sent over into Spain; and that the general report was, that these soldiers were to form the army of Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, and were to be led by him immediately into Italy. This intelligence so alarmed the senate, that they would not detain the consul to hold the comitia, but ordered him to name a dictator for that purlpose, and then to return immediately to his province.?3 With all the patriotism of the Romans, it was not possible that personal ambition and jealousy should be wholly extinct among them; and the influence exercised at the present crisis by Q. Fabius, and his pref-A dictator appointed to hold the comitia Fabius erence of Q. Fulvius and Marcellus to all other commanders, was and Fultius choesen c on no doubt regarded by some as excessive and overbearing. The S. 2o Livy, XXVII. 1. 2 Livy, XXVII. 5. 52 Livy, XXVII.

2, 4, 12-14, 20. 28 Livy, XXVII. 5.

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570 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLY1 magistrate who presided at the comitia enjoyed so great a power over the elections, that the choice of the dictator on this occasion was of some consequence; and Loevinus intended to name the commander of his fleet, M. Messala, not withsut some view, possibly, to his own re-election, if the comitia were held under the auspices of a man not entirely devoted to Fabius and Fulvius. But when he declared his intention to the senate, it was objected that a person out of Italy could not be named dictator; and the consul was ordered to take the choice of the people, and to name whomsoever the people should fix upon.

Indignant at this interference with his rights as consul, Lmevinus refused to submit the question to the people, and forbade the prsetor, L. Manlius Acidinus, to do so. This, however, availed him nothing; for the tribunes called the assembly, and the people resolved that the dictator to be named should be Q. Fulvius. Leevinus probably expected this, and, as his last resource, had left Rome secretly on the night before the decision, that he might not be compelled to go through the form of naming his rival dictator. Here was a new difficulty, for the dictator could only be named by one of the consuls: so it was necessary to apply to Marcellus; and he nominated Q. Fulvius immediately.24 The old man left Capua forthwith, and proceeded to Rome to hold the comitia, at which the century first called gave its votes in favor of Fulvius himself and Fabius. This, no doubt, had been preconcerted: but two of the tribunes shared the feelings of Levinus, and objected to such a monopoly of office in the hands of two or three men; they also complained of the precedent of allowing the magistrate presiding at the election to be himself elected. Fulvius, with no false modesty, or what in our notions would be real delicacy, maintained that the choice of the century was good, and justified by precedents; and at last the question was submitted by common consent to the senate. The senate determined that, under actual circumstances, it was important that the ablest men and most tried generals should be at the head of affairs; and they therefore approved of the election. Accordingly Fabius and Fulvius were once more appointed consuls; the former for the fifth time, the latter for the fourth.25 Thus was the great object gained of employing the three most tried generals of the republic, Fabius, Fulvius, and Marcellus, against Hannibal Plan forn the approaching campaign. Each was to command a full consular army, Marcellus retaining that which he now had, with the title of proconsul; and the plan of operations was, that, while Marcellus occupied Hannibal on the side of Apulia, a grand movement should be made against Tarentum and the other towns held by the enemy on the southern coast. Fabius was to attack Tarentum, while Fulvius was to reduce the garrisons still retained by Hannibal in Lucania,26 and then to advance into Bruttium; and that band of adventurers from Sicily, which Loevinus had sent over to Rhegium to do some service in that quarter, was to attempt the siege of Caulon, or Caulonia. Every exertion was to be made to destroy Hannibal’s power in the south, before his brother, could arrive in Italy to effect a diversion in the north.27 Levinus, it seems, paid the penalty of his opposition to Fulvius’ election, in being deprived of his consular army, which he was ordered to send over to Italy to be commanded by Fulvius himself; and he and the proprietor, L. Cincius, were left to defend Sicily with the old soldiers of Cannze, and the remains of the defeated armies of the two Fulvii, the praetor and the proconsul, which had been condemned to the same banishment, together with the forces which they had themselves raised within the island, partly native Sicilians, and, partly Numidians, who had come over to the Romans with Mutines.28

With these resources, and with a fleet of seventy ships, Sicily was firmly held; and Lrevinus, it is said, was able in the course of the year to send supplies of corn to Rome, and also to the army of Fabius before Tarentum.29 24 Livy, XXVII. 5. L7 Livy, XXVII. 12. i ivy, XXVII. 6. 8

Livy, XXVII. 7. Iivy, XXVII. 7. “Livy, XXVII. 8.

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CHArP.XLVI.] REVOLT OF TWELVE LATIN COLONIES. 571 But before the consuls could take the field, a storm burst forth more threatening than any which the republic had yet experienced. The sol-Twelve of the Latin diers of the army defeated at Herdonea, who were now to be sent colonie~ reftue fresh over to Sicily, were in a large proportion Latins of the colonies; supp and as they were to be banished for the whole length of the war, fresh soldiers were to be levied to supply their places in Italy. This new demand was the drop which made the full cup overflow. The deputies of twelve of the colonies, who were at Rome as usual to receive the consul’s orders, when they were required to furnish fresh soldiers, and to raise money for their payment, replied resolutely that they had neither men nor money remaining.30 “The Roman people,” says Livy, “had at this period thirty colonies; of which number twelve thus refused to support the war any longer. The consuls remonThe number mentioned by the historian has occasioned great per-strate with themnin. plexity; but its coincidence with the old number of the states of he Latin confederacy leaves no doubt of its genuineness; and when the maritime colonies are excepted, which stood on a different footing, as not being ordinarily bound to raise men for the regular land-service, it agrees very nearly with the list which we should draw up of all the Latin colonies mentioned to have been founded before this period. But what particular causes determined the twelve recusant colonies more than the rest to resist the commands of Rome, we cannot tell. Amongst them we find the name of Alba, which two years before had shown, such zeal in hastening to the assistance of Rome unsummoned, when Hannibal threatened its very walls; we also find some of the oldest colonies, Circeii, Ardea, Cora, Nepete, and Sutrium; Cales, which had so long been an important position during the revolt of Capua, Carseoli, Suessa, Setia, Narnia, and Interamna, on the Liris. The consuls, thunderstruck at their refusal, attempted to shame them from their purpose by rebuke. “This is not merely declining to furnish troops and money,”

they said; “it is open rebellion. Go home to your colonies; forget that so detestable a thought ever entered your heads; remind your fellowcitizens that they are not Campanians nor Tarentines, but Romans, Roman born, and sent from Rome to occupy lands conquered by Romans, to multiply the race of Rome’s defenders. All duty owed by children to their parents, you owe to the senate and people of Rome.” But in vain did Fabius and Fulvius, with all the authority of their years and their great name, speak such language to the deputies. They were coldly answered, “that it was useless to consult their countrymen at home the colonies could not alter their resolution: for they had no men nor money left.” Finding the case hopeless, the consuls summoned the senate, and reported the fatal intelligence. The courage which had not yielded to the slaughter of Cannme, was shaken now. “At last,” it was said, “the blow is struck, and Rome is lost: this example will be followed by all our colonies and allies: there is doubtless a general conspiracy amongst them to give us up bound hand and foot to Hannibal.“31 The consuls bade the senate to take courage; the other colonies were yet true; “even these false ones will return to their duty, if we do not condescend to entreat them, but rather rebuke them for their treason.” ether eighteen colonies; the senate resolves to Every thing was left to the consuls’ discretion: they exerted all tkeD no notice of the their influence with the deputies of the other colonies privately; t and having ascertained their sentiments, they then ventured to summon them officially, and to ask, ” Whether their appointed contingents of men and money were forthcoming?” Then M. Sextilius of Fregellae stood up and made answer in the name of the eighteen remaining colonies: “They are forthcoming; and if more are needed, more are at your disposal.: Every order, every wish: of the Roman people, we will with our best efforts fulfil: to do this we have means enough, and will more than enough.” The consuls replied, ” Our thanks are all too little for your desert: the whole senate must thank you themselves.” They’ Livy, XXVII.

9.:1 Livy, XXVII. 9.

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572 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLVI. led the deputies into the senate-house; and thanks were voted to them in the warmest ternms. Then the consuls were desired to lead them before the people, to remind the people of all the services which the colonies had rendered to them and to their fathers, services all surpassed by this last act of devotion. The thanks of the people were voted no less heartily than those of the senate. ” Nor’ sllall these eighteen colonies even now,” says Livy, ” lose their just glory.

They were the people of Signia, of Norba, of Saticula, of Brundisium, of Fregelle, of Luceria, of Venusia, of Hadria, of Firmum, and of Ariminumn; and from the lower sea, the people of Pontia, and of Psestum, and of Cosa; and from the midland country, the people of Beneventum, and of Jfsernia, and of Spoletum, and of Placentia, and of Cremona.” The aid of these eighteen colonies on that day saved the Roman empire. Satisfied now, and feeling their strength invincible, the senate forbade the consuls to take the slightest notice of the disobedient colonies; they were neither to send /for them, nor to detain them, nor to dismiss them; they were to leave them wholly alone.3 It is enough for the glory of any nation, that its history in two successive Magnanimity of their years should record two such events as the magnanimous liberality incidence in the subse-of the senate in sacrificing their wealth to their country, and the quent destinies of the f o l;ouse of Fulvies and of no less magnanimous firmness and wisdom of their behavior torregellse. wards their colonies. An aristocracy endowed with such virtue deserved its ascendency; for its inherent faults were now shown only towards the enemies of Rome; its nobler character alone was displayed towards her citizens. But when M.

Sextilius of Fregellae was standing before Q. Fulvius, promising to serve Rome to the death, and the old consul’s stern countenance was softened to admiration and joy, and his lips, which had so remorselessly doomed the Capuan senators to a bloody death, were now uttering thanks and praises to Rome’s true colonists, how would each have started, could he have looked for a moment into futurity, and seen what events were to happen, before a hundred years were over! By a strange coincidence, each would have seen the selfsame hand red with the blood of his descendants, and extinguishing the country of the one and the family of the other. Within ninety years, the Roman aristocracy were to become utterly corrupted; and its leader, L.

Opimius, as base personally as he was politically cruel, was to destroy Fregelle, and treacherously in cold blood to slay an innocent youth, the last direct representative of the great Q. Fulvius, aifter he had slain M.

Fulvius, the youth’s father, in civil conflict within the walls of Rome.33

Fregellme, to whose citizens Rome at this time owed her safety, was within ninety years to be so utterly destroyed by the Roman arms, that at this day its very site is not certainly known: the most faithful of colonies has perished more entirely than the rebellious Capua.3” Rome could rely on the fidelity of the majority of her colonies; but their very Tie sacred treasure is readiness made it desirable to spate them to the utmost.

Therebroughtsout. fore a treasure, which was reserved in the most sacred treasury for the extremest need, was now brought out; amounting, it is said, to four thousand pounds weight of gold; and which had been accumulating during a period of about 150 years, being the produce of the tax at five per cent. on the value of every emancipated slave, paid by the person who gave him his liberty. With this money the military chests of the principal armies were well replenished; and supplies of clothing were sent to the army in Spain, which P. Scipio was now commanding, and was on the point of leading to the conquest of New Carthage.‘S At length the consuls took the field. Marcellus, according to the plan samnium and Lueania, agreed upon, broke up fromn his quarters at Venusia, and proceedthes Brlttians treal a ed to watch and harass Hannibal; while Fabius advanced upon bout sulnission. Tarentumn, and Fulvius marched into Lucania. Caulonia at the 32 Livy, XXVII. 10.‘4 Velleins, II. 6, 4. Strabo, V. p. 86& 33 Velleius, II., 4. II. 7, 2. Plutrch, Actor ad Herennium, IV.

15. C. Gracchus, c. xvi. Appian, B. C. I. 26. Livr, XXVII. 10.

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IHAP. XLVI.] FALL OF TARENTUM.,73 same time was besieged by the band of adventurers from Sicily. The mass of forces thus employed was overwhelming; and Hannibal, while he clung to Apulia and Bruttium, was unable to retain his hold on Samniumn and Lucania. Those great countries, or rather the powerful party in both, which had hitherto been in revolt from Rome, now made their submission to Q. Fulvius, and delivered up such of Hannibal’s soldiers as were in garrison in any of their towns. They had apparently chosen their time well; and by submitting at the beginning of the campaign they obtained easy terms. Even Fulvius, though not inclined to show mercy to revolted allies, granted them full indemnity: the axes of his lictors were suffered this time to sleep unstained with blood. This politic mercy had its effect on the Bruttians also: some of their leading men came to the Roman *?amp to treat concerning the submission of their countrymen on the terms which had been granted to the Samnites and Lucanians; and the base of all Hannibal’s operations, the southern coast of Italy, was in danger of being torn away from him, if he lingered any longer in Apulia.36 Then his indomitable genius and energy appeared once more in all its brilliancy. He turned fiercely upon Marcellus, engaged him twice, and so anniba’sbrilliantex disabled him, that Marcellus, with all his enterprise, was obliged Pbreit. tren thmRi to take refuge within the walls of Venusia, and there lay helpless “‘ls during the remainder of the campaign.? Freed from this enemy, Hannibal flew into Bruttium: the strength of Tarentum gave him no anxiety for its immediate danger; so he hastened to deliver Caulonia. The motley band who were besieging it fled at the mere terror of his approach, and retreated to a neighboring hill; thither he pursued them, and obliged them to surrender at discretion.3s He then marched back with speed to Tarentum, hoping to crush Fabius, as he had crushed Marcellus. He was within five miles of the city when he received intelligence that it was lost. The Bruttian commander of the garrison had betrayed it to Fabius: the Romans had entered it in arms: Carthalo, the Carthaginian commander, and Nico and Philemenus, who had opened its gates to Hannibal, had all fallen in defending it: the most important city and the best harbor in the south of Italy were in the hands of the Romans.39 The news of the fall of Paris, when Napoleon was hastening from Fontainebleau to deliver it, can scarcely have been a heavier disappointment to him, than the news of the loss of Tarentum was to Han-Feabis t..nte a nare, b. nibal. Yet, always master of himself, he was neither misled by fails. passion nor by alarm: he halted and encamped on the ground, and there remained quiet for some days, to show that his confidence in himself was unshaken by the treason of his allies. Then he retreated slowly towards Metapontum, and contrived that two of the Metapontines should go to Fabius at Tarentum, offering to surrender their town and the Carthaginian garrison, if their past revolt might be forgiven. Fabius, believing the proposal to be genuine, sent back a favorable answer, and fixed the day on which he would appear before Metapontum with his army. On that day Hannibal lay in ambush close to the road leading from Tarentum, ready to spring upon his prey. But Fabius came not: his habitual caution made him suspicious of mischief; and it was announced that the oinmens were threatening: the haruspex, on inspecting the sacrifice, which was offered to learn the pleasure of the gods, warned the consul to beware of hidden snares, and of the arts of the enemy. The Metapontine deputies were sent back to learn the cause of the delay; they were arrested, and, being threatened with the torture, disclosed the truth.40 The remaining operations of the campaign are again unknown: the Romans, however, seem to have attempted nothing further; and Hannibal He remains mstero kept his army in the field, marching whither he would without op-the field, 33 Livy, XXVII. 15. 40 Livy, XXVII. 15, 16. s7

Livy, XXVII. 12-14. 40 Livy, XXVII. 16. s Livy, XXV1I. 15, 16.

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574 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLVI position, and again laying waste various parts of Italy with fire and sword.4’ So far as we can: discover, he returned at the end of the season to his old winterquarters in Apulia. It is not wonderful that this result of a campaign, from which so much had Dissatisfaction atRome; been expected, should have caused great disappointment at Rome. celuPlsintogihevstMr-th However much men rejoiced in the recovery of Tarentum, they less is elected consul. could not but feel that even this success was owing to treason; and that Hannibal’s superiority to all who were opposed to him was more manifest than ever.

This touched them in a most tender point; because it enabled him to continue his destructive ravages of Italy, and thus to keep up that distress which had long been felt so heavily. Above all, indignation was loud against Malrcellus;42 and if in his lifetime he indulged in that braggart language, which his son used so largely after his death, the anger of the people against him was very reasonable. If he called his defeats victories, as his son no doubt called them afterwards, and as the falsehood through him has struck deep into Roman history, well might the people be indignant at hearing that a victorious general had shut himself up all the summer within the walls of Venusia, and had allowed the enemy to ravage the country at pleasure. The feeling was so strong, that C.

Publicius, one of the tribunes, a man of an old and respected tribunician family, brought in a bill to’ the people to deprive Marcellus of his command. Marcellus returned home to plead his cause, when Fulvius went home also to hold the comitia; and the people met to consider the bill in the Flaminian circus, without the walls, to enable Marcellus to be present; for his military command hindered his entering the city. It is likely that the influence of Fulvius was exerted strongly in his behalf; and his own statement, if he told the simple truth, left no just cause of complaint against him. He had executed his part of the compaign to the best of his ability: twice had he fought with Hannibal to hinder him from marching into Bruttium; and it was not his fault, if the fate of all other Roman generals had been his also; he had but failed to do what none had done, or could do. The people felt for the mortification of a brave man, who had served them well from youth to age, and in the worst of times had never lost courage:‘they not only threw out the bill, but elected Marcellus once more consul, giving him, as his colleague, his old lieutenant in Sicily, T. Quintius Crispinus, who was now prretor, and during the last year had succeeded to Fulvius in the command at Capua.4’

It marks our advance in Roman history, that among the praetors of this year A.:C.l546. A.C. 208. we find the name of Sex. Julius Cmasar; the first Cmsar who apJu Cesar preetor. pears in the Roman Fasti. For some time past the Romans seem to have mistrusted the fidelity of the Doubts about the fidel-Etruscans; and an army of two legions had been regularly stationed ity of Etrria. in Etruria, to check any disposition to revolt.

But now C. Calpurnius Piso, who commanded in Etruria, reported that the danger was becoming imminent, and he particularly named the city of Arretium as the principal seat of disaffection.44 Why this feeling should have manifested itself at this moment, we can only conjecture. It is possible that the fame of Hasdrubal’s coming may have excited the Etruscans. It is possible that Hannibal may have had some correspondence with them, and persuaded them to cooperate with his brother. But other causes may be imagined; the continued pressure of the war upon all Italy, and the probability that the defection of the twelve colonies must have compelled the Romans to increase the burdens of their other allies. If, as Niebuhr thinks,45 the Etruscans were not in the habit of serving with the legions in the regular infantry, their contributions in money, and in seamen for the fleets, 41 Livy, XXVII. 20. “Vagante per Italiam 43 Livy, XXVII. 20, 21. Ilannibale.” 44 Livy, XXVII. 21. 42 Livy, XXVII. 20. 45 See page 505.

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CHAP. XLVI.] STATE OF ETRURIA. 575 would have been proportionably greater; and both these would fall heavily on the great Etruscan chiefs, or Lucumones, from whose vassals the seamen would be taken, as their properties would have to furnish the money. Again, in the year 544, when corn was at so enormous a price, we read of a large quantity purchased in Etruria by the Roman government for the use of their garrison in the citadel of Tarentum.46 This corn the allied states were bound to sell at a fixed price; so that the Etruscan landowners would consider themselves greatly injured, in being forced to sell at a low price, what in the present condition of the markets was worth four or five times as much. But whatever was the cause, Marcellus was sent into Etruria, even before he came into office as consul, to. observe the state of affairs, that, if necessary, he might remove the seat of war from Apulia to Etruria. The report of his mission seemed satisfactory; and it did not appear necessary to bring his army from Apulia.47 Yet some time afterwards, before Marcellus left Rome to take the field, the reports of the disaffection of Arretium became more serious; and C. Disaffection of Arre. Hostilius, who had succeeded Calpurnius in the command of the tium. army stationed in Etruria, was ordered to lose no time in demanding hostages from the principal inhabitants. C. Terentius Varro was sent to receive them, to the number of 120, and to take them to Rome. Even this precaution was not thought sufficient; and Varro was sent back to Arretium to occupy the city with one of the home legions, while Hostilius, with his regular army, was to move up and down the country, that any attempt at insurrection might be crushed in a moment.48 It appears also that, besides the hostages, several sons of the wealthy Etruscans were taken away to serve in the cavalry of Marcellus’ army, to prevent them at any rate from being dangerous at home.49 The two consuls were to conduct the war against Hannibal, whilst Q. Claudius, one of the proetors, with a third army, was to hold Tarentum, and Disposition of the Rothe country of the Sallentines. Fulvius with a single legion re-ee, arfio.. F.i.to sumed his old command at Capua.

Fabius returned to Rome, and service. from this time forward no more commanded the armies of his country, although he still in all probability directed the measures of the government.50 Crispinus had left Rome before his colleague, and, with some reinforcements newly raised, proceeded to Lucania, to take the command of the army which had belonged to Fulvius.

His ambition was to rival Pl” of th campaign. the glory of Fabius, by attacking another of the Greek cities on the southern coast. He fixed upon Locri, and having sent for a powerful artillery from Sicily, with a naval force to operate against the sea front of the town, commenced the siege.

Hannibal’s approach, however, forced him to raise it; and as Marcellus had now arrived at Venusia, he retreated thither to cooperate with his colleague. The two armies were encamped apart, about three miles from each other: two consuls, it was thought, must at any rate be able to occupy Hannibal in Apulia, while the siege of Locri was to be carried on by the fleet and artillery from Sicily, with the aid of one of the two legions commanded by the prmetor Q. Claudius at Tarentum. Such was the Roman plan of campaign for the year 546, the eleventh of this memorable war.” The two armies opposed to Hannibal must have amounted at least to 40,000 men; he coiuld not venture to risk a battle against so large a force: but his eye was everywhere; and he was neither ignorant nor legion sent to besiego unobservant of what was going on in his rear, and of the intended Loci.

march of the legion from Tarentum to carry on the siege of Locri by land.

So confident was he in his superiority, that he did not hesitate to detach a force of 8000 horse and 2000 foot from his already inferior numbers, to intercept these 46 Livy, XXV. 15. 49 Livy, XXVII. 26. 47 Livy, XXVII. 21.

50 Livy, XXVII. 22. 40 Livy, XXVII. 24:I Livy, XXVII. 25.

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57G HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLV1. troops on their way: and while the Romans marched on in confidence, supposing that Hannibal was far away in Apulia, they suddenly found their road beset; and Hannibal’s dreaded cavalry broke in upon the flanks of their column. The rout was complete in an instant; the whole Roman division was destroyed or dispersed; and the fugitives, escaping over the country in afi directions, fled back to Tarentum.52 The fleet from Sicily were obliged therefore to carry on the siege of Locri as well as they. could, with no other help. This signal service rendered, Hannibal’s detachment returned to his camp, Position of te tw bringing back their numerous prisoners. Frequent skirmishes took illeien. Mn.rcellusn i place between the opposed armies; and Hannibal was continually kilin an mu hoping for some opportunity of striking a blow. A hill covered with copsewrood rose between the two armies, and had been occupied hitherto by neither party; only Hannibal’s light cavalry were used to lurk amongst the trees at its foot, to cut off any stragglers from the enemy’s camp. The consuls, it seems, wished to remove their camp for the two consular armies were now encamped together-to this hill; or, at any rate, to occupy it as an intrenched post, firom which they might command the enemy’s movement. But they resolved to reconnoitre the ground for themselves; and, accordingly, they rode forward with two hundred cavalry, and a few lightarmed soldiers, leaving their troops behind in the camp, with orders to be in readiness on a signal given to advance and take possession of the hill.53 The party ascended the hill without opposition, and rode on to the side towards the enemy, to take a view of the country in that direction. Meantime the Numidians, who had always one of their number on the lookout, to give timely notice of any thing that approached, as they were lurking under the hill, were warned by their scout, that a party of Romans were on the heights above them. No doubt he had marked the scarlet war-cloaks of the generals, and the lictors who went before them, and told his companions of the golden prize that fortune had thrown into their hands. The Numidians stole along under the hill, screened by the trees, till they got round it, between the party on the summit and the Roman camp; and then they charged up the ascent, and fell suddenly upon the astonished enemy. The whole affair was over in an instant: Marcellus was run through the body with a spear, and killed on the spot; his son and Crispinus were desperately wounded; the Etruscan horsemen, who formed the greater part of the detachment, had no inclination to fight in a service which they had been forced to enter; the Fregellans, who formed the remainder of it, were too few to do any thing; all were obliged to ride for their lives, and to leap their horses down the broken ground on the hillsides to escape to their camp. The legions in the camp saw the skirmish, but could not come to the rescue in time.

Crispinus and the young Marcellus rode in covered with blood, and followed by the scattered survivors of the party; but Marcellus, six times consul, the bravest and stoutest of soldiers, who had dedicated the spoils of the Gaulish king, slain by his own hand, to Jupiter Feretrius in the capitol, was lying dead on a nameless hill; and his arms and body were Hannibal’s.54 The Numidians, hardly believing what they had done, rode back to their camp The Roman sy to report their extraordinary achievement.

Hannibal instantly put trents. Han.ibnlraises his army in motion, and occupied the fatal hill. There he found the siege of Locri. the body of Marcellus, which he is said to have looked at for some time with deep interest, but with no word or look of exultation: then he took the ring from the finger of the body, and ordered, as he had done before in the case of Flaminius and Gracchus, that it should be honorably burned, and that the ashes should be sent to Marcellus’ son.55 The Romans left their camp under cover of the night, and retreated to a position of greater security: they no longel b Livy, XXVII. 26. 4 Livy, XXVII. 27. a~ Livy, XXVII. 26. 65 Plutarlch, Marcellus, c, 20.

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CHAP. XLVI.] HASDRUBAL IN GAUL. 577 thought of detaining Hannibal from Bruttium; their only hope was to escape out of his reach. Then Hannibal flew once more to the relief of Locri: the terror of the approach of his Numidian cavalry drove the Romans to their ships; all their costly artillery and engines were abandoned; and the siege of Locri, no less disastrous to the Roman naval force than to their land army, was effectually raised.56 During the rest of the season the field was again left free to Hannibal; and his destructive ravages were carried on, we may be sure, more He continues masterof widely than even in the preceding year. The army of Marcellus Cre dimo, of.his. lay within the walls of Venusia; that of Crispinus retreated to wounds. Capua;57 officers having been sent by the senate to take the command of each provisionally.

Crispinus was desired to name a dictator for holding the comitia; and: he accordingly nominated the old T. Manlius Torquatus; soon after which he died of the effect of his wounds; and the republic, for the first time on record, was deprived of both its consuls before the expiration of their office, by a violent death.58 The public anxiety about the choice of new consuls was quickened in the highest degree by the arrival of an embassy from Massilia. The Mas-The Mossilions send silians, true to their old friendship with Rome, made haste to ac-tidings of Hasdrubal’s quaint their allies with the danger that was threatening them. Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother) had suddenly appeared in the interior of Gaul; he had brought a large treasure of money with him, and was raising soldiers busily. Two Romans were sent back to Gaul with the Massilian ambassadors to ascertain the exact state of affairs; and these officers, on their return to Rome, informed the senate, that, through the connections of Massilia with some of the chiefs in the interior, they had made out that Hasdrubal had completed his levies, and was only waiting for the first melting of the snows to cross the Alps. The senate therefore must expect in the next campaign to see two sons of Hamilcai in Italy.59 Reserving the detail of the war in Spain for another place, I need only relate here as much as is necessary for understanding Hasdrubal’s expe-His route out of Spain. dition. Early in the season of 546, while the other Carthaginian through Gaul. generals were in distant parts of the peninsula, Hasdrubal had been obliged with his single army to give battle to Scipio at Baccula, a place in the south of Spain, in the upper part of the valley of the Bmetis; and having been defeated there, had succeeded, nevertheless, in carrying off his elephants and money, and had retreated first towards the Tagus, and then towards the western Pyrenees, whither Scipio durst not follow him, for fear of abandoning the seacoast to the other Carthaginian generals.60 By this movement Hasdrubal masked his projects from the view of the Romans; they did not know whether he had merely retired to recruit hji army, in order to take the field against Scipio; or whether he was preparing for a march into Italy.6” But even if Italy were his object, it was supposed that Jib would follow the usual route, by the eastern Pyrenees along the coast of the Mediterranean; and Scipio accordingly took the precaution of securing the passes of the mountains in this direction, on the present road between Barcelona ant Perpignan;62 perhaps also he secured those other passes more inland, leadinzg from the three valleys which meet above Lerida into Languedoc, and to the streams; which feed the Garonne. But Hasdrubal’s real line of march was wholly unsuspected: for passing over the ground now so famous in our own military annals; near the highest part of the course of the Ebro, he turned the Pyrenees at their western extremity, and entered Gaul by the shores of the ocean, by the Bidassoa~ and the Adour.63 Thence striking eastward, and avoiding the neighborhood of’ Livy, XXVII. 28. eo Livy, XXVII. 18, 19. Polybins, X. 38, 39‘7 Livy, XXVII. 29. G’ Polybius, X. 39, 7. Livy,- XXVII. 20. L8 Livy, XXVII. 33. Ga Polybius, X. 40, 11. 69 Livy, XXVII. 36. fY Livy, XXVII. 20.

37

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578 HISTORY OF ROME.- [CHAP. XLVI the Mediterranean, he penetrated into the country of the Arverni; and so would cross the Rhone near Lyons, and join Hannibal’s route for the first time in the plains of Dauphine, at the very foot of the Alps. This new and remote line of march concealed him so long, even from the knowledge of the Massilians, and obliged them to seek intelligence of his movements from the chiefs of the interior.64 Now then the decisive year was come, the year of the great struggle so long Doubts at Rome about delayed, but which the Carthaginians had never lost sight of, the choice of consul. when Italy was to be assailed at once from the north and from the south by two Carthaginian armies, led by two sons of Hamilcar. And at this moment Marcellus, so long the hope of Rome, was gone-; Fabius and Fulvius were enfeebled by age; Levinus, whose services in Macedonia and Sicily had been so important, had offended the ruling party in the senate by his opposition to the appointment of Fulvius as dictator two years before; and no important command would as yet be intrusted to him. In this state of things the general voice pronounced that the, best consul who could be chosen was C. Claudius Nero.65 C. Nero came of a noble lineage, being a patrician of the Claudian house, and A.

U. C. 541. A. c. a great-grandson of the famous censor, Appius the blind.

He had 20t. C. Nero. served throughout the war, as lieutenant to Marcellus in 540; as praetor and proprietor at the-siege of Capua, in 542 and 543; as propretor in Spain in 544; and lastly as lieutenant of Marcellus in 545..” Yet it is strange that the only mention of him personally before his consulship which has reached us, is unfavorable: he is said to have shown a want of vigor when serving under Marcellus in 540, and a want of ability in his command in Spain.67 But these stories are, perhaps, of little authority; and if they are true, Nero must have redeemed his: faults by many.proofs of courage and wisdom; for his countrymen were not likely to choose the general rashly, who was to command them in the most perilous moment of the whole war; and we know that their choice was amply justified by the event. But if Nero were one consul, who was to be his colleague? It must be some one who was not a patrician, to comply with the Licinian law, and M. Livius. the now settled practice of the constitution.

But there was no Decius living, no Curius, no Fabricius; and the glory of the great house of the Metelli had hithertc. during the second Punic war, been somewhat in eclipse, bearing the shame of that ill-advised Metellus, who dared after the rout of Cannre to speak of abandoning Italy in despair. The brave and kindly Gracchus, the bold Flaminius, the unwearied and undaunted Marcellus, had all fallen in their country’s cause. Varro was living, and had learnt wisdom by experience, and was serving the state wel. and faithfully; but it would be of evil omen to send him again with the last army of.the commonwealth to encounter a son of Hamilcar. At last men remembered. a stern and sullen old man, M. Livius, who had been consul twelve years before, and; had then done good service against the Illyrians, and obtained a triumph, the: last which Rome had seen;6 -but whose hard nature had made him generally odious, and who, having been accused before the people of dividing the Illyrian spoil amongst his soldiers unfairly, had been found guilty and fined.69 The shame and the sense of wrong had so struck him for though ungracious and unjust from temper, he was above corruption-;that for some years he lived wholly in the country; and though he had since re-:turned to Rome, and the last censors: had obliged him to resume his place in the,senate, yet he had never spoken there, till this very year, when the attacks made ion his kinsman, the governor of Tarentum, had induced him to open his lips in e4

Livy, XXVIIT. 39.- - Livy XXIV. 17. XXVII. 14. U Livy, XXVII. 34. G6 See above, p. 470. Livy, XXIV. 17. XXV. 2, 3, 22.: XXVI. 69 Frontinus IV. I.

45. t7. XXVII. 14.

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CHAP. XLVI.] THE ROMAN ARMAMENT. 579 his defence. He was misanthropical to all men, and especially at enmity with C. Nero: yet there were qualities in him well suited to the present need; and the senators suggested to their friends, and tribesmen, and dependents, that no better consuls could be appointed than C. Nero and M. Livius.?0 The people might agree to choose Livius, but would he consent to be chosen? At first he refused altogether: “If he were fit to be consul, why He consentsreluctantly had they condemned him? if he had been justly condemned, how to be cho.enconul; could he deserve to be consul?” But the senators reproved him for this bitterness, telling him “that his country’s harshness was to be borne like a parent’s, and must be softened by patient submission.”

Overpowered, but not melted, he consented to be elected consul. Then the senators, and especially Q. Fabius, besought him to be reconciled to his colleague. “To what purpose?” he replied: “we shall both and is reconciled to serve -the commonwealth the better, if we feel that an enemy’s eye Nero.. is watching for. our faults and negligences.” But here again the senate’s authority prevailed; and the consuls were publicly reconciled.”’

Yet the vindictive temper of Livius still burnt within him so fiercely, that, before he took the field, when Q. Fabius was urging him not to be rash in hazarding a battle, until he had well learnt the strength of his enemy, he replied, “that he would fight as soon as ever he came in sight of him;” and when Fabius asked him why he was so impatient, he answered, “Because I thirst either for the glory of a victory, or for the pleasure of seeing the defeat of my unjust countrymen.“72 It is worth while to remark what gigantic efforts the Romans made for this great campaign. One consul was-to have Cisalpine Gaul for his Enormou.armament of province, the other Lucania and Bruttium; each with the usual theROmanI. consular army of two legions, and an equal force of Italian allies. The army of the north was supported by two others of equal force; one, commanded by L.

Porcius, one of the prietors, was to cooperate with it in the field; the other, commanded by C. Varro, was to overawe Etruria, and form a reserve.

In like manner the consul of the army of the south had two similar-armies at his disposal, besides his own; one in Bruttium, of which old Q. Fulvius once more took the command, and another in the neighborhood of Tarentum.

Besides these twelve legions, one legion occupied Capua, and two new home legions were raised for the immediate defence of Rome. Thus fifteen legions, containing 75,000 Roman citizens, besides an equal number of Italian allies, were in arms this year for the protection of Italy. In this same year the return of the whole population of Roman citizens of an age to bear arms according to the census, amounted only to 137,108; and in addition.to the forces employed in Italy, eight legions were serving abroad; two in Sicily, two in Sardinia, and four in Spain.73 Soldiers were raised with a strictness never known before; insomuch that even the maritime colonies were called upon to furnish men for-the le-Means taken to aise gions, although ordinarily exempted from this service, on the ground troops. that their citizens were responsible for the defence of the seacoast in their neighborhood. Only Antium and Ostia were allowed to retain their customary exemption; and the men within the military age in both these colonies were obliged to swear that they would not sleep out of their cities more than thirty nights, so long as the enemy should be in Italy. The slaves also were again invited, to enlist; and two legions.

were composed out of them; and after, all, so perilous was the aspect of affairs in the north from the known disaffection of Etruria, and even of Umbria, that P. Scipio is said to have draughted 10,000 foot and 1000
horse from the forces of his province, and sent them by sea to reinforce the army of the north; - while the praetor commanding in Sicily sent 4000
archers and slingers for 7O Livy, XXVII. 34. -2 Livy, XXVII. 40. Valerius Maximus, IX. ” Livy, XXVII. 35. Valerius Maximus, IV. 8, 1. 2, 2. VI1. 2, 6. 7 Livy, XXVII. 36.

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580 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLV1, the army of the south. The lot decided that M. Livius was to be opposed to HIasdrubal, C. Nero to Hannibal.74

Meantime Hasdrubal had begun his march from the plains between the Rhone and the Isere, and proceeded to cross the Alps by the route forHasdrubal crosses the Alps, and advances up-merly followed by his brother. It is said that he found the obonArilminum. stacles of all kinds, both those presented by nature, and those offered by the hostility of the inhabitants, far less than had been experienced by Hannibal. The inhabitants were now aware that the stranger army meant them no ill; that it was merely passing through their valleys on its way to a distant land, to encounter its enemies there. Nay, it is added that traces of Hannibal’s engineering were still in existence, that the roads which he had built up along the steep mountain-sides, and the bridges which he had thrown over the torrents, and the cuttings which he had made through the rocks, after having been exposed for eleven years to the fury of the avalanches, and the chafing of the swollen streams, were even now serviceable to Hasdrubal. At any rate, Hasdrubal appeared in Italy sooner than either friend or foe had expected him;~5 and having issued from the Alpine valleys, and crossed the Po, he descended along its right bank, and sat down before the Latin colony of Placentia. But the colony was one of the faithful eighteen, and did not forget its duty. It closed its gates; and Hasdrubal had no artillery to batter down its walls; he only lay before it therefore long enough for the Cisalpine Gauls and Ligurians to join him, and then pressed forward on his march by the line of the later IEmilian road, towards Ariminum and the shores of the Adriatic. The preetor L.

Porcius retreated before him; and hasdrubal sent off four Gaulish horsemen and two Numidians to his brother, to announce his approach, and to propose that they should unite their two armies in Umbria, and from thence advance by the Flaminian road straight upon Rome.78 Livius had by this time arrived on the scene of action, and had effected his junction with L.

Porcius; yet their combined forces were unable to maintain their ground on the frontier of Italy; Ariminum was abandoned to its fate; they fell back behind the Metaurus; and still keeping the coast road,-for the later branch of the Flaminian road, which ascends the valley of the Metaurus, was not yet constructed, -they encamped about fourteen miles further to the south, under the walls of the maritime colony of Sena.” On the other side of Italy, C. Nero, availing himself of the full powers with Nero ecampsAt renu-which the consuls were invested for this campaign, had incorpoDia. rated the two legions, which Q. Fulvius was to have commanded in Bruttium, with his own army, leaving Fulvius at the head of a small army of reserve at Capua. With an army thus amounting to 40,000 foot and 2500 horse, Nero fixed his headquarters at Venusia; his object being by all fMreans to occupy Hannibal, and to hinder him from moving northwards to join his brother.78 At no part of the history of this war do we more feel the want of a good miliDiffiullties in the his-tary historian, than at the opening of this memorable campaign. tory of this campaign. What we have in Livy is absolutely worthless; it is so vague, as well as so falsified, that the truth from which it has been corrupted can scarcely be discovered.. We are told that Hannibal moved later from his winterquarters than he might have done, because he thought that his brother could not arrive in Cisalpine Gaul so early as he actually did; and we are told that he received information of his having reached Placentia.79 Yet, after having heard this, he wastes much time in moving about in the south, first into Lucania, then to Apulia, thence falling back into Bruttium, and finally advancing again into Apulia, and there remaining idle, till the fatal blow had been struck in the north. It is added, that in the course of these movements he was several times engaged with the 74 Livy, XXVII. 38. 77 Appian, VII. 52. 15 Livy, XXVII. 39.

Appian, VII. 52.‘1 Livy, XXVII. 40. q6 Livy, XXVII. 43. 79 Livy, XXVII.

39.

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CHAP. XLVI.] NERO’S MARCH. 581 Romans, and lost nearly 15,000 men, killed or taken.80 Putting aside these absurdities, in which we cannot but recognize the perversions of Valerius Antias, or some annalist equally untrustworthy, we must endeavor as far as possible to conjecture the outline of the real story. With 40,000 men under an active general opposed to him in the field, and with 20,000 more in his rear in the neighborhood of Tarentum, Hannibal could only act on the offensive by gathering all his remaining garrisons into one mass, and by raising additional soldiers, if it were possible, amongst the allies who yet adhered to him. This was to be accomplished in the face of a superior enemy, and, as Hasdrubal was already arrived on the Po, without loss of time. It was for this object apparently that he entered Lucania, to raise soldiers amongst his old partisans there; with this view he crossed back into Apulia, and then moved into Bruttium to join the new Bruttian levies, which had been collected by Hanno, the governor of Metapontum. All this he effected, baffling the pursuit of Nero, or beating off his attacks; and having amassed a force sufficient for his purpose, he again turned northwards, re-entered Apulia, advanced, followed closely by Nero,‘to his old quarters near Canusium, and there halted.81 Whether he was busy in collecting corn for his further advance, or whether he was waiting for more precise intelligence from his brother, we know not; but we do not find that he moved his army beyond CanuSium. Admitting, however, that Hannibal was aware of Hasdrubal’s arrival before Placentia, we can understand why his own movements could not He waits for tidings but be suspended, after he had collected all his disposable force fromhisbrother. together, till he should receive a fresh communication from his brother. For from Placentia-Hasdrubal had a choice of roads before him; and it was impossible for Hannibal to know beforehand which he might take. But on this knowledge his own plans were to depend; if Hasdrubal crossed the Apennines into Etruria, in order to rally the disaffected Etruscans around him, Hannibal might then advance into Samnium and Campania: if, on the other hand, Hasdrubal were to move eastward towards the Adriatic, thinking it desirable that the two armies should act together, then Hannibal also would keep near the coast, and retracing the line of his own advance after the battle of Thrasymenus, would be ready to meet his brother in Picenum, or in Umbria.

And it was in order to determine Hannibal’s movements, that Hasdrubal, when he left Placentia, sent off the six horsemen, as has been already mentioned, to say that he was marching upon Ariminum, instead of upon Etruria, and that the two brothers were to effect their junction in Umbria. With marvellous skill and good fortune Hasdrubal’s horsemen made their way through the whole length of Italy. But Hannibal’s rapid move-Hasdrubals men. ment into Bruttium disconcerted them; they attempted to follow gonersae dboughtrito him thither; but mistaking their way, and getting too near to Ta-Nero. rentum, they fell in with some foragers of the army of Q. Claudius, and were made prisoners. The prcetor instantly sent them under a strong escort to Nero. They were the bearers of a letter from Hasdrubal to his brother, containing the whole plan of their future operations; it was written, not in cipher, but in the common Carthaginian language and character; and the interpreter read its contents in Latin to the consul.82 Nero took his resolution on the instant. He dispatched the letter to the senate, urging the immediate recall of Fulvius with his army from Capua Neroleeshiam to Rome, the calling out every Roman who could bear arms, and….’ the marching forward the two home legions to Narnia, to defend that narrow gorge of the Flaminian road against the invader. At the same time he told the senate what he was going to do himself. He picked out 7000 men, of whom 1000 were horse, the flower of his whole army; he ordered them to hold theme0 Livy, XXVII. 41, 42. 81 Livy, XXVII.

42. 2 Livy, XXVII. 43.

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582 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLVI selves in readiness for a secret expedition into Lucania, to surprise one of Hannibal’s garrisons; and as soon as it was dark, he put himself at their head, leaving his lieutenant, Q. Catius, in the command of the main army, and began his march.83 His march was not towards Lucania. Already before he left his camp had send marches’to join he sent forward horsemen on the road leading to Picenum and Livius. Umbria, with the consul’s orders, that all the provisions of the country should be brought down to the roadside, that all horses and draught cattle should be led thither also, and carriages for the transport of the weak and wearied soldiers. Life and death were upon his speed, the life and death of his country. His march was towards the camp of his colleague, before Sena; his hope was to crush Hasdrubal with their combined and overwhelming forces, whilst Hannibal, waiting for that letter which he would never receive, should remain still in Apulia. When Nero had reached a sufficient distance from Hannibal, he disclosed the oojoins Livus. secret of his expedition to his soldiers. They felt the glory of their mission, and shared the spirit of their leader. Nor was it a little thing to witness the universal enthusiasm which everywhere welcomed their march. Men and women, the whole population of the country, crowded to the roadside; meat, drink, clothing, horses, carriages, were pressed upcn the soldiers; and happy was the man from whom they would accept them. Every tongue blessed them as deliverers; incense rose on hastily built altars, where the people, kneeling as the army passed, poured forth prayers and vows to the gods for their safe and victorious return. The soldiers would scarcely receive what was offered to them: they would not halt; they ate standing in their ranks,; night and day they hastened onwards, scarcely allowing themselves a brief interval of rest,.4 In six or seven days the march was accomplished: Livius had been forewarned of his colleague’s approach; and, according to his wish, Nero entered the camp by night, concealing his arrival from Hasdrubal no less successfully than he had hidden his departure from Hannibal.85 The new-comers were to be received into the tents of Livius’ soldiers; for any Theydeterminetofight enlargement of the camp would have betrayed the secret; and witboutdelay, they were more than seven thousand men: for their numbers had been swelled on their march; veterans who had retired from war, and youths too young to be enlisted, having pressed Nero to let them share in his enterprise. A council was held the next morning; and though Livius and L. Porcius, the praetor, urged Nero to allow his men some rest before he led them to battle, he pleaded so strongly the importance of not losing a single day, lest Hannibal should be upon their rear, that it was agreed to fight immediately. The red ensign was hoisted as soon as the council broke up; and the soldiers marched out and formed ir. order of battle.“8 The enemy, whose camp, according to the system of ancient warfare, was only half a mile distant from that of the Romans, marched out and Hasdrubal retreats.

formed in line to meet them. But as Hasdrubal rode forward to reconnoitre the Roman army, their increased numbers struck him; and other circumstances, it is said, having increased his suspicions, he led back his men into their camp, and sent out some horsemen to collect information. The Romans then returned to their own camp; and Hasdrubal’s horsemen rode round it at a distance to see if it were larger than usual, or in the hope of picking: up some stragglers. One thing alone, it is said, revealed the secret: the trumpet which gave the signal for the several duties of the day, was heard to sound as usual once in the camp of the prmator, but twice in that of Livius. This, we are told. satisfied Hasdrubal that both the consuls were before him; unable to understand bs Livy, XXVII. 48.‘5 Livy, XXVII. 46. - Liy, XXVII. 45. 86 Livy, XXVII. 46.

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CHAP. XLVI.] HASDRUBAL IS OVERTAKEN. 583 how Nero had escaped from Hannibal, and, dreading the worst, he resolved to: retire to a greater distance-from the enemy; and -having put out all his fires, he set hisarmy in motion-as soon as night fell, and retreated towards the Metaurus.Y Whose narrative Livy has followed here, we cannot tell; it is not that of Polybius, except in part;: and some points speak ill for the credibility along the banks of the of its author. According to this account, Hasdruhbal marched back Metanus.fourteen miles to the Metaurus’:-
but his guides deserted him and escaped unobserved in the darkness, so that, when the army reached the Metaurus, they could not find the fords, and began to ascend the right bank of the river, in the hope of passing it easily when daylight came, and they should be arrived at a higher part of its course. But the windings of the river, it is said, delayed him: as he ascended further from the sea, he found the banks steeper and higher; and no ford was to be gained.88 The Metaurus, in the last twenty miles of its course, flows through a wide valley or plain, the ground rising into heights rather than hills, Description. of the while the mountains from which it has issued ascend far off in the corse of the Metaurus. distance, and bound the low country near the sea with a gigantic wall. But, as is frequently the case in northern Italy, the bed of the river is like a valley within a valley, being sunk down between steep cliffs, at a level much below the ordinary surface of the country; which yet would be supposed to be the bottom of the plain by those who looked only at the general landscape, and did not observe the kind of trough in which the river was winding beneath them. Yet this lower valley is of considerable width; and the river winds about in it from one side to the other, at times running just under its high banks, at other times leaving a large interval of plain between it and the boundary. The whole country, both in the lower valley and in the plain above, is now varied with all sorts of cultivation, with scattered houses and villages, and trees; an open, joyous, and habitable region, as can be found in Italy. But when Hasdrubal was retreating through it, the dark masses of uncleared wood still, no doubt, in many parts covered the face of the higher plain, overhanging the very cliffs of the lower valley; and the river below, not to be judged of by its present scanty and loitering stream, ran like the rivers of a half-cleared country, with a deep and strong body of waters. These steep cliffs would, no doubt, present a serious obstacle to an army wishing to descend to the edge of the river; and if their summits were The Romans overtake covered with wood, they would at once intercept the view, and Handrobol, make the march more difficult. Thus Hasdrubal was overtaken by the Romans, and obliged to fight. It is clear from Polybius that he had encamped for the night after his wearisome march; and retreat being fatal to the discipline of barbarians,- the Gauls became unmanageable, and indulged so freely in drinking, that, when morning dawned, many of them were lying drunk in their quarters, utterly-unable to move.89 And now the -Roman army was seen advancing: in order 4F battle; and Hasdrubal, finding it impossible to continue his retreat, marched out of his camp to meet them.~0 No credible authoritytells us what was the amount of his army: that theRoman writers extravagantly magnified it, is certain; and that who draws uphisarmy he was enormously outnumbered by his enemy is no less so.

Po-rbattl. lybiust1 says, that he deepened his lines, diminishing their width, and drawing up his Whole force in a narrow space, with his ten elephants: in front. We hear nothing of his cavalry, the force with which his brother had mainly won his victories; and he had probably brought scarcely any African horse from Spain: what Gaulish horsemen had joined him since he had crossed the Alps, we know 8 Livy, XXVII. 47. 90 Livy, XXVII. 48. i Livy, XXVII. 47.‘9 Polybius,- XI. 1. -8 Polybius, XI. 3.

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584 HISTORY OF ROME, [CHAP. XL’ 1 not. His Gaulish infantry, as many as were fit for action, were stationed on hig left, in a position naturally so strong as to be unassailable in front; and its flank would probably be covered by the river. He himself took part with his Spanish infantry, and attacked the left wing of the Roman army, which was commanded by Livius.

Nero was on the Roman right, the prwetor in the centre.92 Between Hasdrubal and Livius the battle was long and obstinately disputed, He i defeated and the elephants being, according to Polybius, an equal aid, or rather slain. an equal hindrance, to both parties;93 for, galled by the missiles of the Romans, they broke sometimes into their own ranks, as well as into those of the enemy. Meanwhile Nero, seeing that he could make no progress on his front; drew off his troops out of the line, and passing round on the rear of the prmetor and of Livius, fell upon the right flank and the rear of the enemy. Then the fate of the day was decided; and the Spaniards, outnumbered and surrounded, were cut to pieces in their ranks, resisting to the last. Then too, when all was lost, Hasdrubal spurred his horse into the midst of a Roman cohort, and there fell sword in hand, fighting, says Livy with honorable sympathy, as became the son of Hamilcar and brother of Hannibal.94 The conquerors immediately stormed the Carthaginian camp, and there slaughEffects ofthevictry. tered many of the Gauls, whom they found still lying asleep in the helplessness of brute intoxication.95 The spoil of the camp was rich, amounting in value to 300
talents: of the elephants, six were killed in the action; the other four were taken alive. All the Carthaginian citizens who had followed Hasdrubal were either killed or taken; and 3000 Roman prisoners were found in the camp, and restored to liberty. The loss of men on both sides was swelled prodigiously by the Roman writers, ambitious, it seems, of making the victory an exact compensation for the defeat of Canne; but Polybius96
states it at 10,000 men on the side of the vanquished, and 2000 on that of the Romans; a decisive proof that Hasdrubal’s army actually engaged cannot have been numerous, for of those in the field few can have escaped. But the amount of the slain mattered little; Hasdrubal’s army was destroyed, and he himself had perished; and Hannibal was left to fight out the war with his single army, which, however unconquerable, could not conquer Italy. Polybius”9 praises the heroic spirit of Hasdrubal, saying that he knew when it Value of Hansdrubal’ was time for him to die; that, having been careful of his life, st, long as there was any hope of accomplishing his grand enterprise, when all was lost, he gave his country, what Pericles calls the greatest and no. blest gift of a true citizen, the sacrifice of his own life. And doubtless none can blame the spirit of selfdevotion to the highest known duty: Hasdrubal was true to his country in his death as in his life. Yet the life of a son of Hamilcar was to Carthage of a value beyond all estimate: Hasdrubal’s death outweighed the loss of many armies; and had he deigned to survive his defeat, he might again have served his country, not only in peace as Hannibal did after his defeat at Zama, but as the leader of a fresh army of Gauls and Ligurians, of Etruscans and Umbrians, cooperating with his brother in marching upon Rome. With no less haste than he had marched from Apulia, Nero hastened back thither to rejoin his army. All was quiet there: Hannibal still lay telligercehof hisbroth-in his camp, waiting for intelligence from Hasdrubal. He received it too soon; not from Hasdrubal, but from Nero: the Carthaginian prisoners were exhibited exultingly before his camp; two of them were set at liberty, and sent to tell him the story of their defeat; and a head was thrown down in scorn before his outposts, if his soldiers might know whose it was. They took it up, and brought to Hannibal the head of his brother.98 He had not 92 Livy, XXVII. 48.,o XI. 3. 93 XI. 1. 97 XI.

2. 4 Livy. XXVII. 49. Polybius, XI. 2. eB Livy, XXVII. 51.’ Polybius, XI.

3.

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CHAP. XLVI.] ANXIETY AND JOY AT ROME. 585 dealt so with the remains of the Roman generals: but of this Nero recked nothing; as indifferent to justice and humanity in his dealings with an enemy, as his imperial descendants showed themselves towards Rome, and all mankind. Meanwhile, from the moment that Nero’s march from the south had been heard of at Rome, intense anxiety possessed the whole city. Anxiety nnd joy at Every day the senate sat from sunrise to sunset; and not a sena-Rome. tor was absent: every day the Forum was crowded from morning till evening, as each hour might bring some great tidings; and every man wished to be among the first. to hear them. A doubtful rumor arose, that a great. battle had been fought, and a great victory won only two days before: two horsemen of Narnia had ridden off from the field to carry the news to their home; it had been heard and published in the camp of the reserve army, which was lying at Narnia to cover the approach to Rome. But men dared not lightly believe what they so much wished to be true; and how, they said, could a battle fought in the extremity of Umbria be heard of only two days after at Rome.? Soon, however, it was known that a letter had arrived from L.

Manlius Acidinus himself, who commanded the army at Narnia: the’ horsemen had certainly arrived there fron the field of battle, and brought tidings of a glorious-victory. The letter was read first in the senate, and then in the Forum from the rostra: but some still refused to believe: fugitives from a battle-field might carry idle tales of victory to hide their own shame: till the account came directly from the consuls it was rash to credit it.” At last word was brought that officers of high rank in the consuls’ army were on their way to Rome; that they bore a dispatch fiom Livius and Nero. Then the whole city poured out of the walls to meet them, eager to anticipate the moment which was to confirm all their hopes. For two miles, as far as the Milvian bridge over the Tiber, the crowd formed an uninterrupted mass; and when the officers appeared, they could scarcely make their way to the city, the multitude thronging around them, and overwhelming them and their attendants with eager questions. As each man learnt the joyful answers, he made haste to tell them to others: “The enemy’s army is destroyed; their general slain; our own legions and both the consuls are safe.” So the crowd re-entered the city; and the three officers, all men of noble names, L. Veturius Philo, P. Licinius Varus, and Q. Metellus, still followed by the thronging multitude, at last reached the senate-house. The people pressed after them into the senate-house itself: but even at such a moment the senate forgot not its accustomed order; the crowd was forced back; and the consuls’ dispatch was first read to the senators alone. Immediately afterwards the officers came out into the Forum; there L. Veturius again read the dispatch; and as its contents were short, and it told only the general result of the battle, he himself related the particulars of what he had seen and done. The interest of his hearers grew more intense with every word, till at last the whole multitude broke out into a universal cheer, and then rushed from the Forum in all directions to carry the news to their wives and children at home, or ran to the temples to pour out their gratitude to the gods. The senate ordered a thanksgiving of three days; the prmetor announced it in the Forum; and for three days every temple was crowded; and the Roman wives and mothers, in their gayest dresses, took their children with them, and poured forth their thanks to all the gods for this great deliverance. It was like the burst of all nature, when a long frost suddenly breaks up, and the snow melts, and the ground resumes its natural coloring, and the streams flow freely. The Roman people seemed at last to breathe and move at liberty; confidence revived; and with it the ordinary business of life regained its activity: he who wanted money found that men were not afraid to lend it; what had been hoarded came out into circulation; land might be bought without the dread that the purchase would be rendered worthless by Hannibal’s ravages; and in the joy and confidence of the ” Livy, XXVII.

50.

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586 HISTORY OF ROME. [CIAP. XLVIt moment, men almost forgot that their great enemy with his unbroken army was still in Italy.‘to At the end of the year both. consuls returned to Rome, and triumphed. Many The cdnso triumph. years had passed since this spectacle had been exhibited in its full solemnity; for Marcellus had only obtained the smaller triumph, or ovation, in which the general passed through the streets on foot. But now the kingly chariot once more carried a Roman consul in the pomp of kingly state up to the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter; and the streets once more resounded with the shouts and rude jests of the victorious soldiers, as they moved in long array after their general. The spoil of Hasdrubal’s camp was large; each soldier received a donation of three denarii and a half; and three millions of sesterces in silver, besides 80,000 pounds of the old Italian copper money, were carried into the treasury. Nero rode on horseback by the side of his colleague’s chariot; a distinction made between them, partly because Livius had happened to have the command on the day of the battle, and partly because Nero had come without his army; his province still requiring its usual force, as Hannibal was there. But the favor of the multitude, if we can trust the writers under Augustus, when they speak of his adopted son’s ancestor, amply compensated to Nero for this formal inferiority: they said that he was the real conqueror of Hasdrubal, while his name, even in absence, had overawed Hannibal.O’ One thing, however, is remarkable, that Nero was never employed again in a military command: we only hear of him after his consulship as censor.

Fabius and Fulvius and Marcellus had been sent out year after year against Hannibal; whilst the man whose military genius eclipsed all the Roman generals hitherto engaged in Italy, was never opposed to him again. Men’s eyes were turned in another direction; and the conqueror of the Metaurus was less regarded than a young man whose career of success had been as brilliant as it was uninterrupted, and who was now almost entitled to the name of conqueror of all Spain. It is time that we should trace the events of the war in the west, and describe the dawn of the glory of Scipio.

CHAPTER XLVII, P. CORNELIUS SCIPIO-HIS OPERATIONS IN SPAIN-SIEGE AND

CAPTURE OF NEW CARTHAGE-BATTLE: OF BECULA-THE CARTHAGINIANS EVACUATE THE

SPANISH PENINSULA-SCIPIO RETURNS TO ROME, AND IS ELECTED CONSUL.-A. U. C.

543 TO A. U. C. 548. THREE-generations of Scipios have already been distinguished in Roman history’: L. Scipio Barbatus, who was actively engaged in the third Samnite war; L. Scipio, his son, who was consul early in the first Punic war, and obtained a triumph; and Publius and Cnnaus Scipio, the sons of L. Scipio, who served their country ably in Spain in the second Punic war, and, as we have seen, were at last cut off there by the enemy towards the end of the siege of Capua.: Publius Scipio, who was killed in Spain, left two sons behind him, Lucius and Publius: of these, Lucius, the elder, became afterwards the conqueror of king Antiochus; Publius, the younger, was the famous Scipio Africanus. Athens abounded in writers at the time of the Peloponnesian war; but, had I0@ Livy, XXVII.

51. -0’ Livy, XXIX. 87.

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CHAP. XLVII.] SCIPIO’S CHARACTER. 587 not Thucydides been one of them, how hard would it be rightly Contradictory accounte to estimate the characters of the eminent men of that period’! And of Scipioscharacter. even Thucydides seems in one instance to have partaken of the common weaknesses of humanity: his personal gratitude and respect for Antiphon has colored, not indeed his statement of his actions, but his general estimate of -his worth: he attributes an over-measure of virtue to the conspirator, who scrupled not to use assassination as a means of overthrowing the liberty and independence of his country. But Polybius, whose knowledge of Rome was that of a foreigner, and for a long time of a prisoner, could not be to Roman history what Thucydides is to. that of Greece, even if in natural powers he had approached more nearly to him; and all his accounts of the Scipios are affected by his intimacy with the younger Africanus, and are derived from partial sources, the anecdotes told by the elder Laelius, or the funeral orations and traditions of the family. On the other hand, there was a large party in Rome to whom Scipio was personally: and politically obnoxious, and their writers would naturally circulate stories unfavorable to him. Hence, the accounts of his early life and character are varying, and sometimes contradictory; and points, apparently the most notorious, are stated very differently, so that we know not what to believe. His friend and companion, Laelius, told Polybius,l that in his first battle, when only seventeen, he saved his father’s life; but Ccelius Antipater said that this was a false pretension; that the consul, P.

Scipio, was saved, not by his son, but by the fidelity of a Ligurian slave.2 By his friends again Scipio is represented as one who, amid all temptations of youth and power, maintained the complete mastery over his passions:3 while his enemies said that his youth was utterly dissolute; and that the famous story of his noble treatment of the Spanish captive maiden was invented to veil conduct which had really been of the very opposite nature.4 His common admirers extolled his singular devotion to the gods: he delighted, it was said, to learn their pleasure, and to be guided by their counsel; nor would he ever engage in any important matter, public or private, till he had first gone up to the capitol, and entered the temple of Jupiter, and there sat for a time alone, as it seemed, in the presence of the god, and doubtless enjoying unwonted communications from his divine wisdom.5 But Polybius, by temper and by circumstances a rationalist, is at great pains to assure his readers, that Scipio owed no: part of his greatness to the gods, and that his true oracle was the clear judgment of his own mind.6 According to him Scipio did but impose upon and laulgh at the credulity of the vulgar; speaking of the favor shown him by the gods, while he knew the gods’ to be nothing. Livy, with a truer feeling, which taught him that a hero cannot be a hypocrite, suggests a doubt, though timidly, as if in fear of the skepticism of his age, whether the great Scipio was not really touched by some feelings of superstition,’

whether he did not in some degree speak what he himself believed. A mind like Scipio’s, working its way under the peculiar influences of his time and country, cannot but move irregularly; it cannot but be full of contradictions. Two hundred years later, the mind of the dicta-Hi re gious pirit. tor Caesar acquiesced contentedly in Epicureanism: he retained no more of enu thusiasm than was inseparable from the intensity of his intellectual power, and the fervor of his courage, even amidst his utter moral degradation. But Scipio could not be like Caesar. His mind rose above the state of things around him; his spirit was solitary and kingly; he was cramped by living among those as his equals, whom he felt fitted to guide as from some higher sphere; and he retired at last to Liternum to breathe freely,8 to enjoy the-simplicity of childhood, since 1 X. 3. 6 Polybius, X. 2, 5, 7. Livy, XXI. 46. 7 XXVI. 19. Sive et ipse captl quadam sus Polytius, X. 18, 19. Livy, XXVI. 49, 50. perstitione animi. Cn.‘Nsevius and Valerius Antias, quoted by 8 Livy, XXXVIII. 52, 53.

Valerius Maximus, A. Gellius, VI. 8. V. 3, 2. 6 Polybius, X. 2, 5, 11.

Livy, XXVI. 19.

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588 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLVIt he could not fulfil his natural calling to be a hero king. So far he stood apart from his countrymen, admired, reverenced, but not loved. But he could not shake off all the influences of his time; the virtue, public and private, which still existed at Rome, the reverence paid by the wisest and best men to the religion of their fathers, were elements too congenial to his nature not to retain their hold on it; they cherished that nobleness of soul in him, and that faith in the invisible and divine, which two centuries of growing unbelief rendered almost impossible in the days of Caesar. Yet how strange must the conflict be, when faith is combined with the highest intellectual power, and its appointed object is no better than paganism! Longing to believe, yet repelled by palpable falsehood, crossed inevitably with snatches of unbelief, in which hypocrisy is ever close at the door, it breaks out desperately, as it may seem, into the region of dreams and visions, and mysterious communings with the invisible, as if longing to find that food in its own creations, which no outward objective truth offers to it. The proportions, of belief and unbelief in the human mind in such cases, no human judgment can determine: they are the wonders of history; characters inevitably misrepresented by the vulgar, and viewed even by those who in some sense have the key to them as a mystery, not fully to be comprehended, and still less explained to others., The genius which conceived the incomprehensible character of Hamlet, would alone be able to describe with intuitive truth the character of Scipio or of Cromwell. In both these great men, the enthusiastic element which clearly existed in them, Its effect on hi lif did but inspire a resistless energy into their actions, while it in no way interfered with the calmest and keenest judgment in the choice of their means: nor in the case of Scipio did it suggest any other end of life, than such as was appreciated by ordinary human views of good. Where religion contained no revelation of new truth, it naturally left men’s estimate of the end of their being exactly what it had been before, and only furnished encouragement to the pursuit of it. It so far bore the character of magic, that it applied superhuman power to the furtherance of human purposes: the gods aided man’s work; they did not teach and enable him to do theirs. The charge of early dissoluteness brought’against Scipio by his enemies is likely Chargeinsthi to have been exaggerated, like the stories of our Henry V. Yet Charge ag the sternest and firmest manhood has sometimes followed a youth marked with many excesses of passion; and what was considered an unbecoming interruption to the cares of public business, was held to be in itself nothing blamable.

That sanction of inherited custom, which at Rome at this period was the best safeguard of youthful purity, Scipio was not inclined implicitly to regard. With all his greatness there was a waywardness in him, which seems often to accompany genius; a self-idolatry, natural enough where there Comparison between his charater and Han-is So keen a consciousness of power and of lofty designs; a self.. dependence, which feels even the most sacred external relations to be unessential to its own perfection. Such is the Achilles of Homer, the highest conception of the individual hero, relying on himself, and sufficient to himself. But the same poet who conceived the character of Achilles, has also drawn that of Hector; of the truly noble, because unselfish hero, who subdues his genius to make it minister to the good of others, who lives for his relations, his friends, and his country. And as Scipio lived in himself and for himself, like Achilles, so the virtue of Hector was worthily represented in the life of his great rival Hannibal, who, from his childhood to his latest hour, in war and in peace, through glory and through obloquy, amid victories and amid disappointments, ever remembered to what purpose his father had devoted him, and withdrew no thought or desire or deed from their pledged service to his country. Scipio had fought at Cannue, and, after the battle, had been forward, it was said, in putting down that dangerous spirit, which showed itself among some of

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JlAP. XLV1I.] WAR IN SPAIN. 589 high birth and name, when they were purposing to abandon Italy Hi firt in despair, and seek their fortune in Greece, or Egypt, or Asia.9 His early manhood had attracted the favor of the people; and although the de. tails are variously given, it is certain that he was made curule mdile at an early age, and with strong marks of the general good-will.’ But he had filled no higher office than the vedileship, when his father and uncle A. C. 543 were killed in Spain, and when C. Nero, after the fall of Capua, was sent out as proprmetor to command the wreck of their army, and joining it to the force which he brought from Italy, to maintain the almost desperate cause of the Roman arms in the west. He held his ground, and even ventured, if we may believe a story overrun with improbabilities, to act on the offensive, and to penetrate into the A. U. c.,544 A. c. south of Spain, as far as the Bmetis.t” The faults of the Cartha-1-0. War in Spain after the death of the ginian generals were ruining their cause, and vexing the spirit of Soipios. Hasdrubal, the son of Hamnilcar, who alone knew the value of the present opportunity, and was eager to make use c~ it. But the other Hasdrubal and Mago thought their work was done, and were nly anxious to enrich themselves out of the plunder of Spain. They disgusted the Spanish chiefs by their insolence and rapacity, while they were jealous of each other, and both, as was natural, hated and dreaded the son of Hamilcar.‘2

Accordingly, all concert between the Carthaginian generals was at an end; they engaged in separate enterprises in different parts of the country: Hasdrubal, the son of Gisco, and Mago, moved off to the extreme west of the peninsula, to subdue and plunder the remoter Spanish tribes; and only Hasdrubal, the son of Hamilcar, remained to oppose the Romans. Nero, therefore, whether he acted on the offensive or no, was certainly unassailed behind the Iberus; and at the end of the year 544, eighteen months at least after the defeat of the Scipios, the Roman arms had met with no fresh disaster; and the coast of the Mediterranean between the Pyrenees and the Iberus still acknowledged the Roman dominion. It was at this period that the government resolved to increase its efforts in Spain, to employ a larger army there, and to place it under the AX.U. 545.

A.C..209. command of an officer of higher rank than Nero, who was only prlosercutea itswith oe proprietor. It was probable that Hasdrubal’s expedition to Italy vigor. was now seriously meditated, and that the Romans, being aware of this, were anxious to detain him in Spain; but, even without this special object, the importance of the Spanish war was evident; and it was not wise to leave the Roman cause in Spain it its present precarious state, in which it was preserved only by the divisions and want of ability of the enemy’s generals. Accordingly, the tribes were to meet to appoint a proconsul, who should carry out reinforcements to Spain, and, with a proprietor acting under him, take the supreme command of the Roman forces in that country. To the surprise of the whole people, P. Scipio, then only in his twenty-seventh year, and who had filled no higher office than that of curule medile, Scipo is elected procame forward as a candidate.‘3 It is said that he had no competion.sul for the Spaniab tors, all men being deterred from; undertaking a service which war, seemed so unpromising; whereas Scipio himself had formed a truer judgment of the state of affairs in Spain, and felt that they might be restored, and that he himself was capable of restoring them. He expressed his confidence strongly in all his addresses to the people; and there was that in him which distinguished his boldness from a young man’s idle boastings, and communicated his hope to his hearers.‘4 At the same age, and nearly under the same circumstances, in which Napoleon was appointed in 1796 to take the command of the French army 9 Livy, XXII. 53. See above, p. 502. 1 Polybius, IX. 11. X. 36. Polybius X. 4. Livy, XXV. 2.’

Livy, XXVI. 18. Polybius, X. 6. a Livy, XkVI. 17. t Livy, XXVI. 19.

Polybius, X. 6.

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590 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLVII. of Italy, was P. Scipio chosen by the unanimous voice of the Roman people, tc take the command of their army in Spain. And great as were the consequences of the appointment of Napoleon, those which followed the appointment of Scipio were greater and far more lasting. At the same time a new proprietor was to be sent out in the room of C. Nero, and goes with large re-whose year of command was come to an end. His successor was inforcements to Spain. M. Junius Silanus,‘6 who had been prretor two years before, and since that time had been employed in overawing the party disaffected to Rome in Etruria. The two new generals were to take with them large reinforcements, amounting to 10,000 foot, 1000 horse, and a fleet of thirty quinqueremes. The troops were embarked at the mouth of the Tiber; and the fleet proceeded along the coasts of Etruria, Liguria, and Gaul, till it arrived safely at Emporim, a Massaliot colony, lying immediately on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. Here the soldiers were disembarked, and proceeded by land to Tarraco; the fleet followed; and the headquarters of the proconsul were established at Tarraco for the winter, as it was too late in the season to admit of any active operations immediately,‘6 And now that Spain has received that general and that army, by whom her fate was fixed through all after time,-for the expulsion of the View. of Spain. Carthaginians from the peninsula decided its subjection to the Romans, and though the work of conquest was slow, and often interrupted, it was not the less sure,-let us for a moment survey the earliest known state of this great country; what Spain was, and who were the earliest Spaniards, before Romans, Goths, and Moors, had filled the land with stranger races, and almost extirpated the race and language of its original people. The Spanish peninsula, joined to the main body of Europe by the isthmus of Description ofthe Span-the Pyrenees, may be likened to one of the round bastion towers ohndsi~Ula. 1
which stand out from the walls of an old fortified town, lofty at once and massy. Spain rises from the Atlantic on one side, and the Mediterranean on the other, not into one or two thin lines of mountains divided by vast tracts of valleys or low plains, but into a huge tower, as I have called it, of tableland, from which the mountains themselves rise again like the battlements on the summit. The plains of Castile are mountain plains, raised nearly 2000 feet above the level of the sea; and the elevation of the city of Madrid, is nearly double that of the top of Arthur’s Seat, the hill or mountain which overhangs Edinburgh. Accordingly the centre of Spain, notwithstanding its genial latitude, only partially enjoys the temperature of a southern climate; while some of the valleys of Andalusia, which lie near the sea, present the vegetation of the tropics, the palmtree, the banana, and the sugar-cane. Thus the southern coast seemed to invite an earlier civilization; while the interior, with its bleak and arid plains, was fitted to remain for centuries the stronghold of barbarism. Accordingly the first visits of the Phcenicians to Spain are placed at a very Early Phlienicion set remote period.:Some stories ascribed the foundation of Gades to tlementsin Spain. The Archelaus, theson of Phcenix-Phoenix and Cadmus being the heboriginl inhabitf supposed founders of Tyre and Sidon, and belonging to the earliest period of Greek tradition; while other accounts of a more historical character made the origin of Gades contemporary with the reign of the Athenian Codrus, that is,: about a thousand years before the Christian era.’” Three hundred years later, the Prophet Isaiah‘8 describes the downfall of Tyre as likely to give deliverance to:the land of Tarshish; that is, to the:south of Spain, where the Phocenicians had established their dominion.

In the time of Ezekiel, the Tyrian trade with Spain was most flourishing; and the produce of the Spanish mines, silver, iron, tin, and lead, are especially mentioned as the ar. 6 Livy, XXVI. 19.: - 17 Velleius, I. IL 5.

16 Livy, XXVI. 19, 20. 18 XXIII. 10.

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C1mP. XLVII.] EARLY SETTLERS IN SPAIN. 591 tides which came from Tarshish to the Phcenician ports.’ Nor did the Phcenicians confine themselves to a few points on the seacoast; they were spread over the whole south of Spain; and the greatest number of the towns of Turditania were still inhabited in Strabo’s time by people of Phoenician origin.20 They communicated many of the arts of life to the natives, and among the rest the early use of letters; for the characters which the Iberians used in their writing before the time of the Romans,2’ can scarcely have been any other than Phcenician. The Phoenicians visited Spain at a very remote period; but they found it already peopled.; Who the aboriginal inhabitants were, and from whence they came, it is impossible to determine. The Greeks called them Iberians, and said: that, although they were divided into many tribes, and spoke many various dialects, they yet all belonged to the same race.22 It cannot be doubted that-their race and language still exist; that the Basques, who inhabit the Spanish provinces: of Guipuscoa, Biscay, Alava, and Navarre, and who in France occupy the country between the Adour and the Bidassoa, are the genuine descendants of the ancient Iberians.

Their language bears marks of extreme antiquity; and its, unlikeness to the other languages of Europe is very striking, even when compared with Welsh, or with Sclavonic. The affinities of the Welsh numerals with those of the Teutonic languages, and the Greek and Latin, are obvious at the first glance; and the same may be said of most of the Sclavonic numerals: but the Basque are so peculiar, that it is difficult to identify any one of them, except A” sei,” 1” six,” with those of other languages.3 And an evidence of its great antiquity seems furnished by the fact, that the inflexions of the nouns and verbs are manifestly so many distinct words, inasmuch as they exist in a separate form as such. We suspect this reasonably of the terminations of the nouns and verbs of Greek and: Latin; but in the Basque language it can be proved beyond question.24 We have seen that the Phoenicians were settled amongst the Iberians in the south; and Keltic tribes were said to be mixed up with them in Various traditions of parts of the north and centre, forming a people, whom the Greeks ealysettlements called Keltiberians. How far strangers of other races were to be found in Iberia, it is difficult to decide. One or two Greek colonies from Massalia, such as Rhoda and Emporim, were undoubtedly planted on the shore of the Mediterranean, just within the limits of Iberia, immediately to the south of the Pyrenees.“5 These belong to the times of certain history; but stories are told of invasions of Spain, and of colonies founded on its territory, on which in their present form we can place no reliance. Carthaginian writers spoke of a great expedition of the Tyrian‘9 XXVII. 12. 23 I give the Welsh from Pughe’s Welsh 20 III. p.

149. Grammar, Denbigh, 1832; the Sclavonic (Bo. 21 Strabo, III. 139.

hemian), from Dobrowsky, Lehrgebaude der 22 Herodotus, in a-fragment of Stephanus MBhmischen Sprache, Prag. 1819; the Basque Byzantius, v.‘Ifr,7pta, preserved by Constantine from Larramendi, Arte de la Lingua BasconPorphyrogenitus, and given by Berkelius: T’ gada, Salamanca, 172q.‘IfplpeKav yivos 6& pwrat. dv6L’aacv, sv yfvos ifv, Karti O)tXa.

Numerals.frc, 1 to 10. WELSH. SCLAVONIC. BASQUE. One Un Geden Bat Two Dau Dwa ~Bi Three Tri Tri Hird Four Pedwar Etyn Lau Five Pump Pet Bost Six Chwech Ssest Sei Seven Saith Sedm Zazpi. Eight Wyth Osm Zortzi Nine Naw Dewet Bederatzi Ten Deg Deset AmAr. i See W. Humboldt’s Dissertation on the 25 Strabo, III. pp. 153, 160. Basque Language in Adelung’s Mithridates, Vol. Iv. p. 314-332.

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592 HISTORY OF ROME. [CuAP. XLVIL Hercules into Spain, at the head of an army of Medes, Persians, Armenians, and other nations of the east.26

Megasthenes,27 the Greek traveller and historian of India, said that Tearco, king of.zEthiopia, and Nabuchodonosor, king of the Chaldaeans, had both carried their arms as far as Spain. Amongst the innumerable countries which were made the scene of the adventures of the Greek chiefs on their return from Troy, after they had been scattered by the famous storm, the coasts of Iberia, and even its coasts upon the ocean, are not forgotten.2

Other stories, as we have seen, claimed a Greek origin for Saguntum; while others again called it a Rutulian’colony, from the Tyrrheno-Pelasgian city of Ardea.29 The settlements of the Greek chiefs on their way home from Troy are mere romances, as unreal as the famous siege of Paris by the Saracens in the days of Charlemagne, or as the various adventures and settlements of Trojan exiles, which were invented in the middle ages.

Whether any real events are disguised in the stories of the expeditions of Hercules, of Tearco, and of Nabuchodonosor, is a question more difficult to answer: for the early migrations from the east to the west are buried in impenetrable obscurity. But the Persians and AEthiopians may have made their way into Spain before historical memory, as the Vandals and Arabs invaded it in later times; the fact itself is not incredible, if it rested on any credible authority. Not knowing, then, what strange nations may at one time or other have inState of agriculture in vaded or settled in Spain, we cannot judge how much the Iberian Spain. character and manners were affected by foreign influence. Agriculture was practised from a period beyond memory: but the vine and olive, and perhaps the flax, were first introduced into the south of Spain by the Phoenicians, and only spread northwards gradually, the vine and fig advancing first, and the olive, as becomes its greater tenderness, following them more slowly and cautiously. Even in Strabo’s time the vine had scarcely reached the northern coast of Spain; and the olive, when Polybius wrote, appears not to have been cultivated north of the Sierra Morena.3 Butter supplied the place of oil to the inhabitants of the northern coast, and beer that of wine.31 In the character of the people some traits may be recognized, which even to Character of the rbe-this day mark the Spaniard. The grave dress,32 the temperance rians. and sobriety, the unyielding spirit, the extreme indolence, the perseverance in guerilla warfare, and the remarkable absence of the highest military qualities, ascribed by the Greek and Roman writers to the ancient Iberians, are all more or less characteristics of the Spaniards of modern times. The courtesy and gallantry of the Spaniard to women has also come down to him from his Iberian ancestors: in the eyes of the Greeks it was an argument of an imperfect civilization, that among the Iberians the bridegroom gave, instead of receiving, a dowry; that daughters sometimes inherited to the exclusion of sons, and, thus becoming the heads of the family, gave portions to their brothers, that they might be provided with suitable wives.33 In another point, the great difference between the people of the south of Europe, and those of the Teutonic stock, was remarked also in Iberia: the Iberians were ignorant, but not simple-hearted; on the contrary, they were cunning and mischievous, with habits of robbery almost indomitable, fond of brigandage, though incapable of the great combinations of war.34 These, in some degree, are qualities common to almost all barbarians; but they offer a strong contrast to the character of the Germans, whose words spoke what was in their hearts, and of whose most powerful tribe it is recorded, that their ascendency was maintained by no other arms than those of justice.35 26 SallulSt, Jugurth. c.

XVIII.‘5 Livy, XXI. 7. See Niebuhr, vol. i. note 127. 27 Quoted by Strabo, XV. 1, ~ 6, p. 687, and 90 III. p. 164. by Josephus, Antiq. X. 11, ~ 1, and contr. 31 Strabo, III. p. 155. Polybius in AthenasApion. I. 20.

Strabo’s character of Megas-us, I. 28. thenes is not favorable: &aeop6vrw a.rarerLv 32 Strabo, III. p. 145, pX4avc#0ovES i.ravrE.‘4eov AtipadXw r7s Kea’ MEyaraOiE. II. 1, p. 70. 33 Strabo, III. p. 165. 34 Strabo, III. p.

154. 28 Strabo, III. pp. 149, 150. 5 Tacitus, German. 22, 85.

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CHAP. XLVIL] SPANISH MINES. 593 Spanish soldiers had for more than two centuries formed one of the most efficient parts of the Carthaginian armies;36 and on this account the Car-Importance of Spain lo thaginian government set a high value on its dominion in Spain. the Carthaginians.

But this dominion furnished Carthage with money, no less than with men.

The Spanish mines had been worked for some centuries; first by the Phoenicians of Asia, and latterly by their Carthaginian descendants; yet they still yielded abundantly. And some of them have been worked for two thousand years since the Carthaginians were driven out of the country; and to this hour their treasures are unexhausted.37 These mines existed for the most part in the mountains which divide the streams running to the Guadiana from those which feed the Guadalquiver.35 This is the chain so well known by the name of the Sp Sierra Morena; but the several arms which it pushes out towards the sea eastward and southward, were also rich in precious metals;, and some mines were worked in the valley of the Guadalquiver itself, as low down as Seville. The streams, moreover, which flowed from these mountains, brought down gold mingled with their sand and gravel;3 and this was probably collected long before the working of the regular mines began. But in the time of th, second Punic war the mines were worked actively; and a hundred years earlier the cinnabar, or sulphuret of quicksilver, of the famous mines of Almaden, was well known in the markets of Greece.40 The Carthaginians honored as a hero or demi-god, the man who first discovered the most productive silver mines; and one of these was in the immediate neighborhood of New Carthage itself.41 Others were nearer the Guadalquiver, at Castulo and Ilipa; or on the feeders of the Guadiana, as at Sisapo,42 the ancient name of the place near to which the great quicksilver mines were worked, now known as the mines of Almaden. One large and most productive silver mine, yielding three hundred pounds daily, is said to nave been opened by Hannibal himself,43 who, while he was in Spain, had married the daughter of one of the chiefs of Castulo,44 and perhaps had acquired some possessions through her in the mining district, as Thucydides had through his wife in Thrace.

The immense resources which the Carthaginians derived from their Spanish dominion, seemed now more than ever secured to them, by the de-oipio’s first measures struction of the Roman army under the two Scipios, and the con-in Spain. sequent retreat of the Romans behind the Iberus. But the divisions between their generals, and the arrogance with which their officers now treated the Spaniards, as if it was no longer worth while to conciliate them, had made a fatal opening, exposing their power to the most deadly blow which it had yet sustained. Scipio, with intuitive sagacity, observed this opening, and with decision no less admirable struck his blow to the heart of his enemy. He formed his plans at Tarraco during the winter; as soon as the season allowed his fleet to cooperate with him, he put it and his army in motion; and while the three Carthaginian generals were in places equally remote from one another, and from the point threatened by the enemy, Scipio crossed the Iberus, and led his land and sea forces to besiege New Carthage.45 His early and most intimate friend, C. Laelius, commanded the fleet; the proprmtor, M.

Silanus, was left behind the Iberus with 3000 foot and A. U.. 545., A. C.

500 horse, to protect the country of the allies of Rome, while 09at He marhoe Scipio himself led 25,000 foot and 2500 horse on his expedition.

thage. Polybius declares that the march from the Iberus to New Carthage was performed in seven days; but as, according to his own reckoning, the distance was: flerodotus, VII. 165. 41 Polybius, X. 10, 11. Strabo, III.

p. 1487 Strabo III. 146-148. 42 Polybius, X. 38, 7. Strabo, III. p. 142..

2s Strabo, III. p. 142. “3 Pliny, XXXIII. 81. 29 Strabo, III. p. 146. 44

Livy, XXIV. 41. to Strabo, III. p. 147. 45 Polybius, X. 6-9. Livy, XXVI.

42. 38

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594 HISTORY OF ROME [CHAP. XLVIlt not less than 325 Roman miles, the accuracy of one or both of his statements may well be questioned.46 Three degrees of latitude divide Carthagena from the Ebro; and the ordinary windings and difficulties of a road in such a distance must make it all but an impossibility that an army with its baggage should have marched over it in a single week. However, the march was undoubtedly rapid; and the Roman army established itself under the walls of New Carthage, while all succor was far distant, and when the actual garrison of a place so important did not exceed a thousand men. To the protection of a force so small was committed the capital of the Carthaginian dominion in Spain, the base of their military operations, their point of communication with Africa, their treasures and magazines, and the hostages taken from the different Spanish tribes to secure their doubted fidelity.4a The present town of Carthagena stands at the head of its famous harbor, built Position of New Car-partly on some hills of tolerable height, and partly on the low thage. ground beneath them, with a large extent of marshy ground behind it, which is flooded after rains, and its inner port surrounded by the buildings of the arsenal, running deeply into the land on its western side. But in the times of the second Punic war, the marshy ground behind was all a lagoon, and its waters communicated artificially with those of the port of the arsenal; so that the town was on a peninsula, and was joined to the main land only by a narrow isthmus, which had itself been cut through in one place, to allow the lagoonwater to find an outlet.”

Scipio then encamped at the head of this isthmus; and having fortified himself on the rear, with the lagoon covering his flank, he left his front open, that nothing might obstruct the free advance of his soldiers to storm the city.49 Accordingly, without delay, he was preparing to lead on his men to the asipio atta it, sault, when he was himself assailed by Mago, who, with his scanty garrison, made a desperate sally along the isthmus against the Roman camp. After an obstinate struggle, the besieged were beaten back into the town with loss; and the Romans,.following them, fixed their ladders to the walls, and began to mount. But the height of the walls was so great, that the long ladders necessary to reach their summit broke in some instances under the weight of the soldiers who crowded on them; and the enemy made their defence so good, that towards afternoon Scipio found it expedient to recall his men from the assault.50

He had told his men before the assault began, that the god Neptune had apand carries the walls. peared to him in his sleep, and had promised to give him aid in the hour of need, so manifest, that all the army should acknowledge his interposition.5 For the lagoon, it seems, was so shallow, that even the slight fall of the tide in the Mediterranean was sufficient to leave much of it uncovered, as is the case at this day in parts of the harbor of Venice. This would take place in the afternoon, and Scipio ordered five hundred men to be ready with ladders, to march across the lagoon as soon as the ebb began. Then he renewed his assault by the isthmus; and whilst this in itself discouraged the enemy, who had hoped that their work for the day was over, and whilst the soldiers again swarmed up the ladders, and the missiles of the besieged were beginning to fail, the five hundred men who were in readiness, boldly rushed across the lagoon, and, having guides to show them the hardest parts of it, reached the foot of the walls in safety, applied their ladders where there were no defenlders, and mounted without opposition.5 No sooner had they won the walls, than they hastened to the main gate of the 4 P.olybius, X. 9, T

I.III. 39, 5. XXVI. 42. W Polybius, X. 12, 13. Livy, XXVI. 45. 47

Polybius, X. 8. 6’ Polybius, X. 11. Livy, XXVI, 45. 8 Polybius, X. 10.

Livy, XXVI. 42. 6 Polybius, X. 14. Livy, XXVI. 46. g Poybiuo, X. 11.

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CHAP. XLVII.] TAKING OF NEW CARTHAGE. 595 city, towards the isthmus; and when they had burst it open, their The town is taken and comrades fiom without rushed in like a torrent. At the same plundered. moment the scaling parties on each side of the main gate overbore the defenders, and were now overflowing the ramparts. Mago reached the citadel in safety; but Scipio in person pushed: thither with a thousand picked men; and the governor, seeing the city lost, surrendered. The other heights in the town were stormed with little difficulty; and the soldiers, according to the Roman practice, commenced a deliberate massacre of every living creature they could find, whether man or beast, till, after the citadel had surrendered, a signal from their general called them off from slaughter, and turned them loose upon the houses. of the town to plunder. Yet it marks the Roman discipline, that even before night fell, order was restored. Some of the soldiers marched’ back to the camp, from, whence the light troops were sent for to occupy one of the principal heights of the town; Scipio himself, with a thousand’ men, went to the citadel; and the tribunes got the soldiers out of the houses, and made them bring all their plunder into one heap in the’ market-place, and pass the night there quietly, waiting for the regular division of the spoil, which was to take place on the following morning.53 When the morning came, whilst the usual distribution of the money arising from the sale of the plunder was made by the tribunes, Scipio pro-Scipio’s conduct to toe ceeded to inspect his’prisoners. All were brought before him prl.oner. together, to the number of nearly 10,000. He first caused them to be divided into three classes. One consisted of all the citizens-of New Carthage, with their wives and families: all: these Scipio set at liberty, and dismissed them to their homes unhurt. The second class contained the-workmen of handicraft trades, who were either slaves, or, if free, only sojourners in the city, enjoying no political rights. These men were told, that they were now the slaves of the Roman people, but that, if they worked well and zealously in their several callings, they should have their liberty at the end of the war. Meantime they were all to enter their names with the qumstor; and a Roman citizen was set over every thirty of them as an overseer. These workmen were in all about two thousand. The third class contained all the rest of the prisoners, domestic slaves, seamen, fishermen, and the mixed populace of the city; and from these Scipio picked out the most ablebodied, and employed them in manning his fleet: for he found eighteen ships of the enemy at New Carthage; and these he was able to add to his own naval force immediately, by putting some of his own seamen into them, and filling up their places with some of the captives, taking care, however, that the number of these should never exceed a third of the whole crew. The seamen thus employed were promised their liberty at the end of the war, like the workmen, if they did their duty faithfully.54

The Carthaginian prisoners and the Spanish hostages were still to be attended to. The former were committed to the care of Lvelius, to be taken His hind treatment of forthwith to Rome; and there were amongst them fifteenl mem-theSpanish hostages. hers of the great or ordinary council of Carthage, and two members of the council of elders. The Spanish hostages were more than three hundred; and amongst them were many young boys. To show kindness to these was an obvious policy; accordingly Scipio.

made presents to them all, and desired them to write home to their friends, and assure them that they were well and honorably treated, and that they would’ all be sent back safely to their several countries, if their countrymen were willing to embrace the Roman alliance.

Particularattention was shown to the wife of a Spanish chief of high rank, who had been recently seized as a hostage by Hasdrubal Gisco, because her husband had refused to comply with his demands for money. Her treatment had been rude and insolent, if not worse; but Scipio assured her that he would take as delicate care of her and of the other ” Polybius, X. 15.

Livy, XXVI. 46. ” Polybius, X. 16, 17. Livy, XXVI. 47.

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596 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLvn Spanish women, as ne would of his own sisters or daughters. This honorable bearing of the young conqueror, for Scipio was not more than twenty-seven years of age, produced a deep impression all over Spain.55 After this important conquest, Scipio remained for a time at New Carthage, Mgoazinestakenin the and busied himself in exercising his soldiers and seamen, and in setting his workmen to labor in manufacturing arms.56 He had taken a considerable artillery in the place, a large sum of money, abundant magazines of corn, and about sixty-three merchant-ships in the harbor, with their cargoes; so that, according to Livy, the least valuable part of the conquest of New Carthage was New Carthage itself.” Lvelius with his prisoners arrived at Rome after a voyage of thirty-four days, rrie the newand brought the welcome news of this great restoration of the RoLrolius carries the news of this conquest to man affairs in Spain.s8 Amidst the confusions of the chronology Rome.

of the Spanish war, it is not easy to ascertain the exact time at which Lielius reached Rome. But it is probable that he arrived there early in the year 545, perhaps at that critical moment when the disobedience of the twelve colonies excited such great alarm, and when the destruction of the army of Cn. Fulvius at Herdonea was still fresh in men’s memories.

Scipio’s victory was therefore doubly welcome; and his requests for supplies were favorably listened to; for his army, although victorious, was still in want of many things, the old soldiers especially, who had been ill clothed and worse paid during several years. Accordingly we find that a sum of fourteen hundred pounds’ weight of gold was brought out from the treasure reserved for the most extraordinary occasions, and expended in purchasing clothing for the army in Spain.59 Scipio himself returned from New Carthage to Tarraco, taking his Spanish The rest of the year hostages with him.60 It was early in the season; but we hear of p.sses io inaction. no other military action during the remainder of the year. This on Scipio’s part is easily intelligible: his army was too weak to hold the field against the combined forces of the enemy; and it was his object to strengthen himself by alliances with the natives, and to draw them off from the service of Carthage, if he could not induce them to enter that of Rome. He had struck one great blow with vigor, surprising the enemy by his rapidity: but what had been won by vigor might be lost by rashness; and after so great an action as the conquest of New Carthage, he could well afford to lie quiet for the rest of the year, waiting for his supplies of clothing from Rome, and strengthening his interest amongst the chiefs of Spain. The inactivity of the Carthaginian generals would be more surprising, if we did not make allowance for the paralyzing effect of their mutual jealousies. No efficient cooperation could be contrived between them; and Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, was too weak to act alone, and, dis, gusted with the conduct of his colleagues, was probably anxious to husband his own army carefully, looking forward now more than ever to the execution of his long projected march upon Italy. Thus there was a pause from all active operations in Spain for several months; whilst in Italy Fabius had recovered Tarentum, and he and Fabius were on the point of being succeeded in the consulship by Marcellus and Crispinus. The loss of Tarentum made it more important than ever that Hasdrubal A.U.c.

5,6. A.C. 208. should join his brother in Italy; while the growing disposition of Deinue.of thue otha-the Spaniards to revolt to Rome rendered the prospect of success in Spain less encouraging. But with no Carthaginian accounts remaining, and amidst the confusions, omissions, and contradictions of the Roman historians, it is almost impossible to give a satisfactory explanation of the events of the ensuing year, 546, in Spain.

Masinissa, then a very young man, the son ” Polybius, X. 18. Livy, XXVI.

47, 49. a Livy, XXVII. 7. ” Polybius, X. 20. 59 Livy, XXVII. 10. X’ MXVI.

47. Polybius, X. 19. ” Livy, XXVII. 17. Polybius, X. 84.

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CEAP. XLVII.] SECOND CAMPAIGN. 597 of a Numidian king, named Gala, was sent over from Africa with a large body of Numidian cavalry to reinforce Hasdrubal, the son of Hamilcar, principally, it is said, in order to his march into Italy.6l Still Hasdrubal made no forward movement, but remained in a very strong position near a place called variously Baecula or Bebula, situated in the upper valley of the Guadalquiver,: near the. mining district; and there he seemed rather disposed to await Scipio’s attack, than to assume the offensive.62 He saw that the fidelity of the Spaniards to Carthage was deeply shaken, not only by the loss of their hostages, but by the encouraging treatment which the hostages themselves had received from the Romans. This feeling had been working ever since the fall of New Carthage; and now its fruits were daily becoming more manifest; insomuch that, when the time at which Scipio was expected to take the field drew near, Mandonius and Indibilis, two of the most influential of the Spanish chiefs, retired with all their followers from Hasdrubal’s camp, and established themselves in a strong position, from which they might join the Romans, as soon as their army should appear in the south.6? On the other hand, Scipio’s Roman force was strengthened, by his having laid up his fleet, and draughted the best of his seamen into the legions, to increase the number of his soldiers. And although a combined effort of the three Carthaginian generals might yet have recovered New Carthage, or at any rate kept Scipio behind the Iberus, nothing of this sort was attempted; and Hasdrubal Gisco, jealous, it seems, both personally and politically of Hannibal’s brother, left him unaided to sustain the first assault of the enemy. Hasdrubal, the son. of Hamilcar, therefore, under these circumstances, was doubtless anxious to carry into effect his expedition into Italy. Hasdrub, leaves Yet, not wishing it to be said that he had abandoned his colleagues, Spau, he resolved first to try his strength with Scipio, to’see what Spanish tribes would actually join him, and whether, by offering battle in a favorable position, he could repulse the enemy, and thus break that spell of Scipio’s fortune which was working so powerfully. But in this hope he was disappointed. Scipio advanced from the Iberus to the valley of the Bmtis, or Guadalquiver, before Hasdrubal saw any thing of the armies of his colleagues hastening to his aid: many Spanish tribes joined the Roman army at the Iberus; Mandonius and Indibilis hastened to it as soon as it approached the place where they were posted; and Hasdrubal, unable to maintain his strong position, and, if we believe Scipio’s statement, seeing it in the act of being carried by the enemy at the close of a successful assault, retreated accordingly, not towards the southern sea, nor towards the western ocean, but northwards towards the Tagus,64 and from thence, as we have seen, towards the western Pyrenees; there recruiting his army from those tribes which had not yet come under the influence of Rome, and preparing for that great expedition to Italy, of which we have already related the progress and the event.

Before Hasdrubal finally retreated, he had lost many prisoners. All those who were Spaniards, were sent home free without ransom by the pol-Increase Of Scipio’s initic conqueror; and he liberally rewarded those Spanish chiefs “.ue”e. who had already come over to his side. They, on their part, saluted him with the title of king. The first Hasdrubal, the founder of New Carthage, had lived in kingly state amongst the Spaniards; and they probably thought that Scipio meant to do the same, and would pass the rest of his life in their country. But the name of king, although perhaps not ungrateful to Scipio’s ears, was intolerable to those of his countrymen; nor would he have been contented to reign in Spain over barbarians: his mind was already turned towards Africa, and anticipated the glory of conquering Carthage. So he repressed the homage of the Spanish chiefs, and desired them to call him, not king, but -general. He then 61 Livy, XXIV. 49. XXV. 34. 63 Polybius, X. 35. Livv, XXVII. 17. 6

Polybius, X. 38. Livy, XXVII. 18. Ap-64:Polybius, X. 38, 39. Livy, XXVII.

17, 18 plan, VI, 24. Appian, VI. 25-28.

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598 HISTORY OF ROME. [CIIAP. XIJVY. took possessionof the strong position which Hasdrubal had evacuated; and there he remained during the rest of the season, watching, so it is said, -the movements of Hasdrubal Gisco, and Mago, who were now come upon the scene of action. On the approach of winter he again returned to Tarraco.65 Such is the account given by Polybius of the events of the war lin Spain durDif.culle in the a.. ing the summer of the year 545; and such, no doubt, was the count id the campaign. statement given by Scipio himself, and obtained by Polybius from Scipio’s old friend and companion, C. Lvelius. What Silenus said of these events we know not; and it is possible that Hasdrubal’s account of them was:never known, owing to his subsequent fate, so that Silenus may have had no peculiar information about them, and may have passed them over slightly. It is evident that Scipio’s pretended victory at Bzecula was of little importance. Hasdrubal carried off all his elephants, all his treasure, and a large proportion of his infantry: he was not pursued; he retreated in the direction which best suited his future movements; and these movements he effected without the slightest interruption from the enemy. Scipio did not follow him, says Polybius,66 because he dreaded the arrival of the other Hasdrubal and Mago: he remained in the south, therefore, to keep them in check, and to prevent them from attacking New Carthage; and not doubting that Hasdrubal would follow his brother’s route, and attempt to enter Gaul by the eastern Pyrenees, he detached some troops from his army to secure the passes of the mountains, and other defensible positions between the Iberus and the frontiers of Gaul.6” It is probable that his notions of the geography of the western parts of Spain and Gaul were so vague, that he had no conception of the possibility of Hasdrubal’s marching towards the Alps without.coming near the Mediterranean. The line which he actually took from. the western Pyrenees to the upper part of the course of the Rhone, through the interior of Gaul, was one of which Scipio, in all probability, did not even suspect the existence. It may be asked why Hasdrubal, whose great object was to reach Italy, did Reasons for:Hadru-not commence his march at the beginning of the year, without balls delay. waiting so long at Baecula:; especially after the desertion of Mandonius and Indibilis had taught him that the Spaniards were no longer to be relied on. But he had himself on a former occasion won over the Celtiberians from the army of Scipio’s father; and any reverse sustained by the Romans might tempt the Spanish chiefs to return to their old alliance. It is possible also that he waited so long at B’ecula for another reason, because he wished to carry with him as large a sum of money as possible; and he was daily drawing a supply from the abundant silver mines in the neighborhood. The success of his expedition depended on his being able -to raise soldiers amongst the Cisalpine Gauls, as well as amongst the tribes of northwestern Spain; and for both these purposes ready money was most desirable. A more inexplicable point in the story of these transactions is the alleged disJealousies of the Car-cord between Hasdrubal and the other Carthaginian generals; thaginian generals. when one of them, Mago, was his own brother, and was not only a soldier of tried ability, but is expressly said to have conducted the war in Spain in accordance with Hannibal’s directions, after Hasdrubal had marched into Italy.68 Whether Mago was placed under Hasdrubal Gisco’s orders, and could not act independently, or whether jealousy, or any other cause, really made him careless of his brother’s success and safety, we cannot pretend to determine: the interior of a Carthaginian camp, and still more the real characters and feelings of the Carthaginian generals, are entirely unknown to us. The one great advantage possessed by Scipio, far more important than his pretended victory at Baecula, was the remarkable ascendency which ethe minds of the he had obtained over the minds of the Spaniards. Every thing Spaniards. in him was at once attractive and imposing; his youth, and the a Polybius, XXXVIII. 40. ILivy, XXVII. 19. 67 Polybius, X. 40. ” X., 9.68 Polybius, IX. 22.

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CIarP. XLVIIT.] HASDRUBAL MARCHES INTO ITALY. 599 mingled beauty and majesty of his aspect; his humanity and courtesy to the Spanish hostages and to their friends; his energy and ability at the’head of his army.

Above all, there was manifest in him that consciousness of greatness, and that spirit, at once ardent, lofty, and profound, which naturally bows the hearts and minds of ordinary men, not to obedience only and respect, but to admiration, and almost to worship. The Carthaginian generals felt, it is said, that no Spanish troops could be trusted, if brought within the sphere of his influence; Mago must go over to the Balerian islands, and raise soldiers there, who might be strangers to the name of Scipio; while Masinissa should follow the course pursued by Mutines in Sicily, and scour the whole country with his Numidian cavalry, relieving the allies of Carthage, and harassing the states which had revolted.69 But Masinissa himself was not secure from Scipio’s ascendency: his nephew had been made prisoner at Baecula, and had been sent back to him with. out ransom: ~
some conciliatory messages were probably addressed to him at the same time, and Scipio never lost sight of him, till two years afterwards he gratified the Numidian’s earnest wish for a personal interview, and then attached him forever to the interests of Rome.7’ Meanwhile that memorable year was come, when the fortune of Rome v as exposed to its severest trial, and rose in the issue signally triumphant. A. U.. 547. sdruVainly did Scipio’s guards keep vigilant watch in the passes of the bal evades Scipio, and marches into Ita[ly. eastern Pyrenees, looking out for the first signs of Hasdrubal’s marchesinto approach, and hoping to win the glory of driving him back defeated, and of marring his long-planned expedition to Italy. They sat on their mountain posts, looking earnestly southwards, while he for whom they waited was passing far on their rear northwards, winning his way through the deep valleys of the chain of Cebenna, or the high and bleak plains of the Arverni, till he should descend upon the Rhone, where it was as yet unknown to the Massaliot traders, flowing far inland in the heart of Gaul. Hasdrubal had accomplished his purpose: his Spanish soldiers were removed out of the reach of Scipio’s ascendency; the accumulated treasures of his Spanish mines had purchased the aid of a numerous band of Gauls; and the Alps had seemed to smooth their rugged fastnesses to give him an easy passage. All the strength which Rome could gather was needed for the coming struggle; and Scipio, as we have seen, sent a large detachment from his own army, both of Roman soldiers and of Spaniards, to be conveyed by sea from Tarraco to Etruria, and to assist in conquering the enemy in Italy, whose march he had been unable to stop in Spain. Thus, with Hasdrubal’s army taken away from the Carthaginian force in Spain, and with the Roman army weakened by its contributions to the A. U. C. 547. A. C. defence of Italy, the Spanish war was carried on but feebly dur-207,n Tie aam paign o ing the summer of the year 547. A new general of the name of decisive events.

Hanno had been sent over to take Hasdrubal’s place; and he and Mago proceeded to raise soldiers amongst the Celtiberians in the interior,72
while Hasdrubal Gisco was holding Batica, and while Scipio was still in his winterquarters at Tarraco, But some Celtiberian deserters informed Scipio of the danger; and he sent M. Silenus with a division of his army to put it down. A march of extreme rapidity enabled him to surprise h,1e enemy; the best of Hanno’s new levies were cut to pieces, the rest dispersed. Hanno himself was made prisoner; but Mago carried off his cavalry and his old infantry without loss, and joined Hasdrubal Gisco safely in Batica.73 The formation of a Carthaginian army in the centre of Spain was thus effectually prevented; and Scipio, encouraged by this success, ventured to resume the offensive, and to advance in pursuit of Hasdrubal Gisco into the south. Hasdrubal, instead of risking a general action, broke up his army into small detachments, with which he garrisoned the more important towns. Scipio 6, Livy, XXVII. 20. 7 Livy, XXVIII. 1.‘O

Livy, XXVII. 19. =S Livy, XXVIII. Appian, VI. 31.‘1 Livy, XXVIII. 35.

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600 HISTORY OF ROME. [CuAP. XLVIL shrank from the tedious and difficult service of a series of sieges, in a country at a distance from his resources, and where Mago and Masinissa with their cavalry would be sure to obstruct,-if not destroy, all his communications. But to avoid’ the discredit of retreating without having done any thing, he singled out one of the wealthiest and strongest of the towns thus garrisoned against him, by name Oringis, and sent his brother, L. Scipio, with a large division of his army to attack it. It was stormed after an obstinate resistance; and the conqueror, true to his brother’s policy, after carrying off his Carthaginian prisoners in the garrison, restored the town unplundered to its Spanish inhabitants.Y4 Thus much having been achieved for the honor of the Roman arms, Scipio carried back his whole army behind the Iberus, sent off L. Scipio to Rome, with Hanno and his other prisoners of distinction, and himself went into winterquarters as usual at Tarraco.75 But before the end of the season he must have received intelligence of the A. U. c.

648. A. C. battle of the Metaurus. The troops which he had sent to Italy 206. Scipio becoes.. anxious for a decisive were probably, in part at least, sent back to him; and every moactian. tive combined to make him desirous of marking the next campaign by sbme decisive action. Nero, whom he had succeeded in Spain, had won the greatest glory by his victory over Hasdrubal: it became Scipio to show that he too could serve his country no less effectively. The Carthaginian general, whether he had been reinforced from Africa, or Strength and position whether he had used extraordinary vigor in his levies of solo the to armies. diers in western Spain, took the field early in the spring of the year 548, with an army greatly superior to that of his enemy. If Polybius, or rather Scipio may be trusted, he had 70,000 foot, 4000 horse, and thirty-two elephants; while the Roman army, with all the aids which Scipio could gather from the Spanish chiefs in the Roman alliance, did not exceed 45,000 foot, and 3000
horse.6 Hasdrubal took up a position in the midst of the mining district, near a town which is variously called Elinga and Silpia;7 but neither its real name nor its exact situation can be determined. His camp lay on the last hills of the mountain country, with a wide extent of open plain in front of it. He wished to fight, and if possible on this ground, favorable at once to his superior numbers, and to his elephants. Scipio, no less anxious to bring on a general battle, marched straight towards Pooparotions for bttle. the enemy. But when he saw their numbers, he was~
uneasy lest the faith of his Spanish allies should fail, as it had towards his father; he dared not lay much stress on them; yet without them his numbers were too weak for him to risk a battle. His object therefore was to use his Spaniards for show, to impose upon the enemy, while he won the battle with his Romans. And thus, when the day came on which he proposed to fight, he suddenly changed his dispositions. For some days previously, both armies had been drawn up in order of battle before their camps; and their cavalry and light troops had skirmished in the interval between. All this time the Roman troops had formed the centre of Scipio’s line, opposite to Hasdrubal’s Africans, while the Spanish auxiliaries in both armies were on the wings. But on the day of the decisive battle, the Spaniards formed the centre of Scipio’s army, while his Roman and Italian soldiers were on the right and left. The men had eaten their breakfast before day; and the’cavalry and light troops pushed forward close under the camp of the enemy, as if challenging him to come out and meet them.

Behind this cloud: of skirmishes, the infantry were fast forming, and advancing to the middle of the plain; and when the sun rose, it shone upon the Roman line, with its order completed; the Spaniards in the centre, the Romans and Italians on -the right and left; the left commanded by M.

Silanus and L. Marcius, Scipio in person leading his right.7 I’ Livy, XXVIII. 3. bins, has been altered into Ilipa, on the au-‘6 Livy, XXVIII.

4. thority of Strabo; in the text of Livy the name’ Polybius, XL. 20.

Livy, XXVIII. 12. stands Silpia. Elinga in the MS. and old text of Poly-78 Polybius, XL. 22.’ Livy, XXVIII. 14.

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CasP. XLVII.] CAMPAIGN OF 548. 601 The assault of the Roman cavalry and light troops called out Hasdrubal’s army; the Carthaginians poured forth from their camp without hearmiengage. waiting to eat, just as the Romans had done at the Trebia; their cavalry and light troops engaged the enemy; while their infantry formed in its usual order, with the Spanish auxiliaries on the wings, and the Africans in the centre. In this state the infantry on both sides remained for a time motionless; but when the day was advanced, Scipio called off his skirmishers, sent them to the rear, through the intervals of his maniples, and formed them behind his infantry on both wings; the light infantry immediately behind the regular infantry, and the cavalry covering all. For a few moments the Roman line seemed advancing evenly to meet the line of the enemy. But suddenly the troops on the right wing began Scipio gain a complete to wheel round to the left, and those on the left wing wheeled to victory. the right, changing their lines into columns; while the cavalry moved round from the rear, and took up its position on the outside of the columns; and both infantry and cavalry now advanced with the utmost fury against the enemy.

Thus the centre of the Roman army was held back by the rapid advance of its wings; and the Africans in Hasdrubal’s centre were standing idle, doing nothing, whilst the battle was raging on their right and left, and yEt not venturing to move from their position to support their wings, because of the enemy in their front, who threatened every moment to attack, yet still advanced as slowly as possible to give time for the attacks on the two wings to complete their work. And this work was not long; Roman and Italian veterans were opposed to newly raised Spaniards; men well fed to men exhausted by their long fast; men perfect in all their movements, and handled by their general with masterly skill, to barbarians confused by evolutions which neither they nor their officers could deal with. As usual, the elephants did as much mischief to friends as to foes; and the Carthaginian wings, broken and slaughtered, began to fly. Then the Africans in the centre commenced their retreat also; slowly at first, as men who had not themselves been beaten; but the flight of their allies infected them; and the Romans pressed them so hardly, that they too rushed towards their camp with more haste than order.“9 The battle was won; and Scipio said that the camp would have been won also, had not a violent storm suddenly burst on the field of battle, and the rain fallen in such a deluge, that the Romans could not stand against it, but were obliged to seek the shelter of their own camp. Their work,’ however, was done; not least probably by the effect which the battle would have on the minds of the Spaniards. In the Carthaginian army, their countrymen had been exposed to defeat and slaughter, while the Africans looked on tamely, and moved neither hand nor foot to aid them; on the other hand, the Spaniards in Scipio’s army had obtained a victory, with no loss to themselves; it had been purchased altogether by the blood of the Romans. Accordingly, the Carthaginian generals found that the contest in Spain was virtually ended.

The Spanish soldiers in their army went over in large bodies to the enemy; the Spanish towns opened their gates thaginian dominion ia to the Romans, and put the Carthaginian garrisons into their hands. S Ilasdrubal and Mago, closely followed by the enemy, retreated by the right bank of the Bmtis to the shores of the ocean, and effected their escape by sea to Gades. Masinissa left them, and went home to Africa, not, it is said, without having a secret interview with M. Silanus, and settling the conditions and manner of its defection. Scipio himself returned by slow marches to Tarraco,inquiring by the way into the merits or demerits of the various native chiefs, who came crowding around him to plead their services, and to propitiate the favor of the new conqueror of Spain.

Silanus, whom he had left behind in the south, to witness the final dispersion of the army of Hasdrubal, soon after rejoined him at 79

Polybius, XI. 23, 24. Livy, XXVIII. 15, 16.

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602 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHm, XLVII Tarraco, and reported to him that the war was over, that no enemy was to be found in the field, from the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules.80 Scipio therefore sent off his brother to Rome, to announce the completion of his work. His own mind was already turned to another field of action: the expulsion of the Carthaginians from Spain seemed to him only to be valued as Scipio crosses to Africa, and negotiato, withSy-it might enable him the easier to carry the war into Africa. He Jplnh had already won the support of Masinissa: but he desired to se,, cure a more powerful ally; and accordingly he sent Laelius over to Africa, to sound the dispositions of the Maspesylian king, Syphax, the most powerful of all the African princes, and who, although at present in alliance with the Carthaginians, had been, not many years since, their enemy. Syphax told Laelius that he would negotiate only with the Roman general in person; and Scipio, relying on his own personal ascendency, and affecting in all things what was extraordinary, did not hesitate to leave his province, and to cross over from New Carthage to Africa, with only two quinqueremes, in order to visit the Masmesylian king. No less fortunate than Napoleon, when returning from Egypt to France in his solitary frigate, Scipio crossed the sea without accident, and entered the king’s port in safety, with the wind so brisk and fair as to carry him into the harbor in a straight course, in a very short time after his ships had first been seen from the shore.sl In the harbor, by the strangest of chances, were seven ships of the Carthaginians, which had just brought Hasdrubal from Spain with the very same object as Scipio, t) secure the alliance of king Syphax; it having been known, probably, that a Roman officer had lately visited his court, with purposes which could not be doubtful. Hasdrubal and Scipio met under the roof of Syphax; and by his special request, they were present at the same entertainment.82 Lselius, who had accompanied his friend to Africa, magnified the charms of his address and conversation, according to his usual practice, and told Polybius, many years afterwards, that Hasdrubal had expressed to Syphax his great admiration of Scipio’s genius, which, he said, appeared to him more dangerous in peace than in war.3 Lmelius further declared that Syphax was so overcome by Scipio’s influence, as to conclude a treaty of alliance with him,84 which treaty, however, we may be very sure, was not one of those which Polybius found preserved in the capitol. It is very possible that Syphax amused Scipio with fair promises; but in reality Hasdrubal negotiated more successfully than his Roman rival; and the beauty of his daughter, Sophonisba, was more powerful over the mind of Syphax, than all the fascinations of Scipio’s eloquence and manners.85 Scipio, however, was satisfied with the swccess of his mission, and returned again to New Carthage. It is manifest that, when Scipio and Silanus returned from the south of Spain nsnlrrection of the Span-to Tarraco, after the dispersion of the Carthaginian army, they im. iards. agined that their work was done; and they cannot have expected to be called out again to active operations in the same year. But, after Scipio’s return from his voyage to Africa, we find him again taking the field in the south: we find a general revolt of the Spanish chiefs, who had so lately joined him; and what is most startling, we find his own Roman army breaking out into an alarming mutiny. Livy’s explanation is, simply, that the present appeared a favorable opportunity to punish those Spanish towns which had made themselves most obnoxious to Rome in the course of the war, and on which it would not have been expedient to take vengeance earlier.86 But surely, if any such intention had been entertained a few weeks sooner, the Roman army would never have been marched back behind the Iberus, but would have proceeded at once to attack the obnoxious towns, as soon as Hasdrubal and Mago had retired to Gades, and the el Livy, XXVIII. 16. s4 Livy, XXVIII.

18. el Livy, XXVIII. 17. 6 Livy, XXIX. 28. sa Livy, XXVIII. 18. e6 Livy, XXVIII. 19. 83 XI. Fragm. Mai. Livy, XXVIII. 18.

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CnAr. XLVII.] SIEGE OF ILLITURGI. 603 Carthaginian army was broken up.

Either the Spaniards must have given some new provocation, which called Scipio again into the field; or some new motive must have influenced him, which hitherto he had not felt, and, outweighing all other considerations, forced him to retrace his steps to the south. Either of these causes is sufficiently probable. Mago had by this time received instructions from Hannibal; and acting under such direction, he was not likely to abandon Spain to the Romans without another Probab ca.e.ofit struggle. We read of a Carthaginian garrison in Castulo, which is said to have fled thither after the dispersion of Hasdrubal’s army;81 but it may also have been sent thither by Mago from Gades, to assist in organizing a new rising against the Romans. The mines were still in his hands; and he probably employed their treasures liberally. Nor were causes wanting to rouse the Spaniards, without any foreign instigation. If they had admired Scipio, they had since found that his virtues did not restrain the license of his army; the Roman soldiers had fleshed themselves with the plunder of Spain, and were likely to return after a moment’s respite, and fall again upon their prey.

On the other hand, the Roman army, like the Spaniards afterwards in America, may have been so eager to prosecute their conquest, and to win more of the wealth of Spain, that their general found it impossible not to gratify them; or they may have:sh-wn symptoms of license and turbulence, which made -it desirable to keep them actively employed, that they might not have leisure to contrive mischief: whatever was the cause, the Roman army again marched into the south of Spain. L. Marcius was ordered to attack Castulo; Scipio himself laid siege to Illiturgi. Illiturgi stood on the north, or right bank of the Bmtis, near to the site of the present town of Andujar, and not far therefore from Baylen, and Situation and stats ol from the scene of the almost solitary triumph of the Spanish arms Illiturgi. in the war with Napoleon. Its people had been allies of the Carthaginians, and had revolted to Rome, when the two Scipios first advanced into the south of Spain;88 but after their defeat and death, Illiturgi had gone back to the alliance of Carthage; and the Roman fugitives from the rout:of the two Scipios, who escaped to Illiturgi, were either cut off by the inhabitants, or given up by them to the Carthaginians. Such was the Roman account of the matter; and Castulo was charged with a similar defection after the defeat of the Scipios, a defection however not aggravated, as at Illiturgi, by any particular acts of hostility.89 Vengeance was now to be taken for this alleged treason.

Without any terms of peace offered or solicited on either side, the Romans prepared’Itscaptureanddestructo attack Illiturgi, and the Spaniards with all their national oob-tio.stinacy to defend it. They fought so stoutly, that the Romans were more than once repulsed; and Scipio was at last obliged to offer to lead the assault in person, and was preparing to mount the first ladder, when a general shout of his soldiers called upon him to forbear: with an overwhelming rush of numbers they crowded up the ladders in many places at once, and drove the defenders by main force from the ramparts. At the same moment, Leelius scaled the walls on the opposite side of’the city; and some African deserters, who were now in the Roman service, men trained to all feats of daring activity, climbed up the almost precipitous cliff on which the citadel was built, and surprised it without esistance.90 Then followed a horrible massacre, in which neither age nor sex was spared; and when the sword had done its work upon the people, fire was let loose upon the buildings of the city, and Illiturgi was totally destroyed. Scipio then marched to Castulo to support L.

Marcius,.who had been able, it seems, to make no impression with the force under his separate Capture of Castulo: command. But Scipio’s arrival, fresh from the storming of Illi-. turgi, struck terror into the besieged; and the Spaniards hoped to make their “I Livy, XXVIII. 20. 1e Livy, XXVIII. 19. 0a Livy, XXIII. 49.‘I Livy, XXVIII. 19, 20,

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604 HISTORY OF ROME. [COA. XLVII. peace by surrendering, not their town only, but a Carthaginian garrison, which was engaged jointly with them in its defence. The Romans treated Castulo; says Livy, more mildly than they had treated Illiturgi; which seems to imply that even at Castulo blood was shed after the town was taken, though it did not amount to an indiscriminate massacre.9’ After the second conquest, Scipio left it to L.

Marcius to complete the work, of Astpa: selfdevo- whether of vengeance or of ambition, by the subjugation of the tion ofitsiuhabitants. other towns of Bratica, while he himself returned to New Carthage.92 Marcius crossed the Beetis, and received the submission of some of the towns on the left bank; but the inhabitants of one place, Astapa, which had rendered itself obnoxious, by carrying on an active guerilla warfare against the Roman detached parties and communications, exhibited one of those-shocking instances of desperation which testify so painfully to the miserable lot of the vanquished in ancient -arfare. They erected a great pile in the middle of their city, on which they threw all their ornaments and most valuable property, and then bade their wives and children ascend it, and sit down quietly on the top. Fifty chosen men were left to keep watch beside the pile, while the rest of the citizens sallied out against the Romans, determined to fight till they were cut to pieces. They fell to a man, selling their lives dearly: in the mean while the fifty men left by the pile performed their dreadful task; they set it on fire; they butchered the womien and children who were placed on it, and then threw themselves into the flames. The Roman soldiers lost their plunder, and exclaimed against the desperate ferocity of the people of Astapa.93 After this tragedy, the neighboring towns submitted; and Marcius returned to Offer to surrnder Ga-his general at New Carthage. But he was not allowed to rest: ade sfor a secret deputation came to Scipio from Gades, offering to surrender the city to him, along with the Carthaginian fleet and garrison employed in maintaining it, and Mago their general, Hannibal’s brother. Again therefore Marcius took the field with a light division of the army; and Laelius accompanied him by sea with a small squadron, to ascertain whether the offer could really be executed.94 It was now late in the summer; and the season, combined with the fatigue and ci io’sillness: mutiny excitement which he had undergone, brought on a serious illness the toman arnmy. upon Scipio, which rumor magnified, spreading the tidings over Spain that the great Roman general could not live. At once, it is said, the fidelity of the Spanish chiefs was shaken: Mandonius and Indibilus, who had regarded Scipio with such extreme veneration, cared nothing for the Roman people, and prepared to assert their country’s independence, by driving out the Roman army.25 But a worse mischief was threatening; a division of eight thousand Roman or Italian soldiers, who were quartered in a stationary camp on the Sucro, Ma once as a reserve for the army engaged in the field, and as a covering force to keep the more northern parts of Spain quiet, broke out into open mutiny; and having driven their tribunes from the camp, they conferred the command on two private soldiers, the one C. Atrius, of the allied people of the Umbrians, and the other C. Albius, of the Latin colony of Cales. It is probable that this division of Scipio’s army consisted almost entirely of Latins and Italian allies; and the generals chosen accordingly represented both of these, and assumed the full state of Roman generals, causing the lictors to go before them, and to bear the rods and axes, which were the symbol of the consul’s imperium, his absolute power of life and death.9 The alleged grievance of the mutinous soldiers was, that their pay was greatly Itecauses; Scipio’s re. in arrears. This indeed was likely to be the case, the treasury of COVOry. ~ Rome being ill able to meet the numerous demands for the public “L Livy, XXVIII. 20. g4 Livy, XXVIII.. 23. 92 Livy, XXVIII.

21.’ Livy, XXVIII. 24. ” Livy, XXVIII. 22, 23. Appian, VI. 33. 96 Livy, XXVIII. 25.

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CHAr. XLVII.] SCIPIO’S POLITIC CONDUCT. 605 service; and as the Spanish army had avowedly been left to its own resources as to money, it is probable that the soldiers were allowed to plunder the more freely, in order to reconcile them to their not being paid in the regular manner.

Scipio himself was charged with injuring the discipline of his army by his indulgence: here, as in other things, it was in his character to rely on his own personal ascendency; and he thought that he might dispense with the constant strictness necessary to ordinary men, as he was sure that his soldiers would never be disobedient to him. But however lax his discipline was, troops at a distance from the seat of war, and quartered amongst a friendly or submissive people, must be somewhat restrained in their license of plunder; and accordingly, even before Scipio’s illness, the soldiers on the Sucro complained that they were neither paid regularly as in peace, nor allowed to provide for themselves as in war. And when they heard that Scipio was at the point of death, and that the Spaniards in the north were revolting from Rome, they hoped to draw their own profit out of these troubled-waters, and, following the example of the Campanians at Rhegium, to secure a city for themselves, and to live in luxury upon the plunder and the tributes of the surrounding people.”’ It is said that Mago from Gades sent them money, to prevail on them to enter into the service of Carthage, and that they took the money, but did no more than appoint their own generals, take oath of fidelity to one another, and remain in a state of open revolt from Rome.“s They probably thought that they might establish themselves in Spain without serving any government at all; and that their own swords were more to be relied on than Mago’s promises.

While this was the state of affairs on the Sucro, tidings came, not of Scipio’s death, but of his convalescence; and presently seven military tribunes arrived in the camp, sent by Scipio to prevent the soldiers from breaking out into any worse outrage. The tribunes affected to rejoice that matters had not been carried to any greater extremity; they acknowledged the former services of the troops, and said that Scipio was not a man to forget or leave them unrewarded; meanwhile the general would endeavor to raise money from the subject tribes of Spain, to make good their arrears of pay. Accordingly soon afterwards a proclamation appeared, inviting the soldiers to come to New Carthage to receive it.99 Scipio’s rectvery was felt from one end of Spain to the other; the revolted Spaniards gave up their hostile purposes, and returned quietly to The mutineers come to their homes; and the soldiers on the Sucro, moved at once by the NewCarthago. fear of resisting one whom the gods seemed to favor in all things, and by the hope of receiving, not only pardon for their fault, but the very pay which they demanded, resolved to march in a body to New Carthage. As they drew near to that city, the seven tribunes, who had visited their camp on the Sucro, came to meet them, gave them fair words, and mentioned, as if incidentally, that M. Silanus, with the troops at New Carthage, was to march the next morning to put down the revolt of Mandonius and Indibilis. Delighted to find that Scipio would thus be left without any force at his disposal, they entered New Carthage in high spirits: there they saw the troops all busy in preparations for their departure; and they were told that the general was rejoiced at their seasonable arrival, to supply the place of the soldiers who were going to leave him. In perfect confidence they dispersed to their quarters for the night.‘00 Thus the prey had run blindly into the snare. The seven tribunes, who met the soldiers on their march, had each been furnished with the names of five of the principal ringleaders, whom they were to secure in Th the course of the evening without disturbance. Accordingly they invited them to supper in their quarters, seized them all, and kept them in close custody till the next morning. But all else was quiet: the baggage of the army which was 97 Livy, XXVIII. 24.‘9 Livy, XXVIII. 25. 8

Appian, VI. 34. 10o Livy, XXVIII. 26.

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606 HISTORY OF ROME. [CHAP. XLVII to take the field against the Spaniards began to move before daybreak; about dawn the columns of the troops formed in the streets, and marched: out of the town. But they halted at the gates; and parties were sent round to every other gate to secure them all, and to take care that no one should leave the city. In the mean time the troops from the Sucro were summoned to the forum to meet their general; and they crowded impatiently to the place, without their arms, as was the custom of the Greek soldiers on similar occasions. No sooner were they all assembled, than the columns from: the gates marched into the town, and occupied all the streets leading to the market-place. Then Scipio presented himself on his tribunal, and sat a while in silence. But as soon as he heard that the prisoners, who had been secured on the preceding evening, were brought up, the crier, with his loud clear voice, commanded silence, and: Scipio arose to speak.101 The scene had been prepared with consummate art; and its effect was overwhelming. The: mutinous soldiers saw themselves completely in the mutiny is quelled by the punishment of-their general’s power; they listened: in breathless anxiety to his eringleader. address, and with joy beyond all hope heard his concluding sontence, that he freely pardoned the multitude, and that justice would be satisfied with the punishment of’ those who had misled them. The instant he-ceased speaking, the troops posted in the adjoining streets clashed their swords on their shields, as. if they were going to attack the mutineers; and the crier’s voice was again heard calling the names of the thirtyfive ringleaders, one after another, to receive the punishment to which they had been condemned. They were brought forth, already stripped and bound:; each was fastened to his stake; and all underwent their sentence, being first scourged, and then beheaded. When all was finished the bodies were dragged: away, to be thrown out of the city; the place of execution was cleansed from the blood; and the soldiers from the Sucro heard the general and the other officers swear to grant them a free pardon with an entire amnesty for the: past. They were then summoned by the crier, one by one, to appear before the general to take the usual military oath of obedience, after which each man received his full arrears of pay.‘02 Never was mutiny quelled with more consummate ability-;- and Scipio’s ascendency over his soldiers after this memorable scene was doubtless more complete than ever. The punishment of the mutineers, however, we are told, rendered the revolted The revolted Spaniards Spaniards desperate. Thinking that they had already done enough…areubdaed. to draw down Scipio’s vengeance, they resolved to try the chances of war, and again took the field, and began to attack the allies of the Romans on the north of the Iberus. Scipio lost not a moment in marchiing in pursuit of them: he was not sorry to employ his: soldiers against the enemy, as the surest means of effacing the recollection of their recent disorders; and he spoke of the Spaniards with bitter contempt, as barbarians equally powerless and faithless, on whom he was resolved to take signal vengeance. In ten days he marched from New Carthage to the Iberus; and on the fourth day after crossing the river he came in sight of the enemy. He engaged and totally defeated them, not, however, without a loss of more than: four thousand men killed and wounded; and immediately after the battle the chiefs threw themselves on his mercy. He required nothing more than the immediate payment of a sum of money, which was to make good the money lately advanced or borrowed: to pay the soldiers after the mutiny; and then, leaving Silanus at Tarraco, he returned to New Carthage.103 Even yet he would not allow himself to rest. Leaving the mass of his army Scipio’sintervie with at New Carthage, he joined L. Marcius, his lieutenant, in the Masinissa. neighborhood of Gades, for the sole purpose, it is said, of gratifying Masinissa’s earnest desire of a personal interview. Masinissa had returned from Africa to Gades, and was professedly consulting with Mago how one more 101 Livy, XXVIII. 26. 103 Polybius, XI. 31-33. Livy, XXVIII. 10a Polybius, XI. 30.

Livy, XXVIII. 29. Ap-31-34. pian$, VI. 86.

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CHAP. XLVII.] MAGO EVACUATES SPAIN. 607 attempt might be made to restore the Carthaginian dominion in Spain. But his mind was already made up to join the Romans; and he took the opportunity of a pretended plundering excursion with his Numidian cavalry to arrange and effect a meeting with Scipio. He too, it is said, like all other men, was overawed aM once, and delighted by Scipio’s personal appearance, manlner, and conversation; he promised the most zealous aid to the Romans, and urged Scipio to cross over as soon as possible into Africa, where he might be able to serve him most effectually.‘04 Scipio’s keen discernment of character tatght him the value of Masinissa’s friendship; and his journey from New Carthage to Gades, in order to secure it, was abundantly rewarded afterwards; for had Masinissa fought in Hannibal’s army, Scipio, in all probability, would never have won the day at Zama. Mago heard of the termination of the mutiny in the Roman army, and of the defeat of the revolted Spaniards in the north; and he found that Mago evacuate Spain,, the Roman army was again returned to New Carthage, and that i,,ndkinoc..Sporinvadig all hopes of making head against Rome in Spain were, for th-Italypresent, at an end. Hannibal summoned him to Italy; and the Carthaginian government, acting, as it seems, cordially upon Hannibal’s views, ordered him to obey his brother’s call. It was not the least bold enterprise of this great war, to plan the invasion of Italy from Gades, at a time when the whole of Spain, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pyrenees, was possessed by the enemy. But Scipio, to strengthen his land forces, had laid up the greater part of his fleet; and the exertions of the Carthaginian government, or his own, had provided Mago with a naval force, small probably in point of numbers, but consisting of excellent ships manned by skilful seamen, and capable, if ably used, of rendering essential service. He was supplied with money from Carthage; and he levied large contributions, it is said, on the people of Gades, and even emptied their treasury, and stripped their temples.‘05 He then put to sea, so late in the season, that Scipio was gone back to Tarraco, and was preparing to return to Rome; and the Roman army being gone into its winterquarters behind the Iberus, New Carthage was left to the protection of its own garrison. This encouraged Mago to attempt to surprise the place; but in this he failed: he then crossed over to the Island of Pityusa (Iviza), which was held by the Carthaginians; and having there received supplies of provisions and of men, he proceeded to attack the two Balerian islands, now called Majorca and Minorca. He was repulsed from the larger island, but made himself master of the smaller: there he landed his men, and drew up his ships, and purposed to pass the winter, the season securing him from any attack by sea, perhaps even hiding his movements altogether from the knowledge of the Romans; while he lay in readiness to catch the first return of spring, and to run over to Italy, and establish himself on the coast of Liguria, in the midst of a warlike population, furnishing the materials of a future army.‘06 Spain was thus abandoned by the Carthaginians; and Gades, left to itself, went over to the Roman alliance, and concluded a treaty with L.

Treaty with Gader. lMarcius, which for two centuries formed the basis of its relations Scipioreturns to Roe.. with Rome.’?7 He had probably been left in command at New Carthage, when Scipio returned to Tarraco. Scipio himself was known to be d(esirous of leaving Spain, and offering himself as a candidate for the consulship; and accordingly L. Lentulus and L.

Manlius Acidius were appointed proconsuls to succeed him and M. Silanus in the command of the Roman army and province. Scipio mceanwhile, accompanied by C. Laelius, returned to Rome; he could not have a triumph, because he had been neither consul nor prector; but he entered the city with some display, with an immense treasure of silver, in money and in ingots, which he deposited in the treasury; and his name was so popular,. that he was I Livy, XXVIII. 35.‘7 Livy, XXVIII. 87. Apilan, VI. 87. See’ Livy, XXVIII.

36. Cicero pro Cornelio, c. XVII. 101 Livy, XXVIII. 87.

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608 HISTORY OF ROME. [SUPPLEMENT. elected consul immediately, with an almost unanimous feeling in his favor. His colleague was P. Licinius Crassus, who at that time held the dignity of Pontifex Maximus.’~S Thus the war, being altogether extinguished in Spain, was reduced as it were Prosp6cts ofthe warin to Italy only; and there it smoldered rather than blazed; for Ita4. Hannibal with his single army could do no more than maintain his ground in Bruttium. Was it possible that Mago might kindle a fierce flame in Liguria? might blow up the half-extinguished ashes in Etruria, and reviving the fire in the south, spread the conflagration around the walls of Rome? This was not beyond possibility: but Scipio, impatient of defensive warfare, and himself the conqueror of a vast country, was eager to stop the torrent at its source, rather than raise barriers against it, when it was sweeping down the valley: he was bent on combating Hannibal, not in Italy, but in Africa. SUPPLE MENT, [WITH the preceding chapter the work is unfortunately terminated. From a note in the margin, that chapter appears to have been finished on the 6th of May; on the 12th of June the author breathed his last. Two more chapters at least would have been requisite to brine the history down to the end of the Second Punic War; for the heading of the forty-eighth chapter shows what it was intended to contain:-Last years of the war in Italy-Consulship of P. Scipio-Scipio in Sicily-Siege of Locri-Scipio in Africa-His victories over Hasdrubal Gisco and Syphax-The Carthaginians recall Hannibal and Mago from Italy-A. u. c. 548 to A. U. c. 551. Every reader of the foregoing narrative of one of the most interesting and eventful periods in ancient history, must regret that the author was not allowed to carry it on to the close of the war. As the best substitute for that which we should have had, the following account of the’ last years of the war, written by Dr.

Arnold in the year 1823, for the life of Hannibal in the Encyclopnedia Metropolitana, is here inserted.] The defeat and destruction of Hasdrubal’s army reduced Hannibal to the neces-. Adventures and death sity of acting entirely on the defensive. It had been for some time of Mago.

evident, that his single army could not overthrow the supremacy of Rome in Italy. Still, while the fate of the war was balanced in Spain and Sicily, and while he was looking forward to the arrival of his brother to cooperate with him, he might be justified in making himself as troublesome as possible to the enemy, even though by so doing he might sometimes incur the danger of some loss. But now his policy was altered: to maintain his ground in Italy, till another effort could be made by his government to support him, was become his most important duty. He was obliged to abandon several towns which had revolted to him from the Romans; and he forced the inhabitants of others to desert their homes, and to retire with him into the remotest part of Bruttium. The superiority of his personal character was so great, that the Romans never dared to attack him; and thus he might repose for a while, watching the first favorable opportunity of issuing from his retreat, and attempting once more to accomplish the design with which he had originally invaded Italy. The death of HIasdrubal had not extinguished all his hopes. Mago, after the total wreck of the 10 Livy, XXVIII. 38.

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LUPPLEMENT.] HANNIBAL EVACUATES ITALY. 609’Carthaginian interest in Spain, was ordered, as we have seen, to attempt a diver-. sion in Italy, and transporting a small force with him by sea, landed in Liguria, and surprised the town of Genoa.’ The name of his family ulged the Gauls and Ligurians to flock to his standard; and his growing strength excited much alarm among the Romans, and obliged them to keep a large army in the north of Italy to watch his movements. The details of his adventures are unknown; nor are we informed what cause prevented him from attempting to penetrate into Tuscany. We only find that he became so formidable an enemy as to maintain an obstinate contest against an army of four Roman legions, a few weeks before the final evacuation of Italy by Hannibal; nor were the Romans certain of victory, till Mago was mortally wounded, and obliged to leave the field. From the scene of this battle, which is said to lave been in the country of the Insubrian Gauls, he retreated with as much expedition as his wound would allow, to the coast of Liguria; and there he found orders from Carthage that he should immediately return to Africa, to oppose the alarming progress of P. Scipio. He accordingly embarked with his troops, and commenced his voyage homewards: but his exertions and anxiety of mind had proved too great for his strength; and he had scarcely passed the coast of Sardinia, when he expired. So unwearied was the zeal, and so great the ability, with which the sons of Hamilcar maintained the cause of their country, altmost solely by their personal efforts, against the overbearing resources and energy of the Roman people. When the Carthaginian government sent for Mago from Italy, they also recalled Hannibal. The account of his operations during the three Hannibal evacuates Itor four years that preceded his return to Africa is peculiarly un- “1ysatisfactory. The Roman writers have transmitted some reports of victories obtained over him in Italy, too audacious in falsehood for even themselves to have believed. But, in truth, the terror with which he continued to inspire his enemies, after his career of success was closed, is even more wonderful than his first brilliant triumphs. For four years after the death of Hasdrubal, he remained in undisputed possession of Bruttium, when the Romans had reconquered all the rest of Italy. Here he maintained his army, without receiving any supplies from home, and with no other naval force at his disposal, than such vessels as he could build from the Bruttium forests, and man with the sailors of the country. Here too he seems to have looked forward to the renown which awaited him in aftertimes; and as if foreseeing the interest with which posterity would follow his progress in his unequalled enterprise, he recorded many minute particulars of his campaigns on monumental columns, erected at Lacinium,2
a town situated in that corner of Italy, which was so long like a new country acquired by conquest, for himself and his soldiers. At length, when it was plain that no new diversion could be effected in his favor, and when the dangerous situation of his country called for his presence, as the last hope of Carthage, he embarked his troops without the slightest interruption from the Romans; and moved only by the disasters of lthers, while his own army was. unbroken and unbeaten, he abandoned’ Italy fifteen years after he had first entered it, having ravaged it with fire and sword from one extremity to the other, and having never seen his numercus victories checkered by a single defeat. Scipio, meanwhile, after his important services, in Spain,. had returned to Rome, and been elected consul, hoping to carry into execution the design A. v. A. c. which he had for some time conceived, of forcing Hannibal to leave 204. Scipio carries tho Italy, by attacking the Carthaginians in Africa. But according to i Africa. the invariable’policy of Rome, he was desirous of securing the aid of some ally in the country which he was going to make the seat of war.

For this end, as we.have seen, he had already opened a communication with Syphax, the most considerable of the Numidian princes, and, according to Livy, had actually concluded a treaty with him.‘But Syphax was won over to the interests of Carthage by Livy, XXVIII. 46. XXX. 18. 2 Polybius, III.

33, 56. 39

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610 HISTORY OF ROME. [SUPPLEME.N the charms of Sophonisba, the daughter of Hasdrubal Gisco; and a short time before Scipio crossed over into Africa, he sent to inform him of his new connection, and to dissuade him from his intended expedition, as he should now be obliged to join the Carthaginians in opposing him. Scipio, however, was not yet without the prospect of finding allies in Africa. Masinissa had deserted the Carthaginian cause after its disasters in Spain, and had privately pledged himself to support the Romans on the first opportunity. Since that time he had been deprived of his paternal dominions by the united efforts of Syphax and the Carthaginians; but though his power was thus reduced, his zeal in the cause of Romo was likely to be the more heightened; and as his personal character was high among his countrymen, many of them might be expected to join him, when they saw him supported by a Roman army. Accordingly, he united himself3 to Scipio so soon as he had landed in Africa; and his activity, and perfect familiarity with the country and its inhabitants, made him a very valuable auxiliary. The landing had been effected within a few miles of Carthage itself; and after some plunder, amongst which eight thousand prisoners to be sold for slaves are particularly specified, had been collected from the adjoining country, the army formed the siege of Utica, whilst a considerable fleet cooperated with it on the side of the sea. But the approach of Hasdrubal Gisco and Syphax, at the head of two immense armies of Carthaginians and Numidians, induced Scipio to raise the siege, and to remove his troops to a strong position near the sea, where he proposed to remain, as winter was fast approaching, and secure of subsistence, through the cooperation of his fleet, to wait for:some favorable opportunity of striking a vigorous blow. His first hope was4 to win over Syphax again to the Roman cause; and with this view his emissaries were continually going and returning beHe destroys the Carthagininnatnd Numid-tween the Roman and Numidian camps. Their temptations to ian army. Syphax were ineffectual: but their report of the manner in which the Carthaginian and Numidian armies were quartered, suggested to Scipio the possibility of insuring success by other means than negotiation. They related, that the Carthaginians were lodged in huts constructed of stakes or hurdles, and covered with leaves, and that the Numidian quarters were composed of similar materials, of reeds, thatch, and dried leaves. Upon this intelligence Scipio conceived the plan of setting fire to both the camps of the enemy. In order to gain a more perfect knowledge of their situation, and the approaches to them, he pretended to listen to the terms of peace which Syphax had before proposed to him in vain. Under pretence of negotiation, he was for some months in constant correspondence with the Numidian king; and disguising some of his most intelligent soldiers in the dress of slaves, he procured them an easy entrance into the enemy’s camp, as forming part of the suite of the officers employed in the negotiation. At last, when the season for military operations was returning, and his seemingly sincere desire of peace had thrown the enemy into a state of perfect security, he-suddenly broke off all communication with them, declaring that, however disposed he himself was to agree to the proposed terms, the other members of the military council were fixed on rejecting them. This sudden rupture disappointed Syphax; but neither he nor the Carthaginian general had any suspicion of Scipio’s real designs; when suddenly the Roman army marched out by night in two divisions, the one commanded by Scipio, and the other by Laelius, his second in command, and advanced against the camps of the enemy, which were not more than six miles from their’own. Laelius, assisted by Masinissa, first silently approached the encampment of the Numidians, and set fire to the first tents that he met with. The flames spread so rapidly, that the Numidians were soon precluded from approaching the quarter where they had first broken out, and thus, having no suspicion that they had been kindled-by the enemy, crowded s Livy, XXIX. 29. 4

Polybius, XIV. 1, &c.

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SWUPPLEKENT.] SCIPIO’S VICTORIES IN AFRICA. t6 11 together in the utmost disorder to effect their escape out of the camp. Numbers were trampled to death in the confusion at the several outlets; numbers were overtaken by the flames and burnt to death; and the rest, on reaching the open country, found themselves intercepted by Masinissa, who had posted his troops in the quarter to which he knew that the fugitives were most likely to direct their flight. In this manner the whole Numidian army, amounting to sixty thousand men, was completely destroyed or dispersed, with the exception of Syphax himself and a few horsemen. Meanwhile the Carthaginians, when they first saw the camp of their allies on fire, not doubting that it was occasioned by accident, began partly to run w’ith assistance to the Numidians, and the rest rushed hastily out of their tents, without their arms, and stood on the outside of the camp, contemplating the progress of this fearful conflagration with dismay. In this he]lless state they found themselves attacked by the enemy, under the command of Scipio in person: some were instantly cut down; and the rest, driven back into their camp, saw it set on fire by their pursuers. They then understood the whole extent of the calamity which had befallen their allies and themselves; but resistance and flight were alike impracticable; the fire spread with fury to every quarter; and every avenue was choked up by a struggling crowd of men and horses, all striving with the same distracted efforts to effect their escape. In this attempt, Hasdrubal and a few followers alone succeeded; thirty thousand men, who had composed the Carthaginian army, perished. The annals of war contain no bloodier tragedy. Hasdrubal, hopeless of delaying the progress of the enemy, continued his flight to Carthage; while Syphax had retreated into the opposite direc-H gains another vietion towards his own dominions, and was endeavoring to rally the tory. wrecks of his army. After much debate in the Carthaginian supreme council, it was resolved that the fortune of war should be tried once more. Syphax was prevailed upon to join his troops to theirs, instead of confining himself to the defence of Numidia; and the recent arrival of four thousand Spaniards, who had been enlisted by Carthaginian agents in Spain, encouraged the two confederates to hope for a successful issue.

Scipio was so engrossed with the siege of Utica, which he had pushed with additional vigor after his late victory, that he allowed the enemy to unite their forces, and appear again in the field with no fewer than thirty thousand men. But when he heard of their junction, he lost no time in advancing to meet them; and engaging them a second time, in little more than a month after the destruction of their former armies, he again totally defeated them, and obliged their two generals to fly once more, Syphax to Numidia, and Hasdrubal to Carthage. The victors now divided their forces: Lselius and Masinissa were dispatched in pursuit of Syphax; and in a short time Masinissa recovered his A. U. C. t5t. A. C. father’s kingdom; and Syphax, having risked a third battle, was 0~2. Defeat and cptare of Syphax. The not only defeated as before, but was himself made prisoner, and Carthagia.ns asue fof his capital fell into the hands of the enemy. Scipio meantime… overran the country towards Carthage, receiving or forcing the submission of the surrounding towns, and enriching his soldiers with an immense accumulation of plunder. The chief part of this, in order to lighten his army, he sent back to his winterquarters before Utica; and then he advanced as far as Tunis, and finding that important place abandoned by its garrison, posted himself there, hoping by his presence in the immediate neighborhood of the capital, to terrify the Carthaginians into complete submission. But they had not yet abandoned more resolute counsels; and instead of suing for peace, they determined to send messengers to Italy, to recall Hannibal and Mago, and, in the mean time, to make an attempt to raise the blockade of Utica, by destroying the Roman fleet., The attempt was made, and was partly successful; but this slight advantage was so far overbalanced by the defeat and capture of Syphax, intelligence of which reached Carthage about the same time, that the further prosecution of the war appeared

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612 HISTORY OF ROME. L[SPPLEMNI: desperate, and a deputation from the council of elders was sent to Scipio to solicit terms of peace. It is said that these deputies forgot their own and their country’s dignity in the humbleness of their entreaties: they moved Scipio, however, to dictate such conditions as he might well deem a sufficient recompense of his victories; conditions which, by obliging the Carthaginians to evacuate Italy and Gaul,-to cede Spain and all the islands between Italy and Africa,-to give up all their ships of war, except twenty,-and to pay an immense contribution of corn and money,-sufficiently declared the complete triumph of the Roman arms. Hard as they were, the Carthaginians judged them sufficiently favorable to be accepted without difficulty. A truce was concluded with Scipio; and ambassadors were sent to Rome to procure the ratification of the senate and people. With regard to the transactions that followed, we are more than ever obliged Interruption of the ne-to regret the want of a Carthaginian historian. Wherever the gotiotions.

family of Scipio is concerned the impartiality of Polybius becomes doubtful; and besides, we have only fragments of this part of his narrative, so that we cannot exactly fix the dates of the several events, a point which here becomes of considerable importance. According to our only existing authorities, the Carthaginians, emboldened by the arrival of Hannibal, or, according to Livy, by the mere expectation of his arrival, wantonly broke the truce subsisting between them and Scipio, by detaining some Roman transports which had been driven by a storm into the bay of Carthage; and then denied satisfaction to the officers whom Scipio sent to complain of this outrage; and lastly, in defiance of the law of nations, endeavored to seize the officers themselves on their way back to the Roman camp at Utica. By such conduct the resentment of Scipio is described to have been very naturally provoked; and the war was renewed with greater animosity.thian ever. This, no doubt, was Scipio’s own report of these transactions, which-Polybius, the intimate friend of his adopted grandson, and deriving his information, in’part at least, from Luelius, in all probability sincerely believed. But it is probable that a Carthaginian narrative of the war in Africa would so -represent the matter, that posterity would esteem the behavior of the Carthaginians, in breaking off the truce when it suited their purposes, as neither more nor less dishonorable than the conduct of Scipio himself, when he set fire to the camps of Syphax and Hasdrubal; and that, although the success was different, yet the treachery in both cases, whatever it may have been, was pretty nearly equal. Hannibal, we are told, landed at Leptis,5 at what season of the year we know not; and after refreshing his troops for some time at Adrumetum, he took the field, and advanced to the neighborhood of Zama, a town situated, as Polybius describes it, about five days’ journey from Carthage, towards the west. It seems that Scipio was busied in overrunning the country, and in subduing the several towns, when he was interrupted in these operations by the approach of the Carthaginian army.

He is said to have detected some spies sent by Hannibal to observe his position; and by causing them to be led carefully round his camp, and then sent back in safety to Hannibal, he so excited the admiration of his antagonist, as to make him solicit a personal interview, with the hope of effecting a termination of hostilities. The report of this conference, and of the speeches of the two generals, savors greatly of the style of Roman family memoirs, the most unscrupulous in falsehood of any pretended records of facts that the world has yet seen. However, the meeting ended in nothing; and the next day the two armies were led out into the field for the last decisive struggle. The numbers on each side we have no knowledge of; but probably neither was in this respect much superior.

Masinissa, however, with four thousand Numidian cavalry, besides six thousand infantry, had joined Scipio a few days before the battle; while Hannibal, who had so often been indebted to the’ Livy, XXX. 25, &c.

Polybius, XV. 1, &c.

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SUPPLEMENT.] BATTLE OF ZAIA 1-3 services,of Numidians, had now, on this great occasion, only two thousand horse of that nation to oppose to the numbers, and fortune, and activity of Masinissa. The account of the disposition of both armies, and of the events of the action, was probably drawn up by Polybius from the information given to him by Laelius, and perhaps from the family records of the house of Scipio. And here we may admit its authority to be excellent. It states that the Roman legions were drawn up in their usual order, except that the maniples of every alternate line did not cover the intervals in the line before them, but were placed one behind another, thus leaving avenues in several places through the whole depth of the army from front to rear. These avenues were loosely filled by the lightarmed troops, who had received orders to meet the charge of the elephants, and to draw them down the passages left between the maniples, till they should be enticed entirely beyond the rear of the whole army. The cavalry, as usual, was stationed on the wings; Masinissa, with his Numidians, on the right, and Lmlius, with the Italians, on the left. On the other side, Hannibal stationed his elephants, to the number of eighty, in the front of his whole line. Next to these were placed the foreign troops in the service of Carthage, twelve thousand strong, consisting of Ligurians, Gauls, inhabitants of the Balearian islands, and Moors. The second line was composed of those Africans who were the immediate subjects of Carthage, and of the Carthaginians themselves; while Hannibal himself, with his veteran soldiers, who had returned with him from Italy, formed a third line, which was kept in reserve, at a little distance behind the other two. The Numidian cavalry were on the left, opposed to their own countrymen under Masinissa; and the Carthaginian horse on the right, opposed to Lhelius and the Italians. After some skirmishinrg of the Numidians in the two armies, Hannibal’s elephants advanced to the charge; but being startled by the sound of the Roman trumpets, and annoyed by the lightarmed troops of the enemy, some broke off to the right and left, and fell in amongst the cavalry of their own army on both the wings; so that Lmelius and Masinissa, availing themselves of this disorder, drove the Carthaginian horse speedily from the field.

Others advanced against the enemy’s line, and did much mischief; till at length, being frightened, and becoming ungovernable, they were enticed by the lightarmed troops of the Romans to follow them down the avenues which Scipio had purposely left open, and were thus drawn out of the action altogether. Meantime the infantry on both sides met: and after a fierce contest, the foreign troops in Hannibal’s army, not being properly supported by the soldiers of the second line, were forced to give ground; and in resentment for this desertion, they fell upon the Africans and Carthaginians, and cut them down as enemies; so that these troops, at once assaulted by their fellow-soldiers, and by the pursuing enemy, were also, after a brave resistance, defeated and dispersed. Hannibal, with his reserve, kept off the fugitives, by presenting spears to them, and obliging them to escape in a different direction; and he then prepared to meet the enemy, trusting that they would be ill able to resist the shock of a fresh body of veterans, after having already been engaged in a long and obstinate struggle. Scipio, after having extricated his troops firom the heaps of dead which lay between him and Hannibal, commenced a second, and a far more serious contest. The soldiers on both sides were perfect in courage and in discipline; and as the battle went on, they fell in the ranks where they fought, and their places were supplied by their comrades with unabated zeal. At last Lelius and Masinissa returned from the pursuit of the enemy’s beaten cavalry, and fell, in a critical moment, upon the rear of Hannibal’s army.6 Then his veterans, surrounded and overpowered, still maintained their 6 The battle of Marengo forms, in many tance from the scene of the first engagement. points, an exact parallel with that of Zama. The struggle, which was obstinately maintained, The Austrians having routed the advanced was decided, as at Zama, by a timely charge of divisions of the French army, commenced an cavalry on the flank of the enemy’s infantry; entirely new action with the reserve, which but the victorious cavalry in the two battles did Bonaparte, like ltannibal, had kept at a dis-not belong to the armies whose situations cor

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614 HISTORY OF ROME, [SUPPLEMrNhigh reputation; and most of them were cut down where they stood, resisting to the last. Flight, indeed, was not easy; for the country was a plain, and the Roman and Numidian horse were active in pursuit; yet Hannibal, when he saw the battle totally lost, with a nobler fortitude than his brother had shown at the Mletaurus, escaped from the field to Adrumetum. He knew that his country would now need his assistance more than ever; and as he had been in so great a degree the promoter of the war, it ill became him to shrink from bearing his full share of the weight of its disastrous issue. On the plains of Zama twenty thousand of the Carthaginian army were slain, Results of the battle, and an equal number taken prisoners; but the consequences of the battle far exceeded the greatness of the immediate victory. It was not the mere destruction of an army, but the final conquest of the only power that seemed able to combat Rome on equal terms. In the state of the ancient world, with so few nations really great and powerful, and so little of a common feeling pervading them, there was neither the disposition nor the materials for forming a general confederacy against the power of Rome; and the single efforts of Macedonia, of Syria, and of Carthage herself, after the fatal event of the second Punic war, were of no other use than to provoke their own ruin. The defeat of Hannibal insured the empire of the ancient civilized world. The only hope of the Carthaginians now rested on the forbearance of Scipio’ Terms of the pence and they again sent deputies to him, with a full confession of the grantedtocarthage. injustice of their conduct in the first origin of the war, and, still more in their recent violation of the truce, and with a renewal of their supplications for peace. The conqueror, telling them that he was moved solely by considerations of the dignity of Rome, and the uncertainty of all human greatness, and in no degree by any pity for misfortunes which were so well deserved, presented the terms on which alone they could hope for mercy. “

They were to make amends for the injuries done to the Romans during the truce; to restore all prisoners and deserters; to give up all their ships of war, except ten, and all theit elephants; to engage in no war at all out of Africa, nor in Africa without the consent of the Romans; to restore to Masinissa all that had belonged to him or any of his ancestors; to feed the Roman army for three months, and pay it till it should be recalled home; to pay a contribution of ten thousand Euboic talents, at the rate of two hundred’ talents a year, for fifty years; and to give a hundred hostages, between the ages of fourteen and thirty, to be selected at the pleasure of the Roman general.” At this price the Carthaginians were allowed to hold their former dominion in Africa, and to enjoy their independence, till it should seem convenient to the Romans to complete their destruction. Yet Hannibal -strongly urged that the terms should be accepted, and, it is said, rudely interrupted7 a member of the supreme council at Carthage, who was speaking against them. He probably felt, as his father had done under circumstances nearly similar, that for the present resistance was vain; but that by purchasing peace at any price, and by a wise management of their internal resources, his countrymen might again find an opportunity to recover their losses. Peace was accordingly signed; the Roman army returned to Italy; and Hannibal, at the age of fortyfive, having seen the schemes of his whole life utterly ruined, was now beginning, with equal patience and resolution, to lay the foundation for them again. From our scanty notices of the succeeding years of his life, we learn that his Wisedomestipolyof conduct, as a citizen, displayed great wisdom and great integrity. Oanqib; Lrthageforaud He is said to have reduced’the exorbitant8 power of an order of goes to Altiochus. perpetual judges, whose authority was very extensive, and had been greatly abused.

He turned his attention also to the employment of the public respond with one another; for at Zama the re-thien Dumas, Campay2gn dA 1800, and Fictoirea serve was defeated by the charge of Lselius; et Conqugtes des Frctnc’ais. tome xDit. while it was victorious at Marengo, owing to 7

Polybius, XV. 19. the attack made by Kellerman. See Gen. Mat-Livy, XXXIII. 45, 46, &c.

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.UPrLEMENT.] CONCLUSION. 615 revenue, much of which he found to be embezzled by persons in office, while the people were heavily taxed to raise the yearly contributions due to the Romans by the last treaty. When a man of such high character raised his voice against so gross an abuse, there was yet vigor enough in the popular part of the Carthaginian constitution to give him effectual support; and it appears that the evil was removed, and the public revenue henceforward applied to public services. Hannibal, however, had thus created many powerful enemies; and ere long they found an opportunity of gratifying their hatred. The war between Rome and Macedonia had lately been concluded; and the success of the Romans, and their commanding interference in the affairs of Greece, awakened the fears and jealousy of Antiochus, king of Syria, whose kingdom was the greatest possessed by any of the successors of Alexander. He seemed disposed to take up the contest which Philip, king of Macedonia, had been compelled to resign; and the Romans were either informed, or fancied, that Hannibal was using all his influence at Carthage to persuade his countrymen to join him. Accordingly a commission was sent to the Carthaginian government, requiring them to punish Hannibal as a disturber of the peace between the two nations. Hannibal, knowing that he should be unable to resist the efforts of his domestic enemies, when thus supported by the influence of Rome, seems at last to have surrendered his longcherished hopes of restoring his country to her ancient greatness. He found means to escape from Carthage, and procured a vessel to transport him to Tyre, where he was received with all the honors due to a man who had shed such glory on the Phoenician name, and from whence he easily reached the court of Antiochus, at Antioch. Finding that the king was already set out on his way towards Greece, he followed and overtook him at Ephesus; and being cordially received, he contributed powerfully to fix him in his determination to declare war on the Romans, and was retained near his person, as one of his most valuable counsellors. The ability of Hannibal was displayed again on this new occasion, by the plans which he recommended for the prosecution of the war. He first War of Antiohus. and most strongly urged that he should be sentg with an army into o.ur obf Prusias thim Italy; there, he said, the Romans were most vulnerable; and an death. attack made upon their own country might distract their counsels, and at least lessen their means of carrying on hostilities in Greece or Asia. When this measure was abandoned, owing, as it is said, to the king’s jealousy of the glory which Hannibal would gain by its success, his next proposal was10 that the alliance of Philip, king of Macedon, should be purchased at any price. Macedon was a power strong enough to take a substantial part in the war, and would be too important to escape, as the little second or third-rate states might do, by forsaking its ally as soon as he should experience any reverses. This counsel was also neglected; and Philip united himself with the Romans against Antiochus; so that Hannibal, employed only in a subordinate naval command, a duty for which his experience had in no way fitted him, could render the king no essential service; and in a short time, when the Romans had brought the war to a triumphant end, he was obliged to seek another asylum, as Antiochus had agreed, by one of the articles1’ of the treaty, to surrender him up to the Roman government. His last refuge was the court of Prusias, king of Bithynia. With that prince he remained about five years; and it is mentioned by Cornelius Nepos, that he gained a victory, while commanding his fleet, over his old enemy Eumenes, king of Pergamus. All his own prospects had long since been utterly ruined; and the condition of such a man, reduced to the state of a dependent exile, under the protection of so humble a sovereign as Prusias, might have satisfied the most violent hatred of the Romans. But it seems they could not be free from uneasiness while Hannibal lived; and when a Roman embassy was sent to the court of Pru9 Livy, XXXIV. 60. Livy, XXXVI. T “Polybius, XXI. 14.

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616 HISTORY OF ROME. [SUPPLEMENI sias, that king, wl:ether spontaneously, or at the solicitation of the ambassadors, promised to put their great enemy into their hands. His treachery, however, was suspected by Hannibal; and when he found the avenues to his house secured by the king’s guards, he is said to have destroyed himself by a poison which he had long carried about him for such an emergency. Some particulars are added by Livy and Plutarch, which, not being credibly attested, nor likely to have become publicly known, it is needless to insert here. It is sufficient to say, that Hannibal died by his own hand, to avoid falling into the power of the Romans, at Nicomedia, in Bithynia; and, as nearly as we can ascertain, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. If the characters of men be estimated according to the steadiness with which r. they have followed the true principle of action, we cannot assign a high place to Hannibal. But if patriotism were indeed the greatest of virtues, and a resolute devotion to the interests of his country were all the duty that a public man can be expected to fulfil, he would then deserve the most lavish praise. Nothing can be more unjust than the ridicule with which Juvenal has treated his motives, as if he had been actuated merely by a romantic desire of glory.

On the contrary, his whole conduct displays the loftiest genius, and the boldest spirit of enterprise, happily subdued and directed by a cool judgment to the furtherance of the honor and interests of his country; and his sacrifice of selfish pride and passion, when after the battle of Zama he urged the acceptance of peace, and lived to support the disgrace of Carthage, with the patient hope of one day repairing it, affords a strong contrast to the cowardly despait with which some of the best of the Romans deprived their country of their service by suicide. Of the extent of his abilities, the history of his life is the best evidence: as a general, his conduct remains uncharged with a single error; for the idle censure which Livy presumes to pass on him for not marching to Rome after the battle of Cannae, is founded on such mere ignorance, that it does not deserve any serious notice. His knowledge of human nature, and his ascendency over men’s minds, are shown by the uninterrupted authority which he exercised alike in his prosperity and adversity over an army composed of so many various and discordant materials, and which had no other bond than the personal character of the leader. As a statesman, he was at once manly, disinterested, and sensible; a real reformer of abuses in his domestic policy, and in his measures, with respect to foreign enemies, keeping the just limit between weakness and blind obstinacy. He stands reproached, however, with covetousness by the Carthaginians, and with cruelty by the Romans. The first charge is sustained by no facts that have been transmitted to us; and it is a curious circumstance, that the very same vice was long imputed by party violence to the great duke of Marlborough, and that the imputation has been lately proved by his biographer to have been utterly calumnious. Of cruelty indeed, according to modern principles, he cannot be acquitted; and his putting to death all the Romans whom he found on his march through Italy, after the battle of the lake Thrasymenus, was a savage excess of hostility. Yet many instances of courtesy are recorded of him, even by his enemies, in his treatment of the bodies of the generals who fell in action against him; and certainly, if compared with the ordinary proceedings of Roman commanders, his actions deserve no peculiar brand of barbarity. Still it is little to his honor, that he was not more careless of human suffering than Marcellus or Scipio; nor can the urgency of his circumstances, or the evil influence of his friends, to both which Polybius attributes much of the cruelty ascribed to him, be justly admitted as a defence. It is the prevailing crime of men in high station to be forgetful of individual misery, so long as it forwards their grand objects; and it is most important, that our admiration of great public talents and brilliant successes should not lead us to tolerate an indifference to human suffering.

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CONSULS AND iMILITARY TRIBUNES, BONi THE BEGINNING OF THE COMMONWEALTH TO

THE TAK. ff OF ROME BY THE GAULS.

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CONSULS AND ILITARY TRIBUNES. F Yearof Year Year ofth Rome, before the Canth i commen Christian Olympiads. Snai Capitalist. LiVY. DIIODORUS.

DIONYSlUS. reckoning. Era. 1 245 508 68-1 EThe tenth book of Diodorus be-L. Junius Birutus ing lost, we have no lists of Cost-L. Tarqninius Collatinus 6 216 500 68-2 ~ I asuls from him earlier than the p Valerins IL. 21st year of the Commonwealth, T. Luretius Dionys. V. 20. 3 - 247. 506

68-3 -L. Junius Brutus accordin5 to Livy’s Patti.] L. Tarquinius Collatinus, afterwards, in the same year, P. Valerius Puslicola P.

Valerius III. M. Horatins Polvillus M. Horatins II.1 V. 21. 4 248 685045 6

M. Valer…. Cot…. CCXLVIII P. Valerins II. Sp. Lartius P. Post Cos…..

CCXLVIIl T. Lucretius Livy, If. 8. T. Herminius V. 36. 5 249 504 69-1 P.

Valerius… Poplicol… P. Lucretius P. Valerins Publicola III. II. 15. 0

P. Postnmius V. 37. 6 250 5403 69-2 P. Postumi… Cos. II…. Ann. CCL M.

Valerius P. Valerius IV. 502 - 6-3 Agrippa MI… Cot…. Ann. CCL P.

Postomins I. 16. T. Lucretins IL V. 40. 7 251 500-P. Valerius IV. Agrippa Menenins Sp. Cassius… Cot…. Ann. CCLI T. Lncretins II. II. 16. P.

Postumins V. 44. 8 252 501 69-4 Agrippa Menenius Opiter Virginius P.

Postumins 11 16. Sp. Cassius V. 49. 9 2c153 500 70-1 Opiter Virginius Postumun Cominins Sp. Cassins IL 17. T. Lartins V. 50. 10 254 499 70-2

Postumus Cominins Sen. Sulpicius 0 T. Lartius IL 18. M S’. Tullius V.

52. 11 2 155 498 70-3 Sen. Sulpicius P. Veturius M’. Tullius II. 19. P.

Aibutins V. 58 0 12 256 497 704 T. e-butius T. Lartius C. Veturins If. 19.

Q. Clcelins Siculus V. 59. 13 2.7 496 71-1 Q.71. Cloelius A. Sesnpronius T. Lartins II. 21. M. Minocins V. 77. 14 2511 495 71-2 A. Sempronius A.

Postunmius M. Minucius II. 21. T. Virgainins VI. 2. 15 259 494 71-3 A.

Postumius Ap. Clandius T. Virginins IL 21. P. Senvilins VI. 23. 16 260 493

71-4 Ap. Claudius A. Virginius P. Servilins IL 21. T. Veturias VI. 34. 17

261 492 72-1 A. ViYrinius Postumus Cominius T. Veturins IL 28. Sp. Cassius IL VI. 49. 18 262 491 72-2 Sp. Cassius T. Geganius Postumus Cominins 11.

33. P. Minucius VII. 1. 19 2 63-490 -72-3 T. Geganins IM. Minucius P.

Minecins IL 34. A. Sempronius VIL 20.!2-4 489 72-4 M. Minucius Q.

Sulpicius A. Sempronius II. 34. Ser. Lartius VII. 68. au~ie agrees also with Livy in making P. Valerius and M. Horatius consult in this year after the banishment of Collatinus and the death of Brutu&

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Year Yeroof theYr of before the Olympiads. Fasti Capitolni. LIVY. Cemmee-Lr~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~y. ~~~~DIODORUS. wealth.IRome. Christian IO wealth.

Era. 21 265 488 73-1 Sp. Natius. Julius Sex. Furiua IL 39. P. Pinarius VIIl. 1. 22 - 266 487 73-2 T. Sicinius Sp. Nautius C. Aquillius II. 40.

Sex. Furius VII. 16. 23 - 267 486 73-3 Sp. Cassius C. Aquillius ___Proculue Virginius II. 41. T. 1iccius VIIL‘64. 24 - 268 485 73-4 Ser.

Cornslius Procuita Virginius __ Q. Fabius II. 41. S p. Cassius IIl. VIII. 68. 2.3 1 269 484 74-1 L. -tEmilius Q. Fabius K. Fabius 1IL 42.

Ser. Cornelius VIILl 77. 26 270 483 74-2 M. Fabius L. Ymilius L.

Valerius II. 42. K. Fabius VIII. 83. 27 271 482 74-3 A.U.C. 270 according to Dionysius Q. Fabius M. Fabius._..._. _Vibulanus IL C. Julius II. 43. I L. Valerius VIII. 87. 28 2 272 1481 -I 74-4 K. Fabius C. Julius.

N.~.. Fusus, Sp. Frinus II. 43. ___ Q. Fabius VII 90 29 273 480 75-1 M.

Fabis Sp. Cassius K. Fabius II…ibulanns If. Cn. Maulius II. 43. Proclus Virginius XI. 1. Sp. Furius IX. 1._ 30 274 479 75-2 K. Fabius Q. Fabius Silvacus Cn. Manlius T… N…. Tricost Rutil,… T. Virginius II. 48.

Ser. Cornelius XI 27. M. Fabius IL. IX. 5. 31 275 478 75-31 - L. El|ilius K. Fabius K. Fabius _____ _ctus_ Ahala C. Servilius I. 49. L. 4Emilius XI. 38. T.Virinius IX.14. 32 - 276 477 75-4 -C. Ioratias MKi. Fabius L.

miiius _____ Lanatus T. Menenius I. 51. L. Valerius XI. 41. C. Servilius IX. 16. 33 - 277 476 76-1 A. Virginius Keawso Fabius C. f-loratius _____

__ uctus -Sp. Servilius If. 51. Sp. Farius XI. 48. T. Menenius IX.18. i 34

- 278 475 76-2…. utilus C. Nautius M. Fabius Ser. Servilius ________

___ __efaque Ann. CCLXXIIX P. Valerius 11.52. Cn.Manlius XI. 50. A.

Virginius IX. 25. 35 279 474 76-3 4… um, F VIII L. Farina K. Fabius P.

Valerius td:_ ____ _ -.. Annr. CCLXXIX C. Manlius II. 54. T. Vir[inius XI.51. C.Naulius IX. 28. 36 -280 473 76-4 L. Amilius. L. tEmilius Mamercus A. Manlius Opiter Virginius, or C. Cornelius Lentulus XI. 52. L.

Furius IX. 36. M..__ .____..__ uluos Vopiscas Julius If. 54. 37 281

472 77-1 L. Pinariuis’P. Minucius IL. }Ernilius.____.__._. _sus P.

Farius 11. 56. C. Horatis XI. 53. Vopiscus Julius IX. 37. 38 282 471 77-2

Ap. Claudius A. Virginius Tricostus L. Pinarius _ T. Quintius II. 56. C. Servilius Structus XI. 54. P. Furius IX. 40. 39 283 470 77-3 -

L. Valerius P. Valerius T. Quintius ____Ti. AEmilins II. 61. C. Nautius Rufus X.L 60. Ap. Claudius IX. 43. 40 284 469 77-4 - T. Nurnicius L.

Furiust Mediolanust L. Valerius II.

_____’____i____________________________________ A. Virginius II. 63. MI.

Manlius Vaso XI. 63. Ti. Xmilius IX. 51. 41.285 468 7 -A.CCXX…. T.

Quintins L. A4 milins Maudsrcus A. Virginius ______Q. Servihius 1I. 64. L.

t~Studiust Iv-.rs ae XI. 65. T.Nuricius IX. 56. 42 - 286 467 78-2 Ti.

AEmn.ilinus - L. Pinarits MfIamertinus - u. intius Capitolinus II. 43___

___________________________________ Q~. Fabius III. 1. P. Furiust Fifron-XI. 66. Q. Servilius Priscus IX. 57. 43 -.-287 466 78-3 - Sp.

Postumiuis A.F.P.N. Albus Regi….. Q. ServiXius Ap. Claudius Ti. Almiius IL _ Sp. Postumiua III. 2. T. Quintins Capitolinus XL 67. Q. F abl IX. 59.

-

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‘Year — Year Of the Year of before the Commoe-io e. Chrisiiaa Olympiads.

Feati Capitolrini. LIVY. DIODORUS. DIONYSIUS. wealth. he 44 288 465 ~78-4

Q. Fabius M.F.K.N. Vibulan Q. Fabius L. Valerius Publicola Sp. Poctunius Albinus T. Quintius 1II. 2. T. stEEmilius Mamercus XI. 69. Q. Serviliue PricusIl. IX. 60. 45 289 464 - 79-1 A. Postumius A.F.P.N. Albus RegilL A.

Postumiusn, A. Virginius T. Quintiue Capitolinue III. Sp. Furius 11i.4. T.

Minucius XI. 70. Q. Fabiue Vibulanue IL LX. 61. 46 291) 463 79-2 P.

Servilius Sp F.P.N. Prisc. L. ZEbutius Kal. Sext. T. Quintius A. Poetumiue Albuc P. Servilius ineunt magistrat. Q. Serviliuc Structue Xf. 71. Ser.

Furius Ix. 62. –-‘~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~116 47 2111191 462 79-3 L.

Lucretius T.F.T.N. Tricipitissa L. Lucretius) A d. WII. Q. Fabius Vibuld us L. 2Ebutius T. VetUrias Id. Sext. Ill. 8. Ti. 1Enmilius Mainercue XL.

74. P. Servilitis Priecus IX. 67. 48 29-2 461 79-4 P. Volumnius M.V.3I.N.

Ainirtin. Galus. P. Volumnius Q. Serviins L. Lueretius Sen. Sulpicius 1I.

10. Sp. Postumius Albinus XI. 75. T. Veturius Gominue IX. 69. 89-1 P.

Valerius P. F. Volusi N. Poplicola 1I. C. Claudius Q. FabiP n in Mla-Mortnus est. In ejus L.F’.E. P. Valerius III. 15. T. Quintius Capitolinus XI 77. Ser. Sulpicius Camerinus X. 1. L. Quinctius L.F.L.N. Ciecinnatue 59

294 459 80-2 Q. uabius I.F.K.N. Vibulanus Ill. Q. Fabius Vibulanus A.

Poctumiuc Regoclus XL 78 e…. _Maluginecis V……. Cornelie Malin I.15. Sp. Furiust Mediolanuet C. Claudius Sabinuc X. 9. 51 295 458 89-3 C.

Nautius Sp:. Sp: N. Rahlus II. L. Minucius P. Servilius Structue Q. Fabius Vibulanue 111…. Carven… C. Nautius III. 25. L. Aflbutiuc Alvas XI. 79.

L. Cornelius X. 29. In M…. Mortune eet. In ejue L. F. est II. Minucius P.F.M.N. Esquilin. Augurin ___CD 52 296 - - 457 80-4 C. Horahtius M.F.L.N.

Ptlivillus 11. Q. Minucius L. Lucretius XI. 81. C. Nautius II. ________

_____ ____ ____ Q. Minucius P.F.M.N. ]Esquilinlus C. LC oratius I1I.

30. T. Veturiust Cichorinust X. 2. 53 297 456 81-1 MI. Valerius MI.’.

Volusi N. MaXumus M. Valerius Ser. Sulpicius XI 84. C. Horatius Sp.

Virginius A.F.A…. Tricost. Cseiiomont. Sp. Virginius 11L 31. P.

Volumniuc Amentinus Q. Minucius X. 26. 81?-2 T. Rolnilius T.F.T.N. Rocus Vaticanus T. Romnilius P. Valerius M. Valerius C. Veturiuc P. Cicurinus C.

Veturius III 31. C. Clodius Regillus XI. 85. Sp. Virginius X. 31. 55 1-199

-454~ _R81-3 Sp. Tarpeius M.F.M.N. Montan. Capitolin. Sp.Tanpeins Q.

Fabius Vibulanus T. Romilus A. Atereciuc…. Yarns Fontinalic A. Aterius 11L 31. L. Cornelius Curilinus XI. 86. C. Veturius X 33 56 3990-453 Sex.

Quintilius Sex. F.P.N….. P. Curiatius C. Nautius Rutilus Sp. Tarpeius P.

Curiati…. N. Fistue Trigemin Sex. Qaintilius IlL 32. L. MsJinuciusf Carutianust A. tTermeniust X. 48. XI. 88. 57-391 - 45-2 - 8 1 P. Seslius Q.F. Vibi N. Capito. icanus C. Menenius P. Horatine T. Menen…….. F.

Agripp. N. Lanatus P. Sestius Ii. 32. [This year is wanting.] Sex.

Quinlilius X. 53. 58 - 451 82-2 Ap. Claudius Ap. F.M.N. Crassin… gill Sabinus II.- Ap. Claudius Cocs. design. L. Postumius L. Menenius T.

Genu…… Au-urinus Cs.dsg.X 4 T. Genu. Auguninus ~~~~~~~~~~~T. Genucius SM. Horatius XL. 91. P. Sectius.5 Ap. Claudius, Ap. F.M.N. Crasein. T.

Genucius Ap. Claudius, T. Genucius, P. L.F.L.N. Augurin: Sp. Veturius, Sp.

F.P.N. Sectius, L. Veturius, C. Inlius, Cr…. sus Cicurinus, C. Julius C.F.L.N. A. Manlius, Sen. Sulpicius, P. Iulus. A. Manlius, Co. F.P.N.

Vulso Curatius, T. Romilius, Sp. PosDecemviri Consular….. rio Legibus S… tumius. Decemviri, Legg. scribendis. III 33. _~~~~_0823 A.

Claudius…. Crassin Regil… Sabin du os ei~k 59 33 4590 23 A.Cadu..

CasnRgl. ai Ap. Claudius, M. Cornelius, Ma:- L. Quisslius Cincinnatus Ap.

Claudu us ein - IL Cor.. N. Maluginesis lugieneis, M. Sergius, L. Mi-ML
chins Vibulanus XII. 3. T. Genucius 56. Esquilin…Ap. Claudius,. Genucus, P. Se-…. linus Augurin Q. Poeelius, T. Antoniise, Me-tius, P.

Postumtus. Sen. Sulpi-…. Mere… rends, K. Duilins, Sp. Oppius ems, A.

Manlins, T. Romuus, Cornicen, MI. Rabuleiess. De-C. Inline, T. Vetutrius, P. Horacemnviri Le0g. scribendis. tins. Ileceminvir legibus scnt_____________________________________ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ILL.

35. jbendis.

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Year yen’….the Yer of ibefore the OO’ DIONYSIUS. Commo-Roe. Christioan Oiympiads Fasti Capitolirl. LIVY. DIODORUS. DIONYSlUS. RoE-=. C h r i s t i a wealth. [~ __ Era. 6 34 449 -… tius…. Barbatus. Sabin. The same Decemvirs 111. 38. M. Valerius Lactuca Ap. Claudius, Q. Fabius, MI.

CorAnn: CCCIV VII K. Sept: Sp. Virginius Tricostus XII. 4. nelius, M.

Sergius, L. Minu-…. ius P.F.P.N. Poplicola Potit…. cius, T. Antonius, NM’. Rabu| De 2Equeis Idlus Sextil. Ann: CCCIV. leius, Q. Poetilius, Kmso Duillius, Sp. Oppius. Decemviri Legg. scribenldis. X. 58. 61:.405 448 83-1

L. Valerius T. Romilius Vaticanus XII. 5. The Decemvirs as before. M.

Horatius Ill. 55. C. Veturius tCichoriust X. 61. 62 |306 44 -7 83-2._

Lar’ Herminius Sp. Tarpeius XIL 6. L. Valerius Potitus T. Virginius III.

65. A. tAsterius t Fontiniust M. Horatius Barbatus XT. 45. 63 307 446 83-3

M. Geganius Macerinus Sex. tQuintiust Lar Herminius C. Julius II. 65……

Trigeminus XII. 7. T. Virginius XI. 51. O 64 308 445 83-4 _T. Quinctius Capitolinus IV. T. Menenius M. Ge[ganius XI. 51. Agrippa Furius IL. 66. P.

Sestius Capitolinus XII. 22. C. Julius] The names are almost M lost in the MS. 65 309 444 84-1 M. Genucius Decemvirs: names given cor- [This year is wanting.] C. Curtius IV. 1. ruptly. XII. 23. 66 31 443 84-2 nius inns….

De.. A. Sempronius Decemvirs: names again corrupt. M. Genucius Ann.

CCCX….nis Sep.. L. Atilius Tribb. Milit. XII. 24. C. Quintius XI. 52. Z

T. Clcelius ) 1V. 7. 67 311 44-84-3 - M. Geganius Macerinus II. tCancus t Horatius A. Sempronius Atrat. Tribb. T. Quinctius Capitolinus V. L.

Valerius t Turpinust XII. 26. L. Atilius Longus Milit. IV. 8. T. Clcelius Siculus ) XI. 62. 68 312 -441 84-4M1 M. Fabius Vibulanus Larinus Herminius I. Geganius Macerinus 11.. Postumus lEbutius Cornicen T. tStertinius -

Structus XIL 27. T. Quinctius Capitolinus V. IVX. 11. XI. 63. 69 313 440

85-1 C. Furius Pacilus L. Julius Here the regular history of DioM.

Papirius Crassus IV. 12. M. Geganius XII. 29. nysius breaks off; the rest being lost, with the exception of 70 314 439 85-2 - Proculus Geganifis Macerinus T. Quintius fragments. L. Menenius Lanatus IV. 12. Agrippa Furius XII. 30.._ 71 315 438 85-3 T. Quintius Capitolinus VI. M. Genucius t Agrippa Menenius IV. 3. Agrippa COurfltius Chilo. XII. 31. t_ 72 316 437
us……. Maus m. Emilius Tribb. A. Sempronius.:Ann. CCCXVI Idib. Se….

L. Quinctius Cincin- > Milit. L. Atilius Tribb. Milit. L. Julius [natus) IV. 16. T. Quintius XIl. 32. 73 317 436 M86-1 M. Geganius Macerin. III. T.

Quinctius XII. 33 L. Sergius Fidenas IV. 17. M. Geganius Macerinus 74 318

435 M… 86-2 NM. Cornelius Maluginensis M. Fabius XII. 34. L. Papirius Crassus IV. 21. Postum. AEbutius + Vulecus t 75 319 434 - 86-3 C. Julius II. Q. Furius Fusus -_L. Virginius IV. 21. M’. Papirius Crassus XII. 35.

76 ~~ 320 433 M864 NI. Manlius (C. Julius III. T. Menenius or L. Virginius Proclus Geganius Macerinus | IV. 23. 36 _ 77 321 432 Al87-1 - NI-~|.

Fabius Vibulanus Tribb. T. Quinctius IJ I }~~~~~~~~~ M. Foslius Mitt. t Nittus t Menenius XII. 37. I_ _____l~ _______ L. Sergius Fidenas IVr.

25. _

-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~J.

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Year of the Yeru of Yeaor th Common- -bfor the m ido. oasti Capitolini.

DOOU.DOYIS ooeo-Rome ChriotianOyom i LIVY. OJDRS DOYIS 78 3~22 431 87-2

L,. Pinorius Mainercinus T Aiib M. 2Emilieinus Ma-] L. Furies Medullinus TrMill. mercus Tribb. Sp. Postumius, Albus MI C. Julius rmilit. _______

_____ ____ ___________________________________ IV. 2.L. Quinius IV.38.2__L.__Qintius__IV.___8_ 79 323 4-3-0 87-3 T’. Quilitius Cincinnatus XI. Geganius _______________________________________ C. Julius Mento IV.

26. L. Ser-ius XII. 43.‘_______________ so 324-429 87-~4 L. Papirius Crassus L. Papirius XIIL 46. ____________________________________ L.

Julius IV. 30. A. Corneliust Maferinust ______________ 81 3 428 88-1 L.

8ergius Fidenas II. C. Julius Ilostus Lucretius Tricipitinus Proclus Virgiuius Tricostus ______ ___________________________________________

~~~~~~IV. 30. X1I. 49. _______________ 82 326 427 8-A. Curnelius Cossus IMaiu T. Quintius Peunus II. IV. 30. Q. Sulpicius Preatexta-Tribib. tus M3Illit. ______ __________________________ ~~~~~~~Sor. Cornelius Cossus 83 327 ~ -4-26 8-C. Servilius Ahala Al. Fabius A. Cornelius Cossus II. L.

Papirius Mugillanus. IV. 30. Al. t Falinlus t Tribb. Milit. *T. Quintius IL. 84 - 328 425 - 88-4 T. Quintius ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ L. t Serviliuis t XII. 58. X1I. 3. Frag. Vatican. 84 328 425 T. Quintius ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~L. Furius C. Furius ITribb. SpPiai, Trb.Mlt MI.

Postumnius mSpt. Pluarilus T rib.Xili.60

___________________________________________ A. Cornell us Cossus IV31 85

39 424 - 91A. Semprunius Atratinus TV 1. QitiMtlus tXI 0 L. Quintius Cincinnatiss )Tribb. C. Julius XLI. 65. L. Furius Medullinus SIllt. _

_ __ L. H
o r li u s B a r al u J I. 3.

_u __IV. 3 5 806 3 423 89-21

A~p.Claudius IC. Papiriurs Sp. Naulius Rutilus ITribb. L. Julius XII. 72.

L. Sergius Fidenas ~Milit. _______ ______ ______ ______ ______

Sex. Julius J IV. 35. _

87 -j331 -42‘2 -8~9-3 ~…. Mugillan. C. Sempronius Atratinus-Opiter Lucretius ______________________________________ Q. Fabius Vibulanus IV.

37. L. Ser-ius Fidenas XIT. 73. ______________ ~88 ~ 332 - 421 8-9-4..

tolin Barbal. L. MNalinus Capilolinus ) Tribb. -T. Quintius N. Fabius…

Q.. Antonius Merend~a >Milit. A. Cornelius Cossus XII. 75. ________

_______ ______ ______ ______ L. Papirius M ugillanus) IV. 42. _

89 -33 40

90-1…Ciuciunatus I N. Fabius Vibulanus L. Quintius Al. MaulI T. Quintius Capitolinus. IV. 43. A. Serupronius XII. 77… d ullinus III. ______

_____ _____ A. S em pro…_ _ _ 90 334 419 90-2. ipp. N.

Lanatus L. Quintius CiuciunaL, Papirius Miugillaisus Sp. Nautius t.Is III. I C. Servilius Struclus XIf. 78. Tricipitinus L. Furius Mednilinus II. Tribb. C. Servilius M. Manlius M MLt A. Sempronius Atra__________________________________________ tinus TV. 44. ________

____ ____________ offl 335 418 901-3…. Mugillanus. -Agrip. SMenenius La-) C. Forius ____________ C. Servilhis Q.F.C.N. Axilla II. natus, Tr T3.

Quintius Tribb. Milit. L. Serghies C.F’.C.N. FideTnIs III. P. Lucretius Triip-H. PostumXIsT.II 8 roi A-lii01 Q. Servilius P.F. Sp: N. Priscus Fide~nas II. D.. linus A. Cornelius C……Q.F.C.N. Ax-illa Mlag…… Sp.

Nanutis Ilutilus) IV. 45. L _______ I ______ ~~~~Cens. L. Papirius M’. F.P

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Year of the1Ye Cmo-Yea rof before the LI.DOORJ INYlS wealton. Rome.

Christian O lypads. Fasti Capitolini. Lv.DOOU.DOYIS w e a lth. _ E ra.

_ 92

36 417 90-4 P. Lucretius Husti F…. L.8r usFdns I.Fru M. Papirius Mugilla-Tribb. L. Quintius Tribib. Milit. _______ _____ _______

......C. Servilius Priecus IV. 45. _

93 337 46 91-1 A. Semproniuss L.F.A.N….Agrip. Menenius La-T. Claudius Agrippa Menenius T.F

~~~~~~~naus Milit. A. Nemproius XI 1 natus II. I 8p. Nautius ~Tribb.

Miliii. Q. Fabius Q.F.M.N….L. Servilius, Structus II. Tribb. L.

tSentiust……. ~~~~~P. Lucretius Tricipi-Mluii. Sex. Juliuss XII. 82.

tinus II. ______ __ ___ __ ____ _________ __________

___________ Sp~. R utilius Crassoss IV. 47. 94 33 1 12 P. Cornolius P.N….A. Sempronius Atra-t Seroius Lucius t…… ~~~~~~tinus III. TIbb.

M. Papirius Tribb. Miliii. C. Valerius L.F. Volusi N. M. Papirius Mugilla-miit Ti. Servilius ) XIII. 2.0 nauahl. Sp. Nautius Rutilus II.) IV. 47. 95

339 _ 91R-3 Q. Fabius Q.F.M.N… P. Cornelius Cosous P. Lucretius c C.

Valerius Potitus Tib C. Serviliuss P. Psturnius A.F.A.N…Q. Quintius Cisseinna-Tribb Agrippa Mene- >Tribb. Milit. U in~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ts miit. ninaj i N. Fabius Vibulanus IV. 49. Sp. Veturius XlII. 7.Z 96 340

413 91-4 Cu. Curnelino Cossua A. Sempronius L. Valeri’us Potitus IM.

Papirius Tribb. Miliii. Q. Fabius Vibul anus’Tribb. Q. Fabius II miliii.

Sp. Nautius J XIII. 9. M. Posiumnius Regril-___ _ _ _ __ __

___ _ __ __ _ __ __ ens a J V. 9. __ _ __ __ _ __

__ __ ____IV.__49__ 97 341 41 21A. Cornelius Cossus Cs. P. Cornelius) L. Furius Medullinus I C. Fabius Tribb. Miliii. IV. 51… j ~~XIII. 34.

___________ 98’ 1 9-Q. Fables Amnbustus Cus T. Postumnius C. Furius Pacilus Cs. C. Cornelius rb.Mii lY 59. C. Valerius 92-3 M. Papirine Air tinus Cues. ~~~~~~~~~~~~K.Fabius 9X III. 38.

99 343a 410AraiusCos ______ ______

_________________________________________ C. Nautius Rutilos IV. 52. M.

Cornlius Cuss. XIII. 43. Th00 344 409 92~-4 A.F.M.N….’. Ymilius Cuss.

L. P___________Coss._ _____ _____ ______…..Medullin:11f. C.

Valicru Pits IV. 53. C. Furius 101-I ~ 345 40 93-1 TN. MIL…..Vspisci N.

loslus Cu. Cornelius Cosu Cs M, Papirius Cs. XI 8…. A.F.M.N. Cussus L.

Fuorius Meduili-‘ pNaiu ______ _____ ____ ______ ~……F.Q.N.

Ahala nue II. IV. 54. ______________ _____________ 102 38 — 407 9-63 2

Pouti Volusus H1. C. Julius isolo’ Tribb. C. 1-Maniust) C. Se’rvilius P.F.Q.N. Alhala IL. P. Cornelius CO S mlii.eErntlls Cuss. XIII. 76. TRo.

MoL. C. Servilius Ahala. C. Valerius Meduilinus IV. 56. ______ _____

______.FAbius; Q.F.M.N. Vibulanue _____T________ 103 ~~347 4 93-3….

tiltLis Cosons L. Furius Meduilinus L. Furius ValeValerius alerius.

PoiPiustusI TriIll.Cu. t Porn-Cuss. XIII. 80. Coossos C.Vlr o!tsII miliii piu N.Fbus AI1.F.Q.N. Amrbustues. N. Fabius Vibulanus H. ________________

______ ____ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~C. Servilius Ahala II. 9IV. 57. -

Page 624 view page image

Yearof the]Yeorof Year Yr of Yoear of before the Fti Capitolini. V.

DIODORUS. DIONYSIUS. Common-Rome. Christian Oly idPL wealth. Era. 104 348

405 93-………….. lulus If. P. Cornelius Cossus’ C. Julius M’ Aimilius Alam. F.M.N. Mamercinus. Cn. Cornelius Cossus Tribb. P. Cornelius Tribb.

Milit…………… lin. Barb: N. Fabius Ambustus (Milit. C. Servilius ) XIII. 104. L. Furius L. F. Sp.: N. Medullinus II. L. Valerius Potitus J

IV. 58….. nnatus. TR. MIL. A. Manlius A.F. Cn: N. Vulso Capolin. 1105

349 404 94-1…. uginensis T. Quintius Capitolinus 1 C. Furius ) Sp:NautiusSp: F. Sp:N….. utilus III. Q. Quintius Cincinna-C.

Servilius…. sus II. tus. C. Valerius b C. Valerius L. F. Vol: N. Potit: Volus: III. C. Julius bulus Ir. Tribb. N. Fabius J XIV. 3…….. F.Q.N.

Ambustus A. Manlius i. M’ Serg…….Fidenas Ta. Mil. L. Furius Medullinus ilt. III. M’. XEmilius Mamercinus J IV. 61. 106 350 1 403 94-2… ius Mlrn. F.M.N.. n. Ii. C. Valerius Potitus III. P. Cornelius. Fur……

Fusus M’. Sergius Fidenas I N. Fabius…. dius P.F. Ap: N…….. P.

Cornelius Malugi-Tribb L. Valerius -Tribb. Miit. Ta. Mil. nensis TMili. t Terentius I L. Juli… Iulis Cn. Cornelius Cossus Maximus t I XIV. 12…..

nctilius L.F.L.N…….. s. K. Fabius Ambustus L. Valer… P.N. Potitus III. Sp. Nautius Rutilus II. J IV. 61…. ens. M. Furius L.F. Sp: N.C…..___ _Postumius A F A.N. Albinus Regillens. L.F. XVI. 107 351 402

94-3… rvilius P.F.Q.N. Ahal… 5’..Emilius Mamerci-I T. Quintius Q.

Sulpicius Ser: F. Ser: N. Camerin. Cornut. nus II. C. Julius Q.F.P.N.

Fiden. L. Valerius Potitus III. A. Manlius Tribb. Milit. A. Manlius A.F.

Cn: N. Vulso Capitol: II. Ap. Claudius Crassus Trbb….. irginius L. F.

Opetr. N. Tricost: Esqui M… Quintillus Varus rMili.. M Sergius L.F.L.N.

Fidenas II. L. Julius Iulus.. XVI. 17. TR. MIL. M. Postumius M. Furius Camillus M. Postumius Albinus J V. 1. 108  352 401 94… urius L.F. Sp: N. Camillus C. Servilius Ahala II. P. Cornelius L. Julius L.F. Vopisci N.

Iulus Q. Servilius K. Fabius… rnelius P.F.A.N. Cossus III. L. Virginius Tribb. Sp. Nautius Tribb. M’ Aimilius Mam: F.M.N. Mamercinus II. Q.

Sulpicius Milit. C. Valerius Milit…. rius L.F.P.N. Potitus IV. A.

Manlius II. M’. Sergius K. Fabius M.F.Q.N. Ambustus II. TR. MIL. M.

Sergius Fidenas II. J V. 8.’ Junius Lucullus t XIV. 19. 109 353 400

95-1… lius M.F. Cu: N. Vulso L. Valerius Potitus IV. M’. Claudiuss P.

Maelius Sp: F. C.N. Capitolinus M. Furius Camillus II. M. Quintius I…..

us P.F.P.N. Calvus Esquilinus M’. _Emilius Mamerci-| Tr.i L. Julius -Tribb. Milit. Sp. F… ius L.F. Sp: N. Medullinus nus IIL. L rbb. M.

Furius I….. us L.F.M’N. Pansa Saccus Cn. Cornelius Cossus II. Milit. L.

Valerius XIV. 35. L. Poblilius L.F. Voler. N. Philo Vulcus K. Fabius Ambustus II. Ta. MIL. L. Julius Iulus J V. 10. 110 354 399 95-2… cius M.F.M.N. Augurinus P. Licinius Calvus C. Servilius C. Duilius K.F.K.N.

Longus P. M1niUs L.Virginius….. s L.F.L.N. Priscus L. Tatinius Tribb. Q.

Sulpicius! Tribb. M. Veturius Ti. F. Sp. N. Crass. Cicurin. P. M elius f Milit. A. Manlius milit. I 1~. … onius L.F.L.N. Rufus L. Furius Medullinus II. - Capitus - Claudius I _____ I______ . -Voler.

Poblilius P.F. Voler. N. Philo. TR. MIL. L. Publilius Volcus J V. 12. M. t Ancus t J XIV. 38.

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Yearof the Yea of [ Year Caommon-t Year ome before the Christian Olympiads. Fasti Capitolini. LIVY. DIODO’US.’ DIONYSIUS. wealth. Ea 111

355 398 95-3L.F.PN. Potitus V. M. Veturius L. Itubis L. Furiu.. F. Sp: N.

Medullin. If.. Pomponius M. Furius M.F.M.N. Lactucin. 3laxurn C. Dailiesi M. milius Q. Servilius…….. Td~~~~~~~~Trbb. Milit.Tib.Mit Q.Servilius…….Volero Publilius Cn. Cornelius… us if. Cu. Genucius K.

Fabius Q. Sulpicius Ser….. L. Atilius V. 13. Sex. ]- Paulus t J XIV. 44.

TR. MI,. 112 336 397 95-4 s II. L. Valerius Potitus V. P. Manlius L.

Seraius M’F.L.N….. Valerius Maximus Sp. t Manius t nus IV. M. Furois Camillus HI. L. Furius Tribb. Milit. P. CorneliusP.r….. L. Purius Medullinus’Tribb…. s is IIl. Milit. A. Manlius A.F.C…… Q. Servilius Fidenas II. XIV. 47. (Q Sulpicius Camerinus 0 Il. j V. 14.’ 113 357~- 3

9Y -5 96-1 Q..nacuus IA. L. Julius Iulus. 1 n. Genucius. squiliuus II.

L. Furius Medullinus L. Atilius Q. ]lIanlius A. P…… IV. M. Pomponius [Tribb. Cn. Genuciu. L. Sergius Fidenas Tribb C. Duilius Must……

Capitolinus II. A. Postumius Regillen-Milit. M. Veturius XV 4 L. Atilius C iuDP Cornelius Ma….. tValerius tPublilius j XIV. 54.

N….’…..Camillus Di.. P. Coreiu au-…. F.M.N. Maluginensis Nlag…

nensis _______________________________

__________________________,__________ A. M anlius Ij V. 16. _____________

__________tMnlus__V.16 514 38 395” -2…..9Cossus P. Licinius Calvus] L.

Valerius L. Fu…..L. Titinius M. Furius 3….. Scipio P. Mlinius Tribb.

Q. Servilius Tr-bb. P. AMelius (Milit. Q. Sulpicius Mlt stus IlL C n.

Genucius Claudius t Ugo t L. Atilius J V. 18. t Marius Appius tj XIV. 82.

115 - 359 394 98-3 P. Cornelius Cossus L. Sergius P. Cornelius Seipio 1 A.

PostumiusN. Valerius Maximus P. Cornelius Tribb. II. Trib Sex. t-Censius t milit. K. Fabius Ambustus Q. Manlius J Ill. j-lit Anitius j-Camillus XIV. 85. u/ L. Furius Medullinus V. I Q. Servilius III. J V. 24. 117 361~

39-97-4 M. Lcreius Famlalus PV). t Seisus L. Furius laedullinus P.

Lieinius VI. P. MFlius Tribb C. lEmilius C i-t cQ. Manlius L. Valerhis Publicola Cn. Genucius ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~Sp.

Postumnius L. Atilius J XIV. 90. P. Cornelius I[. J V. B6. 117 - 36-2- L.

Lucretius FlavusP.tSxst Ser.SulpciusCamei-Css. Cornelius Crassus t[[

Se.Supeus Vami . 29. K. Fabius Tib L. Furius i lit. -. Servilius J X!

AT. Valerius’J XIV. 94.,zn

Page 626 view page image

Yl~ar -‘Ceble YearCamealth Yoea. befeisthen Olympiads. Pashi Capitolini.

LIVY. DIODORUS. DIONYSItJS. HS’, 6 2 391 97-2 L.Valerius Potitus M..t auiuaseus Tribb. M. Manlius Capitoli-Coss. C. Jmilius? Milit. 119 ~ 3 63

~ 3 90 97-3 L. Lucretius L. ~Lucretius Coss. Ser. Suslpicius Ser. t Casson t XIV. 99. M. -Zmilius Tribb. L. Furius Medullinus’VII. “Milit.

Agrippa Furius _______ ______ ______ ______ ______. ZE rn ilius IL. V. 32. _ 121 36

3869 -9-7-4 C.Fabius Ambustus L. Valerius Coss.  Fabius Ambuslus A.

Manlius XIV. 103. Fabius Ambustus Tib Q.Stlpicius Lon-aus Milit. Q.

Servilius IV. z tSer. Cornelius Malu0 121 365 98-1 nensis J

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~V. 36. ______________ _____________ 121 365 368 L.

Valerius, Publicola II. L. Lutcretius L. Virginins Ser. Snipicins Ttibb.

Milit. P. Cornelius TrIbb. C. Aimilius A. Manlius jMilit. C. t Kufots i XIV. 107. 122 366 387 98-2 ~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~L. Postumius JVI. 1.

______________ 122 366 387 -7 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~8_-2 Q~~~~C. t K sot 1 nfus 1-Sulpidi us K. Fabius Tribb. Q. Servilius Mullt. P. Cornelius J ~ _

_____________________________ V~~~~~~~~~~. f Cloisf i.10

123 Th672U 386 9-M. Forims) t Caine t >Tribb. Miliii.P ____ ____

______________________~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ t snlubs 1-XV. 2. ___________

12_4 36G8 3 86 968_-4 L. Lucretins Coss. _______

_____________________________ I Ser. S ulpicins X V. 8.

_____________________________v. 8 125 369 384 99_f-1 L. Valerins Coss.

_____ ________________________ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~A. Manlins XV. 14.

_____________ 12)6 370 33 9-L. Lucretius t Sentuis tSulpicins (Tribb. L.

Emilius lbilit. _____ ________________________ 1~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.

Formus f XV. 15. ____________ 127 LI 382 ~~~~~99-3 Q. Sulpicius I ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~C. Fabius Servilins Cornelius TriIbb. P. 1 IUgo t fMilit. Sex. t Anius t _____________________ Ca mus t Mlarcus t I X V.

20.O. _ _ 128 372 381 9~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~l4 ~~~~P.

Cornelius L. Virginius, L.Papirius M.Furius ITribb. Milil. A. Valerius L.

Manius ~

Page 627 view page image

EXPLANATION OF THE FIRST TABLES. a preceding tables exhibit a view of the lists of consuls and military tribunes from c beginning of the commonwealth to the Gaulish invasion, according to four distinct iuthodes.

the remains of the Fasti Capitolini, Livy, Diodorus Siculus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. And I have endeavored to arrange each list according to the chronology adopted by its own particular author; so that as this chronology varies, the same’ear will be found marked by the names of different sets of consuls, according as we prefer one of these four authorities to the other.. The principal fragments of the Fasti Capitolini were discevered in the year 1546, i the course of some excavations which were then being maie on the ground of the ancient Forum. They have been preserved in the museum of the Capitol, and their contents have been long known to the world, as they have been often published. ly extracts have been taken from the edition of Sigonius; and I have been careful to give them in their genuine state, without noticing the additions by which Sigonius attempted to supply from conjecture the lost or effaced words of the original marble. It happened, however, that about two hundred and seventy years after the discovery of these fragments, two other fragments of the same marble were brought to light in the course of a new excavation in the Forum, on the very spot where the former remains had been found.

This was in the years 1817 and 1818; and Signor Borghesi, an eient Italian antiquary, published a facsimile of these new portions of the Fasti, and illustrated them in two able memoirs published at Milan in the year 1818.

The ne pieces joined on exactly with those discovered before; so that in several instances word, of which only one syllable had been preserved in the former fragments, was now completed by the discovery of the remaining syllable, after an interval of nearly three enturies. I have, therefore, copied their contents from Borghesi’s edition, and incorporated them with the older fragmien’ts published longy ago by Sigyonius. These Fasti do not notice the Greek Olympiads; but they preserve in several places n~otices of the yea~rs from the foundation of Rome. Thus the consulship of Sex.

Quinetilius and P. Curiatus is placed in the year 300, and’the triumph of the consuls who immediately succeeded the decemvirate, M. Horatius and L.

Valerius, is assigned to the month of Aug(ust, 304. It appears, then, that these Fasti only allow two years to th e decemvirate, and not three; and, moreover, that they place its commencement inl the year 302, agreeing in that respect with the chronology of Livy. II. Livy also makes no mention of the Greek chronology; but he too, from time to time, notices the years from the building of Rome. Thus hie places the first institution of the military tribuneship in. 310 (IV. 7), and the beginning of the decemvirate in 302 (III. 33). Taking -these two dates for my starting points, I have caJeulated from them thne dates of the years before and after them, according to Livy’s list of consuls. This brings the date, of the expulsion of the Tarquins to the year 247; but then it seems probable -that Livy has omitted the consuls of the fourth year of the commonwealth by accident; and it seems as if he had omitted those of one or two years more at the beginningy of the great Volscian war of Coriolanlus. With the, addition of these three years, the first year of the commonwealth would become the year 244, which would goree, with Livy’s own calculation of the reigns of the several kings; but as my object in these tables was rather to give the actual chronology of the several authorities than to endeavor to correct it, I have reckoaned no greater number of consulships in the table of the Piasti according to Livy, than Livy himself allows for. 1II.

Dionysius regularly gives the Olympiads along with the Roman consulships, so that the synebronistic part of his chronology canl be ascertained with certainty. With him, the first year of the commonwealth is the first year of the, sixty-eighth Olympiad (T. 74); and the Gaulish invasion falls in the first year of the, niniety-eighth Olympiad; co that there were just one hundred and twenty years between themn. Again, the first

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8HISTORY O ROME. year of the (ommonwealth is the two hundred nd forty-fifth from h funatio o Rome (I. 75); so that the Gaulish invasion falls, according to Dionysius, in theyer of Rome 365, and the intermediate years can, therefore, be determined without difficulty But as the remaining part of Dionysius’ history ends at the year of Rome 312, we can not compare his lists of the consuls and military tribunes, from 313 to 365, with those of the Fasti Capitolini, of Livy, and of Diodorus. IV.

Diodorus gives the Olympiads also, but his synchronistic system does not agre with that of Dionysius. We have not his list of the early consulshipa, because his tent book which contained them is lost: but the seventy-fith Olympiad fai according to him, in the consulship of Sp.

Cassius and Proclus Virginius, whereas that saze consu ship is by Dionysius placed five years earlier, in the last year of the seventy-third Olypiad. Accordingly, if the list of consuls ill the two writers ad continued to agree with one another, the invasion of the Gauls would have flen, by Diodorus’ reckoningin the second year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad. And yet he does place it in th second year of the ninety-eighth Olympiad. This is the date asigned to it by Polybius. 6), and it was probably so generally agreed upon, that Diodorus thought himself obliged to conform his reckoning to it. He had already introduced into his list several variations from the Fasti followed by Dionysius. For instance, he ad omitted the consulship f C. Julius and Q. Fabius, which Dionysius places in Olymp. 74-4; and he ad then inserted two consulships unknown to Dionysius, to Livy, and to the Fast Captoi i Olymp. 82-~, and 82-3. Thus the first year of the decemvirate, which according to Dio nysius was Olymp. 82-3, is with Diodorus Olymp. 84-1. The difference is then reduced by one year, because Diodorus assigns only two years to the decevirate instead of three; and thus the famous consulship of L. Valeri and M.

Horatius is placed by him five years later than by Dionysius, in Olymp.

84-3 instead of Olymp. 83-2. But after this he inserts another consulship in Olymp. 90-1, so that thedirence is again raised to six years, and the Gaulish invasion ought consequently to have been placed in Olyp. 99-3. To prevent this, and to bring it to Olymp. 98-2, he strikes out the consuships and military tribuneships of five years from Olymp. 91-2 to Olymp. 92-2 inclusive, so that the tribunes whom he places in Olymp. 91-2
are L. Sergius, M. Papirius, and M. Servilius, whom he ought, according to his own systen, to have placed in Olymp. 92-3. The obiect desired is thus accomplished, and the Gaulish invasion is in this manner thrown back to Olymp. 98-2. But so resolved was Diodorus to follow his own -system in his general chronology, although he, had felt himself in a manner forced to depart from it in giving the, date of the Gaulish invasion, tlhat, in order to return to it, he fills up the five, years following Olymnp. 98-2
with the very same consulships and tribunlesbips which he had already given for it and the four years preceding it; so that the military tribunes of Olymp. 99-4 are, in fact, the tribunes of the year next after the Gaulish invasion, and those of Olymp. 99-3 are evidently, although the names are grievously corrupted, the very same with the tribunes whom he bad before placed in Olymp. 98-2, and under whose’ tribuneship he had given his account of the’Ganlish war. Thus much will suffice in illustration of the table. It may be observed, however, ais a proof of the confusion of the early chronology of Rome, that the only instance in which the Roman annals of this period attempted any synchronism with the events of foreign history, tends but to perplex the subject still more. The annals of the year of Pome 323, according to Livy’s reckoaning, that is, the year of the consulship of T. Quintius and C. Julius, had recorded that in that year the Carthaginians first crossed over with an army into Sicily, having been invited to take p-art in the, domestic wars of the Sicilian states. Now this year, according to Dionysius, xv~s Olymnp. 87-4, and according to Diodorus it would be Olymp. 89-1. But the Carthaginians crossed over into Sicily, for the first time. since the, reign of Gelon, in Olymp. 92-3, according to Diodorus, XIII. 43, and this is confirmed by Xenophon, Hellenic. I. 1, ad finem, so that the true date of this event is nineteen years later than. the date assigned to it in the Roman annals, if we follow the reckoning of Dionysius, and fourteen years later if we, follow that of Diodorus. Niebuhr supposes that the Roman annalists confused the Carthaginian invasion with the first appjearance of an Athenian fleet in Sicily, namely, with the expedition of Laches, in the fifth year of the Peloponnesian war (Thuc~ydides, IllI. 86), that is, in Olymp. 88-2. But this is one of the very few conjrectures of Niebuhr which appear to inc quite improbable. The expedition of Laches consisted only of twenty ships, and its operations were so insignlificant that it cannot be conceived to have attracted the attention of the Romans. But the, Carthaginian expedition which Hannibal led,against Selinus consisted, according to the lowest computation, of one hundred thousand men and sixty ships of war; and his grelat success in the destruction of so powerful a city as Selinus was likely to have spread terror through all the neighboring countries. Yet how is it possible to make the niniety.

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EXPLANATION OF THE FIRST TABLES. 629 second Olympiad synchronize with the consulship of T. Quinctius and C. Iulius, t with the year 323 or 324 of Rome. Note-I have said that Livy places the beginning of the decemvirate in the year 302. iswords are, “Anno trecentesimo altero quam condita Roma erat.” III. 33. BtSigois understands this to mean the year 30l, although he finds it difficult to make out nine years in Livy’s narrative between the first decemnvirate and the institution of the military tribuneship, which Livy places beyond all dispute in the year 310. As to the grammatical question, although I am aware that the point has been contested, yet it seems to me certain that “Anno trecentesimo altero” must sigonify the year 302 301. For “alter” must immediately precede “: tertius,” and there can be no doubt that “Anno trecentesimo tertio” would signify the year 303. The confusion seems to have arisen from such expressions as “alter ab undecimo,” which, although Servius interprets even this to mean the ” thirteenth,” may yet, I suppose, be fairly understood to be the twelfth, because here the inclusive system of reckoning is followed, andlcl the eleventh year itself is counted as the first, the twe’fth as the second from the eleventh, the thirteenth as the third, and so onl. Thus the thirteenth of March is, according to the Roman reckoning-, the third day before the Ides, or fifteenth, because the fifteenth itself is reckoned as the first. But in abstract numeral expressions, such as “1trecentesimo altero,” it is different, for here the inclusive system is not followed, and ” alter” is therefore the “1second”

in our sense of the word, and “1trecentesimo primo” would be the date of the year preceding it. The usage of the Greek word 3Jtrco~ is exactly analogous to th-is. AEVrip~p Eite Tflarv Itdyv would be the year next after the battle, which we should more naturally call the “1first year”

after it. But’olv/Lwta5 ZCV71pa rpig 7ang iEKaTrbV is not the one hundred and first, but the one bundred and second Olympiad. If Sigonius’

interpretation could be shown to be righbt, it would only embarrass his system still more; for if “1trecenltesimo altero” means what we should call “the three hundred and firstI” then “1trecentesimo decimo” in Livy, IV. 7, must be what we should call -thee 16 three hundred and ninth,” it being certain that in all reekxoning,% “1alter” is immediateily Ifllowed by “1tertius.”

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CONSULS AND MILITARY TRIBUNES. Yearof th e ar of Y ear. - - -_.. .

Common-comlnOe, ef1ore the Olympiad. Fasti Capitolhini. DIODOEUS. LIVY
t’sti Sieli. Fasti Cupiniani sive woeaot-common Christiallnoi,,_ymp.{

OOU. echooine. IEra.,. c i 1“S~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tribb. Xilit.-XIV.

11(0. Tribb. J.fi’t.-VI. 4. 123 7 387 8-Q. Kwteso t T. Quintius Cincinnatus Capitolino & Corbo. t f Ents t Sulpicius Q. Servilits Fidenas V. K. Fabius L. Julius Julus Q. Servilius L. Aquillius Corvus P.

CornIelius L. Lucretius Tricipitinus ~ 3A. t Cladius - Ser. Sulpicius Rufus Tribb..liiit.-XV. 2. Tribb. Jffilit.-VL. 5. 124 368 386 98-3 M.

uritus L. Papirius Cursore & Lanato. t Caius t C. Cornelius t Emilius t C. Se:r’gius L. YEmilius IL. -h~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~L. Menenius L.

Valerius Publicola III……. Coss. XV. 8. TriTrb. filit.-VI. 6., 125 369

385 98-4 L. Lucretius M. Furius Camillus Malurinense & Cin-Ser. Sulpicius Ser. Cornelius Maluginensis cinnato. A. anius.~Q. Servilius Fidenas VI. L.

Quintius Circinnatus L. Horatius Pulvillus P. Valerius 1 | | ~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Coss.-XV. 14. Tribb. OdIilit.-Vi. 11. C) l l 370 384

99-1 | L. Valerius A. Manlius Capitolhio & CincinA. Mandus. P. Cornelius nato. TL Quintius Capitolini L~ Quintitis L. Papirius Cursor I1. C.

Sergius II. Trilbb. Jilit.-XV. 15. Tribb. Jlilit.-V,. 18. 120 7 371 383

99-2 L. Lucretius Ser. Cornelius Maluginensis Rufo & Camillo. N t Sentius t Sulpicius I. L. elEilius P. Valerius Potitus I.. L. Purinus M. Furius Camillus Set. Sulpicius Rufus II. C. Papirius Crassus T. Quitius Cinciunatus IT. Tribb. JkTilit.-Xv. 20. | ribb..1illit.-Vl. )l. 128 37; 382 993 Q. Stlepicius I Valerus IV. Genucius & Curt/us Publicola 111. & 81

1 1 1 ~~I C. Fabius A. Manliuzs lie. FaXdrat ac a \ro [ Flac:o II1.’Nl~~~~~~~~~ I~~~~~~~~ |.Servilius Cornelius Ser. Sulpicius II!.‘P(uh7 o’p raavo bJ ~~~~~ I I I ~~~~~~~P. t Ugo t L..Lucretius |0 70

ToKaT5rEr-, Sex. t Anius - L. M3milius IlIl. e n - _g ~ - -

Caius t Marcus + I.. Tieboniuis v. l

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Year oftheI Year of before the Commee-ltm. boeteOlympiad. oo s EYEi oa.

Ec epnaisr com -tome. Christiaa Easti CapitoliaF Weanlth. Era. Norisiani.

Tri.bb, Alilit. XV. 22. Tribb..iliit.-Vl. 22. 129 373 381 99-4 F.

Cornelius Sp. Papirius Macrinus It. &-, Cap-Fidenas & Crasso. L.

Virginius L. Papirius itolinus IV. L. Papirises Ser. Cornelius Maluginensis Tel. Furius IV. A. Valerius Q. Servilius L. Manlius Ser.

Sulpicius Q. Posiurmius L. Z, milius IV. Tribb. Jiilit.-XV. 23. Tribb.

Milit.-VJ. 22. 130 374 380 100-1 T. Qeintius TeM. Furius Camillus VII.

Vibulanus & Elva Publicola IV. & TriL. iervilius A. Postumius Recillensis cipitino. L. Julius L. Postumius Reoillensis Aquillius Decius L. Furius C

Lucretius Ancus L. Lucretius 0 Ser. Sulpicius M. Fabius Ambustus Tmibb.

Miiit.-XV. 24. Tribb. Milit.-Vl. 27. - 131 375 379 100-2 L. Palpirius L. Valerius V. 1P Pacelaus,- & Cras-Publicola V. e MaC. Cornelius P.

Valerius III. Bus mertino VI. L. Teallius C. Sergius III. C. Servilius L.

Menenius II. A. Valerius Sp. Papirius Q. Fabius Ser. Cornelius Maluginensis ______ T7ribb. Alliziiz’. -X 1 5. Tribb. 211,illit.-VV1.

30. 132 376 378 100-3 T. Cornelius P. Manlius Macrinus IIL & Lm-Capitolino & Albi-s Q1. Servilius C. Meanlius nas no. l. Farius L. Julius L. Quintius C. Sextilius Tel. Albinius L. Anlistius Trill. AMilit.-XV. 28.

Tribb. Milit.-VJ. 31. 133 377 377 100-4 L. Papirius Sp. Furius j Manlius t Capi-Fidenas I. & Siculo. H3 TlM. t Publius t Q. Servilius II. tolinus V.

T. Cornelius C’ Licinius L. Quintius P. Clcelius T. Horatius L. Ge-anius _

Tr-ib..11’ilit. XV. 30. Tribb..Milit.-Vf. 32. 134 378 376 101-1 Ser.

Sulpicius L. Ernilius -Macrinus IV. & Fi-Maamertino & CinL. Papirius P.

Valerius IV. denas cinato. T. Cornelius C. Veturius M. Quintius Ser.

Sulpicius ]L. Quintius;,,,; L. Quintius I Cincinnati Tribb..iilit.-XV. 38.

135 379 375 101-2 L. Valerius Crispus [Omitted in Livy. through Maloge-onesius & Lanato III. & Pref Telallius Fabius t some confusion in his reck-Crassus textato. Ser. Sulpicius oning.] Lucretius I I C )IB

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Year Vee~ ofthe Yo Comama In-Year of before the Olypiad. Roe. Crifin y aticaiolm Fast! Cuspi’ i~ni sive Rome. Chrati. OpUS. LIVa. i tsti Sicuti.atn. wealthf~l. ENohslani. 136 353 374 101-3 Q. Crassus No curule Magistrates Julius & Virginius Bacho t Solo Tribb. Jldit.-XV. 48. VI. 35.

137 381 373 1014 M. MFucrus No curole Magistrates Capitolinus VI. &

Papirto & 4-iolto j L Furius Camnerious A. Postumius L. Lureteims M

Fabius ____ __ _ ____ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ L.

Postum ius Trolbb. Muilt.-V. 50. VI. 35. 138 382 372 102-1 actus est L.

Valerius No curole Magistrates Pennus & t Melito t t Scarabiense, &.

dedicavit P. t Ancus t Celimontano. C. Tereti us L. Menenius C. Solpicius T. Papirios L. o)Eesiilhi 1. Fabius Tribb..Milit.-XV. 51. VI. 35. 139 383

371 102-2… opilcola V. P. Manlius No curube Magistrates Crassus &

Tallius Prisco & Corninlo. *… ext. III. C. t Erenucius t .luginensis VI. C. t Sextus TR. Mir-Tib. Julius L. Albioius P. Trebonius C. Aelallius Tribb..Milit.-XV. 57. VI. 35. 140 384 370 102-3….Cossus Q. Servilius No comulic Magistrates Tricipitious & Fide-Manmertino & So8 . o..ginensis.

L. Farmus nas II. o t __TR. Mom. P. Cclius _ Trill. Jhlit.-XV. 01.

Trill?)..4iit.-VI. 30. 141 385 39 102-4. pitolin. L. Tbonilias L. Forius Cossus & Pceous 11. Jedullino & Polito….lunenss VII. C. Virginius A.

Manlius. exist. IV. TR. MoL. Ser. Sulpicius Ser. Silpicius Sp. Servilius C.F.C.N. Structos L. Quintius Ser. Cornelius L. Papirius Sp. F.C.N.

Crassus. C. Cornelius P. Valerius L. Veturius L.F. Sp. N. Crassus Cicurinus. C. Valerius C. Valerius lb. Hus IV. Diet….. amercinuis Magg.

Eq. Ret Gerundoe CauLisa. u…rn in Milites ex. S.C. abdicarunt. In eorun locumn facti soot… pitobinus. Diet. Seditionts sedand0 ci R.G.C…..mus e Plebe Mag. eq. _____ ___________ ____________________~___

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Yer. e Year of the Year of before the Fasti Cospinisn Common Rome.

risian Fasti Capitolini. IDIODOIBUS. IY. Sicti. Fasti Cspini sive _______

_______ _______ - Tribb..lilit.-XV. 71. To-Ib..Miiit.-Vl. 36. 142 386

368.103-1 *…..s s lT L. Papirius Q. Ser vilius f Achillas 1 & Mu-Fidenas III. & Ma-…. aluginensis II. L. Menenius C. Veturius gillanus luginense….. acerinus Ser. (Cornelius A. Cornelius L. Veturills L.F. Sp.

N. Crassus Ciclurinus I1. Ser. Sulpicius 1. Cornelius P. Valerius L.F.L.N.

Potitus Poplicola VI. Q. Quintius……Max. Rei Geru. e. usa XV. 7’.

To-ibb.. ilit.-VI. 38. 143 387 367 103-2… EBE PRIMTJM CREARI CEPTI.

Anarchy T. Quintius Atratinus & Vibula-Capitolino & Structo… mercinus Ser. Cornelius nus L. Sextius Sex. F.N.N. Sextin. Lateran. Ser. Sulpicius Primus o plobe. Sp. Sevilius a 2 Toibb. Jlilit.-XV. 76. Tribb. JIilit.

VL. 42,. 144 388 366 103-3.. tinensis L. Furius A. Cornelius II.

Capitolinus VII. & Cosso II. & Grasso. Q. Servilius Q.F.Q.N. Ahala3..

Paulus Mallius M. Cornelius II. Vibulanus 11. elr. Sllpicius M1. Geganius Ser. Cornelius P. slanlitus’Nl~~~~~~~~ L’~~~~~~~L. Vetirius P. Valerius VI. _/ .. . I… L H ITribb. Milit.-XV. 77. Coss. VIt. 1. 145 389

365 103-4… Peticus Q. Servilius LI. Sextius Mugillanus II. & Mamercino &

Late-C. Licinius C.F.P.N. Calvus C. Vetlurius L. mEilius Mamercinus Rutilius rano. A. Colrselius M. Cornelius M 11. F1bius -Tribb. MJitit.-XV.

78. Coss.-VIL 1. t l146 390 - 364 104-1 |… ercinus IT. |T. Quintius L.

Genucius 2Amilius & Rusticus Abentinense8 &laa-t Cn. Genucius. M.F.M.N.

Aventinensis. Ser. Cornelius Q. Servilius la.,… mperiossus. Dict. Ser.

Sulpicius… Natta. Mag. eq. Coss.-XV. 82. - COss.-VI.. 2. |147 391 363

104-2… Ahala Ir. L. rAnmilils Mamercus C. Futpicius Peticus f Cossus t Medulli-Petico & Calbo. IL. Genucius. VI.F.M.N. Aventinensis IT. L.

Sextius Laterias C. Llcinius Stolo llus Regillensis,Dict. Rei Gerunde Causa. Sci..ag. eq. _______ I____ I - Coss.-Xv. (90. Coss.-VII. 3. il148

392 362 104-3 L…. l. C-enocius Cn. Cenucins Flavus &- Caniueilus AMamertino & AbenC. Sulpicius MI.F.Q.N. Peticus IT. Q j. Selrvilius L.

Sextlius Miamercinus 1I. tinense…. Capitolinus Criisrinus. Di;t…..

M.N. Maluginensis. Ma>. eq. I I I IRei Gerunldae Causa. I a. o C C
alibus… o CCCSCII. t si=rP1r-,-L~-,. …. =…….r. …. _____

___-_ ,. ( ___.

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Year of the Year YerOf too Year of before theOlmidFstCaat nspiniiv Cooo-Roooo. Christian Olmid.Fo i C tolioi. DIODOkUS. IVY. Fasti Siculi.

atsopInin otue weolilo. E ra. Norisiani. oOSS.-XV. 95. Coss.-VIL. 4. 149

3930 361 104-4….mbnotno C. Snipicins Q.Servilius Ahala Potitus Capitoli-H-aala IL. & AbentiC. Poetelius C.F.Q.N. Libo. Visolus. C. Licinius L.

Genucius nus nense…. Ahala. Diet. Ret. Gerund. Causa..Capitulin.

Criopinus. Ma0. eq….Cue. De Galleis et Tiburtibus. 1 M1. Fabius N.F.M.N.

Amboustus. Cus. Ovans. De 0 erniceis. Ann. CCCXCIII.

_______________________________ Nun. Sept. - os-V.2 ooVI isi Cu. Manbins L.F.A.N. Caitobin. imperioss. L. mibiSS. V. OSS.-VIL 11. 15 94 360 105-1

*…. Latnas Cn. Genucius C. Snipeinis Genuetus & 1 Cubi-Stulo & Petien.

Cn. Manius L.FA.N. Caitoln__mpros__L.___milusC. Lietnins Calvus us _______

1 95 359 105-2….mbustus. Q. Servilius C. Pcetelius Bolbbus Mamertinus &

Late-Ambusto & Proculo. C. Plautino P.F.P.N. Proucelus L. Genneins M.

Fabius Ambustus ranns C, Suipeinis M.F.Q.N. Petteno II. Diet. Gatteis.

Ann. CCCXCV. Nu,‘nis Mat. C. Plauttus P.F.P.N. Prouenis. Cus. De Herniceis. Ann. CCCXCV. Idibuos Mat.0 152 396 3l5 8 105-3..C. Licinins M.

Pupibtins L,nas Potitus & Cabba Hutilo & Capitoitno. C.ilarcluo L.F.CN.

Rutibus. C. Snipicins Cn. Manlius Cue. De Privornatibus. Ann. CCCXCVI.

______ ______ ~~~~~~~~~Kab. Jun. I _

153 397 357 105-4…. M. Fabins C. Fabins Mamnertinus IIL Ambusto& Leenas C. PoIetlius C. Plantius, ~ Siuls t II. C. M’arcino L.F.C.N. 11ntilus. Diet. De Tusceis. Ann. CCCXCVII.

__________________________ ~~~Prictie N un. M at.

_ CObS.-XVI. 15. te0ss.-V11, 16. 154 3998 356 106-1 M. Pupilino Leenas C.

Mareteis -f Allus f & Genueius Ruttlo & Capitoliun. Cno. Manlius lInperius-us Cu. Manlins COSS.-XV1. 23. C.obss-V1I. 17. 155 399 355

106-2…. M. Fabins M. Fabins Amnbust us IIL Stulo & Petinus Ambusto I-T.

& LveM. ,a’bi N.P..N. A bustu TT.C. Plutine M. Pupitlius La-tnas II. nae II. Cue. l1t. De Tiburtibus. Ann. CCCXCIX. ______ _____ ______

Itt~~~~~~11. N un. Jeon. OoSS.-XVI. 28. COSS.-VI[L 18. ~15S 400 354 106 3

C. Maretus C. -nubpieius Peticus III. Libo & Loatse Petten & Pubbicuba. _

- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ C n. M a n ti u es M. V a le riu s P u b lic ula ta coat, quntnt tricestmu quam, a Galis reciperata.”

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evo Year of bfr h 1Csii~isv Ce 005 eor ommbefon-l0ympisd. Fazti Capitolini DIODOPIUS. Fa sti Siouli.‘Rome. Christian Olypia.vyorpistniosiaiv.i COSo.-XV1. 32. Coss-oP. 18.Cp] 157: 401 353

105-4 M. Fabius M. Fabius Aeubustus III. Ambustus&Procu-Ambustuo III.& M.

Popillius T. Quintius lus itolino. “in quibusdam annalibus pro T. Quintio M. Popiliumn consulcm invenio.” Coss. X~I. 37. Coss.-VIL 19. 138 402 352

107-1 C. Sulpicius C. Sulpicius Peticus IV. Rusticius & Capito-Petico IV.

& PubliM. Valerius M. Valerius Publicola Pf. linus cola IP. Coss.-XVI. 40.

Coss.-o VI. 21. 159 403 351 107-2… lius M.C.F.N. Lmnas Cos. III. M.

Fabius P. Valerius Publicola Ambustus 1I. & L,’- Publicola &: Rutilo…

alleis. Ann. CDIII. Quirinalibus. T. Quintius C. Mlarc1 is Putilis has II.

Gosso.-XVI. 64. Cooo -Vii. 022. 160 404 330 107~-3… audius P.F.Recil…

M. Valerius C. Sulpicius Peticus t Potitus & Publico-Petico V. & Penno biit C. Sulpicius T. Quintius Pennus la t II. i… Diet. Ce. 1it. Habend.

Causa…. Dict. Lioss.-Xv.. 52. Coeq.-VI. 23. 101 403 349 107-4…. C.

Marcius M. Popilius Lwnas Rusticius 1P. & fPce-Loenas IV. & Scipierius M.F.M.N. Corvus P. Valerius N. Cornelius Scipio nus t-one. Di.Conmi.

PHabend. Causa. {. Coss.-XVL 53. Coss.-V-I. 24. 102 406 348 108-1…. C.

Sulpicius L. Furius Camillus Scipio & Lweenas Camilo & Crasso….. fioss.

Torquat.. C. Quientiies Ap. Claudius Crassus Coss.-XV1. 56. Coss.-Vll. 26.

163 407 347 108-2…. C. Cornelius P. Valerius Corvus Camiluls &. Crassus L nas IV. & Corvi-…… Visolus. M. Popillius M. Popilius Lccuas IV.

no…. ereus M.P.M.N. Corvus. Cos. 1P.. Antiatibus Volsceis Satricaneisque. Ann. CDVII. K. Febr. Coss.-Xvl. 59. Coss.-ViP. 27. 164 408

346 108-3 PM. 2Enfi!ius T. Manlius Torquatus Corvinus & Loenas Veemo &

Torquato. T. Quintius C. Plautius PL_. Coso.-XVI. C6. C oss.-VlI. 27. 165

409 345 108-4 PM. FPablis M. Valerius Corvus II. Venox & Torquatus Corvo &

Visulo. Ser. Selpicius C. Pcetelius Uboo.-XVP. 09. GOSS.-VPP. 208. 166 410

344 109-1.H. rius. MP.F.M.N. Corvus. De Samnitibus Anno A. Valerius M.

Fabius Dorso Corvinus II. Pa Libo Dorsus & Rcfa. CDX. X. K. Oct. PP.

Popillius Ser. Sulpicius Camerinus s.onelius P.F.A.N. Cossus Arvina.. os.

De Sam_______________ _______nilibus. Ann. CDX VIII. K. Oct. Coos.-XV1.

70. COoS.-VPP. 28. 167 411 343 109-2 C. Plautius C. Poarcius Rutilus III.

Vulso & Camerinus Rutilo IlL & ToruT. Pianlius T. Mianlius Torquatus II.

quato. Coss.-X VI. 72. CoOSS-VIP.28L 168 412 342 109-3 M. Valerius M.

Valerius Corvus PIP. RuiIbes & Torquatus Corvo iPl &P Cosso C. Pwetelius A. Cornelius Cossus IP. _ _ _ _

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Yesrsfthe Year at 5~esr I Year of before the 0m pad, Fati Capitini.Dsiae a Rome Chriatian DSlP VaSu 1i. Fasti Cuspinlani ive Common-~~~~ra Norisani.

wea~lth. Coss.-XVI. 74. Coss.-VII. 38. 169 41I 341 109.4..anlius L.F.A.N.

Imperiossus Torquat. C. Marcius C’. Marcius Rutilts Corvinus III. & Cos-Ilacla Ill. & Rutilo os fII. De Lolineis Camnpaneis Si dicineis T. Manlius Torqualtus Q. Servilius sus 1111. urTuIceis. A: CDXIII. XV. K. Junias.

Coss.-XVI. 77. CoSs.-VI1. 1. 170 414 340 110-1 iibilius Q.F.Q.N. Philo Cos. De Latineis 1. Valerius C. Plautius II. f-Ahitis f & Rutilius Venno HI. & MamerAnn. CDXIV. Idib. Janar. A. Cornelits L. IEuailius Mamercinus CO. Coss. XVI. 82. G~ss. Vlll. 3. 171 415 339 110-2 L. Furius Sp. F.M.N.

CGamriis Cos. De Pedaneis Q. Servilius T. danhlius Torquatus III. Venox I [. & t-Ma- Torquato HI1. & et Tiburtibus. An. CDXV. IV. K. Oct. Mlarcius Rutilus P. Decius Mus mertinus t Moure. C. Mienius. P.F.P.N. Cos. De Antiatibus Lavineis Veliterneis. Ann. CDXV. Pridie K. Oct. Coss.-XVI. 84.

Coss.-VIII. 12. 172 416 338 110-3 L. 2a-nilius Ti. Alcnilius Mamercinus Torquatus III. & Mamercino & Philo. C. Plotius Q. Publilius Philo Muso CoSS.-XV1. 89. Coss.-VIII. 13..4 173 417 337 110-4 T. Maulias Torquatus L.

Furmus Camillus j-Mamertinus t& Camillo & jt NeP. Decius tC. M nios j Silo tm Pm u t. Coss.-XV1. 99. Coss.-VIII. 15. 174 418 336 111-1 M.

Valerius M.F.M.N. Corvras III. Cos. IV. De Ca-Q. Publilius C. Sulpicius Longus Camillus & t Mini-Poeto & Longo 0 lenais. Ann. CDXIIX. Idib. Mart.

Ti. imilius Mamercus P.‘Elius Pietus us t Coss.-XVII. 2. Coss.-VIII. 16.

175 419 335 111-2 L. Furius L. Papirius Crassus t Phiatus t & Lon-Crasao & 1-Iella 1-. 0 C. Ilanitis K. Duilius gtas Coss.-XVII. 17. Coss.-ViI.

16. - _ 176 420 334 111-3 C. Sulpicius M. Valerius Corvus IV.

Crassus & f Dulius t 1-Caleno - & Corvo Papiri_ MIl. Atiliua Regrulus IV. Goss.-XVII. 29. Cosa.-Vi1. 16. 177 421 333 111-4 K. Valerius T. Veturius Regulus & Corvinus Caudino & Caivino. L. Papirius Sp.

Postuanius Coss.-XVII. 40. CosS.-VIII. 17. 178 422 332 112-1 M. Atilius A.

Corneliss II. t Albinus t & Calvi-t Hloc anno DictatoM. Valerius Cn.

Domitius nus res non fuerunt j-. Coss.-XVII. 49. Coss. VIll. 18. 179 423

331 112-2 Sp. Postumius M. Claudius Marcellus Albinus II. & Cossus Calvino & Arvinus T. Veturius C. Valerius IT. Coss.-XVII. 62. CoSS.-VIII. 19. 180

424 330 112-3. Aimilius L… N. Mamercin. Privernas. Cos. C. Domitius L.

Papirius Crassus II. Potitus & Marcellus Petito & Marcello. If. Do Privernatibus. Ann. CDXXIV. K. Mart. A. Cornelius L. Plautius Venno C.

Plautius P.F.P.N. Dacianus Cos. do Privernatibus. Ann. CDXXIV. K. Mart.

Coss.-XVII. 74. Coss.-VIII. 20. 181 425 329 112-4 C. Valerius L. Xmilius Marnercinus t Brassus - & Venox Crasso II & Venue. M. Clodlus C. Plautius

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Year o - he Year Common-Rome. Christian Olympiad. Fasti Ccitossii, DIODOPUS. LVY. Fasteuli. PNorisliai. Y~~or of the Veoro f 001 c the.

DIODORUS. LIVY. Fosti Sicoli. Fosti Co:spinioni sire wealth. Era.

Coss.-XVIL. 82. Coss.- V111. 22. 182 426 328 113-1 L. Plotius P. Plautius Proculus Ianamertinus II. & t Privernas t If. & L. Papirius P. Cornelius Scapula -Decianus Deciano. Coss.-X V1I. 87. Coss-VIII.‘22. 183 42 327

113-2 Q. Publilius Q.F.Q.N. Philo II. Primus Pro Cos. P. Cornelus L.

Cornelius Lentulus Venox & Scipo Dciano. & arDoSaSniitibus I’alepolitaeies. Ann. CDXXVII. A. Postumius Q. Publilius Philo II. bato.

K. Mai. Coss. XV1I. 110. Coss.-VII. 23. 184 428 326 113-3 L. Cornelius C.

Pcetelius Lentulus & t Silo t Lentulo & Philo. Q. Publilius L. Papirius ________ _______ ________ -. [~Coss.- V ill. 29. 183 429 323 113-4 L.

Papirius Sp. F.L.N. Cursor. Diet. De Samniti-….. L. Furius Camillus II.

Libo & Cursor Libone III. & Curbus. An. CDXXIX. III. Non. Mart. Junius Brutus Scwva sore I. Coss. XVIL 113. Coss.-VIIf. 37. 116 433 32,4 114-1

C. Pcetelius C. Sulpicius Camnillus & Brutus Camillo II. & Brumo. U

Papirius Q. Alnmilius or Aulius Coss. XVil.‘2. Coss. Vil. 38., [1187 431

323 114-2 L. Fulvius L.F.L.N. Curvus Cos. De Samnitibus. L. Furius Q.

Fabius Longus & Ceratanus t Hoe anno Dieta Ann. CDXXXI. Quirinalibus. Dec.

Junius L. Fulvius tatores non fue-Q. Fabius M.F.N.N. Maximus Rullianus runt. Cos. De Samnitibus et Apuleis Ann. CDXXXI. ______ ______ XII. K.

Mlart. Coss.-XVII. 28. Coss.-tX. 1. 188 432 3-22 114-3 C. Sulpicius T.

Veturius Calvinus Cursor 1I. & j Sul-Longo II. & Cereta-____i ___,_______________________ C. A2lius Sp. Posturnius lus t no.

Coss.-4IX. 7. 3 1 C 189 433 3.1 114-4 C. Ma Q… Q. Publilies Philo Calvinus &’ Baibi-t Corvo t & Rullia-M. Fos… L. Papirius Cursor nus t no. L. Corn… L. Papiriu… T. Manli… L. Papiriu… Coss.-IX. 15. ci 190 434 320 115-1 L. Pspirius…. Q. Aulius Cerretanus II. CursorIlI. & t Silo - Calvino II. & AlbiL. Papirius Sp. F.L.N. Cursor IL Cos. III. DIe L.

Papirius no. Samnitibus. Ann. CDXXXIV. X. K. Septerm. Cens….. C….

cius… _________ II1~~~~~~~~ Coss.-XVIII. 44. Coss.-.IX. 20. 1921 436

319 115-3) M. Plautius L.F.L.N. Vennoa Q. b.bllius C. Fosuius lCs o & Ceru - urlsore si & ePhilo:1 434 1’ 320 115-1

L.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~?Papiniuus. ]’ &uia Cer-eau I CursoreBH[

SioClvn II. &7 Phlo L. Foslius C.F…N. Plac eina… t Publius + L.

Piautius Venno atanus ian. Cens. L. Papirius L.F.M.N. Crassus C. Alainius P.F.P.N. Lustrum Feeer. N,. V. Coss. XVIII. 58. Coss. !X. 20. 192 436

318 115-3 Q. Aimilius Q..F.L.N. Barbula. Q. /Eius C. Junius Bubuleus ~
enox & Flaccus f Murillano t & CcrC. Junius C.F.C.N. Bubuleus. Brutus. L.

P’aph’ius 1 Q. Emilius Ba’bula etano. Coss.-XIX. 2. Coss-X. 21.. 193 437

317 115-4 Sp. Nautius Sp. F. Sp. N. Rutilus L. Plotius Sp. Nautil’s Barbula&Bubulcus Venno & Flaccina1.M. Popilius A.F.M.N. Lmnas. H’. Fulvius Al. Popilli as tose. ~~~~I ]N ~L. Airnilius L.F.L.N. Marnere. Privernas.

Diet. L. Fulvius L.F.L.N. Curvus. Mag. eq. Rei Gerund. Causa.,_ I

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Year of thYea Year ofthe Year of before the w Rome; Christian C tesos.

DIODORUS. LIVY. Fasti Sicoli. Fasisianio Rome; Christi~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~tn Fnsti Cusyipinni Rive~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Neisas Ero. 194 438 316 11- - 1 E.

Papirino Sp. PEN. Curoor Chss.-XiX. 17. 194 438 3 3, 6 116-1 L;. Papirius Sp. F.1L.N. Cursor IV. ~ I C. Junius [Names omitted.] Entilus & LEnas Barbula & Bruto….obliliuo.. F.Q.N. Philo IV. mi. Ymilus’ Fabius MI.F.N.N. Maximus Rullianus. Diet. *. Aulius.. P Ai. N. Cerretan. In Pr-ilo ocfisus est. In ejus L.F. est. Mag. oq. R.G.C.. Fabius M.PF.N.N.

Ainbuotus. Mag. eq. Coss.-XIX. 55. Coss.-IX. 24. 195 439 315 116-2 Mi.

Pcetelius M.F.M.N. Libo. Sp. Nautius Si. RPtelius Curoor IV. & Loenas, Lucillo & LzEnas. C. Sulpicius Ser. F.Q.N. Longuso… S. Popillius C.

Sulpicius II. C. Mainius P.F.P.N. Diet. Ret Gerund. Cansa. M. Foslius C.F.M.N. Flaccinator. Sing. eq. C. Sulpicius Ser. F.Q.N. Longus Cos. IlL

De Samnitibus. Ann. CDXXXIX. K. Quint. Coss.-XIX. 66. Coss.-IX. 28. 196

440 314 116-3 L. Papirins Sp. F.L.N. Curoor… L. Papiriuo IV. L. Papirius V. Cursor V. & Bubul-Curoore IV. & Philo C. Junius C.F.C.N. Bubulcus.

Biutus.. Q. Publiltus II. C. Junius Bubulcus Cus II. LIII. C. Pcetelius C.F.C.N. Libo. Visolus. Diet. Mi…….P.MI.N. Libo. Sing. eq. Ret Gerund.

m Causla. - Coss.-XiX. 73. Coss,-X. 28. 197 441 313 116-4 M. Valerius MI.F.tVN. Maximus. M. Pmeteliss Si. Valerius.. Libone & Longo 111. P.

Decius P.F.QIN. inus. C. Sulpicius P. Decius C. Sulpicius Ser. F.Q.N. Eon us Diet. R.G.C. 0 C. Junius C.P.C.N. Bubulcus. Brutus Ma0. eq. Cens. Ap.

Claudius C.F. Ap. N. Crocus. C. Plautius C.F.C.N. Qui in hoo honore. Venox appellatus est. L.F. XXVI. SE Valerius M.F.M.TN. Maximus. Coo. De Samnitibus Soraneisq., Ann. CDXXXXI. Idib. Sext. olese.-XlX. 77. Chs.-iX.

30. 198 442 312 117-1 C. Junius C.F.C.N. Bsbuleus. Brutus 11. L. Papirius V. C. JSnius Bubulcus III. Miaximus & Siuso Cursore V. & Bruto Q.

Aimilius.F.L.N. Barbula If. C. Junius Q..Lmilius Barbula II. H. C. Junius.

C.P.C.N. Bubtslcus. Brutus. Coo. IIIL De Samnitibus. An. CDXLI1. Nonis Sext. Q. Aimilius Q.F.E.N.’ Batbula. Cos. IL. Do Etrueceis. An. CDXLII.

idib. Sext. Chss.-XLX. 165. Coss.-1X. 33. 199 443 311 117-29 Q. Fabius M.F.N.N. iaxim. Rullian. Mi. Valerius Q. Fabius Bubulcus IV. & Bar-Maximo & MIure. C. Aiarcius C.F.L.N. Rutilus. Qui poston Censori-P. Decius C.

Siarcius Rutilus bula nus appellatus est. Guss.-XX. 3. Cosute.- X. 41. 200

444 310 117-3 L. Papirins Sp. F.L.N. Cursor. Diet. C. Junius Fabius Rullus & Rutilius Bruto III. & BarbuC.lJunius C.F.C.N. Bubulcus Brutus. Snag. eq.

Q. snEiliss P. Decius la 1I. Rei Gerund. Causa. Hoc auno Dictator et SlnTast Eq. sine Coo. fuernunt E. Papirius Sp. P.L.N. Cursor III. Diet.

It. De Samnitibus. An. CDXL1V. Idibus Cct. Q. Fabins M.F.N.N. Siaximus Pullian. II. Pro Cos.] De Etrusceis. Au. CDXLIV. Idib Nov. I

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Year of the Year Coon-Yerom before tha~e~ Olympiad. Fasti Capitolin.

FastiCuspinl= sa8 Rome Chritia’DIODORUS. LIVY. Fasti Skcull.Noiiai wealth.Ri Era.. Coss.-XX. 27. Coss.-IX. 42. 201 441 309 117-4 Q. Fabius 11. Ap. Claudius Muso II. & Rullus II. lulliano IL1 & RutiP. Docius P.F.Q.N. Mus. C. iarcius L. Volunmnius, lo II. _____ ___ __ Q.

Fabius M.F.N.N. M aximus Pullian. III. ________________________ 446

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~t Coso. t-XX. 36. Coss.-tX. 412. 202 446 308

118-1 Ap. Claudius C.F. Ap. N. Coecue. t Ap. Claudius f P. Cornelius Arvina Appius & Violens t Hoc anno DictatoL. Volumnius C.F.C.N. Flamnia Violens. t-L. Plautius jt Q. Marcius Tromulus ree non fuerunt t Cons. M.

Valerius M.F.M.N. Maximus. C. Junius C.F.C.N. Bubulcus Brutus. L.. XXVII.

Coss.-XX. 45. Coss.-1X. 44. 203 447 307 118-2…. Tr.. ulue Ap. Claudius L. Poetumius t Romulus t & t Al-jt Mure II. & RulliaP. Corn…. L.

Volumnius Ti. Minucius binus t 1110 1.11. t Q. Alarcius Q.P.$.N. Tremulue Cos. De Anagninets elirniceisq. Ann. CI)XLVII. Prid. K. Quint. N. Scipio lBarbatus…… Mus. Coss.-XX. 73. Coss.-IX. 45. 204 448 306 118-3…..

Megollus. Q. Marcius P. Sulpicius Saverrio, Motellus j & Minu-Coeco &

Violense. Ti. Mi…… P. Cornelius P. Semprontus Sophus cius M. Fulvius L.F.L.N. Corvus. Poetinus Cos. Do Samnitibus. Ann. CDXLriX. It1. Non. Oct.

Coss.-XX. 81. Coss.-X. 1. ” 5 4,:9 305 118-4. C. N. Sophus. L. Poetumiets L. Genuoius Sempronius & 1 Fa-Tremuo & Arvina. P. 8…. Ti. Minucius 8cr.

Cornelius ventis…..N. N. Maximue Ruolianu. P. Sempronius P.F.C.N. Sophus Cos. de Xquoueis Ann. CDXLIX. VII. K. Oct. P. Sulpicius Son. F.P.N.

Saverrio. Cos. Do Samni-I Itbus. Ann. CDXLIX. 1111. K. Nov. 1 Goss.-XX.

91. Coss.-X. 1. 206 450 304 119-1….. n. F. Cu. N. Lentulus. P.

Semprontus M. Livius Denter Lentulus & - Aven-Megello, & AuguriP.

Sulpicius M. AElmilins tesius,p no. Coss.-XX. 102. Coss X. -. 20W 451 303

119-2……C. N. Den… Sen. Cornelius M. Valerius V. Dentonius & nEmi-Sofo & Saberio. L. Genucius, Q. Appuleius lius N. lBubulcus B…… C.

Janius C.F.C.N. Bubulous Brutus 1IL Dict. Do IFquoeis Ann. CDLI. ILL. K.

Sext. Coss. XX. 106. Coss.-X. 9. 208 452 302) 119-3…..P.N.NN.

Max….1M. Livius M. Fulvius Pitinue Cornvinus & Pansa Rufo & Adventi-….

ilius L.F.L.N….. -Emuos T. Manlios Torqoatus. nense….. no Dictat….

fluic suffectus M. Valorius. M.F.M.N……..onius… _. Valor…. IV.

Diot. I1…. X. K. Do.. _

Page 640 view page image

‘Yeai 9Year of the Cmo-Rome. befre the lymid rsoi eYear of before Fasti Capitolini. DIODOCS. LIV. Fasti Siculi. Fasti Cuspinian sire commou-Rome.

C -1h r i Fst Capit.0olInL DIODORIUS. LIVY. Norisiaui. wealth.’ ra.

Coss.-X. 11. 20-9 453 301 119-4 F.C.N.. [The regular history of Dio-L.

Cornelius Scipio Petitus & Torquatus t Dextro t L, Paulo. dorus ends with the 20)th Cn. Fulvius ~~~~~~~…. ~book, at the third year of Coss.-X. 14.

210 454 300 1205-1…. the 119th Olympiad, and Q. Fabius Maximus IV.

Scipio & Maximus t Corvo IL & 1UIllihis lists of consuls here p. Decius Iil. alo I. t M, Fi.‘ulvius Cn. F. Cn. N. Psetinus Cos. terminate.] De Samnnitibus Neqainatibusque. Ann. CD. VII. K. Oct. Coss. X. 16. 211 455

299 120-2….. L. Volumnius j-Rullus III. & Muso Corvo V. & Pansa. Ap.

Claudius III.. Cn. Fulvius Cn. F. Cn. N. Max. Centumalus. Cos. De Samnitibus Etrusceisque. Ann. CDLV. IdiI ~ bus Nov. Coss. X, 22. 212 456

298 120-3 Q…. Fabius Maximus V. t Claudius & Vio-Petino & Torquato. P.

Decius IV. lens tCoss.-X. 32. I 213 457 297 1~0-4 t…L. Postumius Megellus Rullus IV. & Muso Scipione & Centu-e__… ens M. Atilius Reoulus IV. nalo. Coss.-X. 38, 39. 214 458 296 121-1……… Rul. L. Papirius Cursor Claudius & Violens Rulliano IV. & Mure…….. e devovit. Sp.

Carvilius II. IIt. Q. Fabius M.F.N.N. MaximusRullianusIII. Cos. Q - V. De Samnitibus et Etrusceis Galleis. Ann. ______ ___ _ C(DLTIX. Prid.

Non. Sept.’ Coss.-X. 47. 0 215 459 295 121-2…. N. Megelu…. Q.

Fabius Gmrges Rullus V. & MIuso V. Caeco & Violense…………Il…

Junius Brutus…. Cornelius A.F.P.N. Arvin……….I. est…. XX. I. Post mius L.F. Sp. N. M-egell. Coss. II. De Samnitib. et Etrusceis VI. K.

April. CDLIX. M. Atilius M1.F.I.N. Regulus Cos. De Volsonibus et Samnitib.

A. CDLIX. V. K. Apr. 216 460 294 121-3 L. Papirius L.F. Sp. N. Cursor [Here the 10th book of Livy - Metellus f & Regu-Rulliano V. & Mure S…….mus. ends; and the ten follow-lus IV. Sp. Carvilius C.F.C.N.

Maximus Cos. De ing books being lost, his Samnitibus. Ann. CDLX. Idibus Jan. lists of consuls are wanting…. L.F. Sp. N. Cursor….. itibus. Ann.

till the period of the second CDLX. Idibus Febr. Poeic war.] 21.7 461 293

121-4 t Ceurso’ So Maaximous lMegello II. & Regulo. 218 - I 218’ 462 _292

2….. 1 Coaximus & Grae-Gurgis &S Scaevola. chu x… ximus… Ann. D.

CDLXII. K. Sext. hs

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(Year Year ofthe Year of before the Fast Cuspinan sie eaCommon-Rome.

Christian Olympiad. Fasti Capitolin[. DIODORUS. SieVY. Norli.iini wealth.

Era. 2,1 9 4063 291 122-2- Metellus I. & Bul-Megello III. & Brubus 1
to. 220 464i6 2~99 122-3 Maximus II. & Mu-Dentato & Rufino. so VLf 221

405 289 1-122-4 t Cremolus t & t Al-Corvino II. & Nocbinus t tus. 222

4606 288 123-1 Marcellus & Rutilius Tremulo 1I. & Arvina. 1223 407 28leM7

123-2 Potitus & t Petitus t Marcellino & Rutilo. 224 408 286 123-3 Lepidus & t Cecin-Maximo & Peto. na t _____________ ______ 0`25 469 28:) 123-4
t Tacitus t & t Den-Canina & Lepido. to f 220 470 28-1 141 1 Dolabella &

Maxi-Tucca & Metello. mnus t 227 471 283 124-2…. eislue… III. Non.

Mart. - t Lucius t & Pappus Calvo & Maximo. 22 472 -2 a 124-3.s (. -
duoI QF.Q.N. Philippus… Barbula & Philippus Luscinio & Labo. Etrusceis.

Ann. CDLXXII. K. Apr. 2.9 473`281 124-4… uncanius Ti. F. Ti. N. Cos.. e Vulsiniensibus et Levinus & Coruraca-Barbula & Filippo. Vulcientib. Ann.

CDLXXIIIL K. Febr. nius rI I 1 .. milius Q.F.Q.N. Barbalu Pro Cos. De Tarentineis Samnitibus et Sallentineis. Ann. DCLXXIII. VI. Idus Quint. 230

474‘283 125-1 Severio & Muro levino & Coruncanio. H 231 - 475 79 125-2 C.

Fabricius C.F.C.N. Luscinus II. Cos. II. De Luscinus & Pappus saberio & t Prori-Lucaneis Bruttieis Tarentin. Samnitibus. cot. Ann. CDLXXV. Idibus Decembr, i~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 232 470 278 125-3 C. Junius C.F.C.N. Brutus Bubulc. Cos. II. De Rufinus & Bubulcus Luscino II. & Paeto. Lucaneis et Bruttieis. Ann. CDLXXVI. Non. Jan. 233 477 2_77 12U-4 Q. Fabius Q.F.M1.N.

Maximus. Gurges II. Cos, Gorges & Clepsinus Rufino IL. & Bruto II. II. De Samnitibus Lucaneis Bruttieis. Ann. CDLXXVII. Quirinalib. 234 478 270’

120-1 - i’ Cm’ius M’F.M’N. Dentat. IV….. nitib. et t Benacus t & Len-uGmgis II. & ClepsilRege Pyrrho. A. CDLXXIIX… ebr. tulus na. ~.. Ti. F.

Ser. N. Lentul… os. De Samnitibus et ~. Ann. CDLXXIIX. K. Mart. 235 479

275 126-2 t Benacus t & Me-Dentato II. & Len_______i~~ ______ Ann.

~~renda tulo. I236 480 274 -I,.. C. N. Canina…. neis Samnitibus.

Licinius & t Cam-Dentato III. & Me-C; ____Ann. CDXXC. Quirinalibus. bins t renda…… —…….. _~………….. 2…. ‘., = -:‘_-__.

_-………….’:-.

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Yearrof thel Year Comon Yer sfohe Olympiad. Fasti Capitolini. Faati Cuspiniapi eive Rom. Crisia DIODORUS. LIVY. Fasti Sicull. wealth. Era.

Nousiani. 237 481 273 126-4… ximus 1I…… Tarenti…. An. Cursor &

Maximues t Lucino t & t CinCD… nat. L. Papirius L… Cos. 11. De Ta…

Isuttieis 238 1 482-j 272-1 12‘7-1 ClaudiuC s & Clepsi-Cursore It. &

Maxinas mo. 239 1483 271 127-2…. Corne…ass Gallus & Pictor f Claudo t &‘Ilepsina. 240 484 270 - 127-3 Sempronius & Ku-Clepsina IL1 & Lvefus sio t. 241 483 289( 127-4. OIsiIS P…De Peicentibhu.. Regulus & Libo Gallo &

Picture. Ap. Claudits Ap. F… Cos. De Peicen… 242 2 486 288 128.1-P M.

Atilius X.F.L.N…..Cos. De Sallentineis - abius Pictor & Sofo & t Ruffo t….. Vill. t Peta t L. Julius L.F.L.N. Libo. Cos. Do Salleutineis. An.

C…. VII.. Febr. 243 - 487 267 12-8-2 D. Jtunius D.F.D.N. Pera Cos. lDe Sassinatibus An. -Maximus & Vitulus Regulo Libone. CDXXCVII. V. K.

Octobr.R N. Fabits C.F.M.N. Pictor II. Cos. De Sassinatibus. 0 An.

CDXXCVII. III. Non. Oct. N. Fabius C.F.M.N. Pictur II. Cos. De Salentineis MVessapieisque. An. CDXXCVII. K. Febr. D. Junius D.F.D.N. Pera If. Cos. Do Sallentineis Messapieisque. An. CDXXCVII. Nun. Febr. 244 488 i 266 - 128-3

Cens. Cu. Cornelius L. F. N. Blasio - Thaugatus t & Pera & Pictoro. C.

Marchis C.F.L.N. Rutilus Qui. L.F. XXXV. Flaccue in hoc honore Censorin.

appel. e. F 245 489 265 128-4 BELLUM PUNICUM PRIEIUM. imusII. &Cras-isiaimo & Vitulo. Ap. Claudius C.F. Ap. N. Caudex. ens e. Fulvius Q.F.Mvl.N. Flaccus. M. Fulvius Q.F.M.N. Flaccus Cue. Do Vulsnirensibue.

An. CDXXCIX. K. Nov. 246 491 264 129-1 -M’ Valerius M.F.M.N. Maximus. Qui in hoc ho-Albinue & Vitulus Caudex & Flacco. nore Messal. appel. e. M’

Otacilius C.F.M’N. Craseus. Cn. Fulvius Cn.F.Cn. Maxim. Centumalus. Diet.

Q. Marcius Q.F.Q.N. Philip-Claviflend. causa. pus Mag. eq. M’ Valerius M.F.M.N. Maxim. Mesealla Cos. Do Pceneis et Rege Siculor. Hierone. An.

CDXC. XVI. K. April. 247 6491 129-2 L. Postumius L.F.L.N. Meaellus Flaccus IL. & Cras-axino & Grxsso. ___________ ______ I _ Q. Mamilius Q.F.M.N.

Vitulus. gas IL

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Year of tke ear Year of the Yer of befvre the 0. Fasti Cuspiniania -e C.

Otuacilius C.F.M1’N. Crassus. 249 1 261 129-4 Cn. Cornelius L.F.Cn.N.

Scipio Asina. 6cipio II. & Florns Flacco & Grasso 9 49 21C. DuiliFs M.F.M.N. C. Duilins M.F.M.N. Cos. Primus Navalem De Sicul. et classe Pcenica egit An. CDXCIII. K. Interkalar. 250 494 1 260 130-1 L. Cornelius L.F.Cn.N. Scipio t Catacinus t & Pa-Asina & Duillio. C. Aquilius AI.F.C.N. Florus terculus L. Cornelius L.F.Cn.N. Scipio Cos. De P-eneis et Sardin. Corsica An. CDXCIV. V. Id. MIart. 251 495 259 130-2 A. A. tilius A.F.C.N. Calatinss Regulus & Blesus Scipione & Floro. M C. Sulpicius Q.F.Q.N. Patesculus C. C. Aquilius Mi.F.C.N. Florum Pro Cos. De Pceneis An. CDXCV. IIII. Non. Octob. u C. Sulpicius Q.F.Q.N. Paterculus Cos. De Pceneis et Sardeis An. CDXC… III… Cens. C. Duilius M.F.M………

cipi…. 252 496 -58 2 130-3 C. Ailius MI.P’.M.N. Regulus Vulso & tDecius Calatino & Patercu-r Ca…. lo. l |Q. Ogulnius L.F.A.N. Galls Diet. Al.

Ltetorius M.F.M.N. Plan-Latinar. Fer. Causa. cianus Mag. eq. A. Atilius A.F.C.N. Calatinus Pr. ex Sicilia De iq PI enis. An….. X..i.. K. F.. C.

Atilius M.F.M.N. Regulus Cos. De Penis Navalem egit VIII… 253 497 257

130-4 L. Manlius A.F.P.N. Vulso Longus. -Petinus & Paullus Rugulo &

Blesio. Q. Caedicius Q.F.Q.N. In Man. mort. e. in ejus locum factus est M.

Atilius M.F.L.N. Regulus. L. SNanlius A.F.P.N. Vulso Long. Cos. De Pcenis Navalem egit VII… An… 254 498-13 1-Ser. Fulvius M.F.M.N. Ptin.

Nobilior Scipio & tCataciont Longo & Regulo. M. Aimilius M.F.M.N. Paullus.

| ll 255 499 235 - 131-2 Cn. Cornelius L.F. Cn. N. Scipio Ansina Capito &

Blesus II. Nobiliore & Paulo. A. Atilius A.F.(C.N. Calatinus. Ser. Fulvius M.F.M.N. Poetinus Nobilior Pro Cos. De Cossurenxsibus et Poeneis Navalem egit XIII. K. Febr. A. CDXCIX. M. Aimilius M.F.L,.N. Paullus Pro Cos. De Cossurensibus et Peenis Navalem egit XIL K. Febr. An. CDXCIX. I 0)CCc ]t t / ] I l]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~C

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Year Year of the l b Fastl Cuspiniani sive omrn Rome. Christiae Olympiad.

Fasti Capitolini. DIODORUS. LIVY. Fasti Siculi. NorisLan. wealth. Era. 256

500 254 131-3 Cn. Servilius Cn. F. Cn. N. Caspio Cotta & Geninus Asina II.

& Calatino C. Sempronius Ti. F. Ti. N. Blaesus II. Cens. D. Junius D.F.D.N. Pera. Abd. L. Postumius L.F.L.N. Megell. Idem qui Pr. erat. In mag. m. est. Cn. Cornelius L.F. Cn. N. Scipio Asina Pro Cos. De Poenis X.

K. April. An. D. C. Sempronius Ti. F. Ti. N. Bliesus Cos. De Paenis K.

April. An. D. 257 1 501 253 131-4 C. Aurelius L.F.C.N. Cotta. Metellus & t Pap-Cepio & Blesio. P. Servilius Q.F.Cn.N. Geminus pus t-[ Cens. M’

Valerius M.F.M.N. Maxim. Messal. P. Sempronius P.F.P.N. Sophus L.F.

XXXVII. C. Aurelius L.F.C.N. Cotta Cos. De Pceneis et Siculeis. Idibus April. An. DI. 258 502 | 25~2 132-1 L. Ccecilius L.F.C.N. Metellus Regulus IL & Vulso Cotta & Gemino. C. Furius C.F.C.N. Pacilus 259 1 503 251 132-2

C. Atilius M.F.M.N. Regulus II… Pulcher &; t Pul-Metello & Pacilo. L.

Manlius A.F.P.N. Vulso II. cher t L. Csecilius L.F.C.N. Metellus Pro Cos.

De Pcenis VII. Idus Septemb. A. DII. 260 504 250 132-3 P. Claudius Ap.

F.C.N. Pulcher. Cotta II. & Geminus Regulo II. & Vulso. L. Junius C.F.L.N.

Pullus. II. M. Claudius C.F. Glicia. qui scriba fuerat. Dictator. O coact.

abdic. Sine Mag. eq. In ejus locum factus est I A. Atilius A.F.C.N.

Calatinus Dit. Rei Gerund. Causa. L. Caecilius L.F.C.N. Metelluslei Gerund. Causa. Mag. eq. 261 5 - 05 249 132-4 C. Aurelius L.F.C.N. Cotta II. Metellus II. & Buteo Pulcro & Pullo. P. Servilius Q.F.Cn.N. Geminus IT. 2G2 50 248 133-1 L. Csecilius-L.F.C.N. etellus Crassus & Licinius Cotta Ii. & Gemino N. Fabius M.F.M.N. Buteo. IL Cens. A. Atilius. A.F.C.N.

Calatinus A. Manlius T.F.T.N. Torquat. Attic. L.F. XXXVIII. 263 507 247

1332 l’ Otacilius C.F.M.N. Crassus II. Bute I & Bulbus Metello &. utilo j.

M. Fabius M.F.M.N. Licinus. Ti. Coruncanius Ti. F. Ti. Nepos. Didt. I. I I FulviusQFM. Comit. Habend. Causa. t Fulviaus Q.F.M.N. Flaccus Mag. eq.

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Tearf othe of - Year tRome. Chritian Olypia. Fasti Capitolini. DIODORUS.

LIVY. Fasti Sicali. Fasiaianie 34 508 240 133-3 M, Fabius M.F.M.N. Buteo.

Torquatua & Blesus Grasso I1. & Licino C. Atilius A.F.A.N. Bulbus 255 509

245 1334 A. Manlius T.F.T.N. Torquat. Attic. undulus & Gallus Buteo &

Pullo. C. Sempronius Ti. F. Ti. N. Blesus II. 266 511) 244 134-1 C.

Fundanius C.F.Q.N. Fundulus Catulus & Albinus Attico & Bleaso. C.

Sulpicius C.F. Ser. N. Gallus 267 511 243 134-2 C. Lutatius C.F.CON.

Catulus Torquatus & t Ca-Fundulo & Gallo. A. Postumius A.F.L.N. Albinus.

to t 268 512 242 134-3 A. Manliua T.F.T.N. To…Attic. II. Cento & t Tudinar Catuto & Albino. 0 Q. Lutatius… C.N. Ce… lus t Cens. C.

Aurelius L…… C. Lutatius C.F.C.N. Catulus Pro Cos. De Pcenis ex Sicil… e… egit. 1111. Non. Oct. A. DXII. &/ Q. Valerius Q.F.P.N. Falto Pro Pr. ex Sicilia Navalem egit Prid. Non. Octob. An. DXII..Q. Lutattus C.F.C.N. Cerco Cos. De Falisceis K.4 Marl. An. DXII. A., Manlius T.F.T.N.

Torquatus Atticus. Cos. II. De Falisceis IV. Non. N… Ann. DXIL 269 513

241 134-4 C. Clautius. Ap. EON. Centho. f Toucinus f & Fal-Attico II. &

Cerco. Is M. Sempronius C.F.M.N. Tuditanus. co 14 Ci - - __ _ __

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _I _ _ __

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__ _ _ _ _ _ * ________*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~6

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EXPLANATION OF THE SECOND TABLES. I HAVE continued the tables of military tribunes and consuls from the point of time at which they ended in the preceding ones, to the end of the first Punic war. I have given, as before, the lists of consuls from Livy and Diodorus so far as their remaining works contain them; and I have now given the fragments of the Fasti Capitolini which relate to the period contained in the tables without any omission, and at the same time without adding to the words or even letters which exist on the fragments of the marble hitherto discovered. The Fasti of Diodorus end with the year 452, and those of Livy with the year 459; and the Fasti Capitolini are wanting for several years here and th.K e both before and after that period. I have, therefore, given two other sets of Fasti, one of which goes by the name of the Sicilian Fasti, because Onufrio Panvini found the MS. containing it in Sicily. Casaubon copied the MS. and gave his copy to Scaliger, who published it in his edition of Eusebius, pp. 227-299, under the title of rLroyn Xp6v-wv. The other Fasti were first made known by John Cuspiniani, who published extracts fiom them in his commentary on Cassiodorus in the sixteenth century. They have been since published entirely by Noris towards the end of the seventeenth century, and they may be found, with his dissertation on them, in the eleventh volume of Gravius’ Collection of Roman Antiquities. The MS. containing them is in the imperial library at Vienna, and, according to Noris, they were compiled about the year 354 of the Christian era. These last Fasti are no doubt older and more correct than the Sicilian, which are full of errors; but both are useless for the period of the military tribuneships, because, representing all the years of the commonwealth as marked by consulships, they never give to any year the names of more than two magistrates. But the author of the Sicilian Fasti seems to have copied his lists from some writer who, like Cassiodorus, gave only the consulships, and purposely omitted the years of military tribuneships; and not being aware of this, and supposing that the lists of consuls were continuous in point of time, he has marked the years immediately preceding the first plebeian consulship with the names of the consuls who preceded the Gaulish invasion; insomuch that, placing that invasion in the third year of the 99th Olympiad, he notwithstanding makes it fall in the consulship of M. Genucius and C. Curtius, who were consuls only five years after the expulsion of the decemvirs. Both the Sicilian Fasti and those of Noris give merely the cognomen, or last name, of each consul: it seems as if they had looked hastily up some Fasti where all the names were given at length, and had, to save trouble, merely copied down the name which came last. Sometimes the recurrence of the same names near to each other has misled them; as, for instance, in the third Samnite war, the Sicilian Fasti give three consulships of Q. Fabius and P. Decius instead of two, and two of Ap. Claudius and Volumnius instead of one. The corruptions of the Roman names are as bad as those in the Fasti of Diodorus: Calatinus is corrupted into ” Catacion,” Dentatus into “

Benacus,” Cadicius into ” Decius,” Caudex into” Thaugatus,” Canina, a rather uncommon cognomen of one branch of the Claudian house, becomes “

Cambius” in the Sicilian Fasti, and ” Cinna” in those of Noris; and many others recur which it is in general easy to correct from the corresponding years in the Fasti Capitolini, or from any correct list of the consuls.

Some corruptions, however, cannot easily be restored, nor is it always easy to ascertain how much must be ascribed to mere errors of the copyist, and where the authors really meant to give different consuls from those named in the other Fasti. With regard to Livy’s Chronology, the fixed point from which we must set out is the year of Rome 400, which, according to his express statement, VII. 18, was the thirtyfifth year after the expulsion of the Gauls, and was marked by the consulship of C. Sulpicius Peticus and M. Valerius Publicola. Reckoning the years from this point, according to Livy’s own statement of events, the consulship of Q. Fabius Gurges and D. Junius

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EXPLANATION OF THE SECOND TABLES. 647 Brutus, the last mentioned in his tenth book, would fall in the year 459. But Sigonius places it one year later, and makes the year 422 to have been wholly taken up by interregna, and so to have been marked by no consuls’ names. This he does, in order to reconcile Livy with himself, because his reckonings elsewhere require, as he thinks, the insertion of a year more than he has actually accounted for. That is to say, Livy, in the beginning of the 31st book, says that the sixty-three years which passed between the beginning of the first Punic war and the end of the second, had furnished him with matter for as many books as the four hundred and seventy-eight years which had elapsed from the foundation of Rome to the consulship of Ap. Claudius, when the first Punic war began. Such are the numbers in almost all the MSS. But as the number four hundred and seventy-eight would agree with no system of chronology, it has been long since corrected in the printed editions to “
four hundred and eighty-eight.” Sigonius, however, argued that the true reading was four hundred and eightysix, the Roman numerals CDLXXVIII.

having, as he thinks, been corrupted from CDLXXXVI. the third X having been altered to V, and the V separated into II. He therefore places the beginning of the first Punic war in 486, having, as I have above mentioned, inserted a whole year of interregna, not noticed by Livy, which he makes out to be the year 422. Now, without this additional year, the first Punic war does actually, as I think, according to rivy, begin in 487; for Sigonius omits two consulships between the retreat of Pyrrhus and the consulship of Ap. Claudius and M. Fulvius, namely, those of Q.

Ogulnius and C. Fabius in 485, and of Q. Fabius Gurges and L. Mamilius in 489. The first of these is mentioned expressly by Pliny, Hist. Natur.

XXXIII. d 44, as well as by Zonaras, VIII. 7, and by the Sicilian Fasti and those of Noris, and is admitted by Sigonius himself in his commentary on the Fasti Capitolini. The consulship of Q. Fabius and L. Mamilius is mentioned by the Sicilian Fasti and by those of Noris, and is required by the dates of the Fasti Capitolini, which place the consulship of D. Junius Pera and N. Fabius in 487, and that of Ap. Claudius and M. Fulvius in 489, manifestly making an interval of a year between them, although the names of the intermediate consuls are lost. Zonaras speaks of Fabius as being sent against the Volsinians, and expressly says that he was consul in that year with ” /lEmilius,” according to the present text of Zonaras in the edition of Du Cange, Venice, 1729. But in the second chapter of the same eighth book of Zonaras, L. _Emilius, the colleague of Q. Marcius Philippus in 473, is in one MS. called MavtXtov, which shows how readily the names AlM, XtoS and Maai,\Los may be confounded with each other. And further, Sigonius acknowledges this consulship of Q. Fabius and L. Mamilius in his commentary on the Fasti Capitolini. Thus, according to Livy, there would be, in fact, the events of 486 years related in his fifteen first books, and the sixteenth book began with the year 487-that is, with the consulship of Ap. Clau. dius and M. Fulvius; and the fifteen next books did contain also the events of sixty three years from the year 487 to the year 550, the consulship of Cn. Cornelius and P. iElius Petus, before the expiration of which the war with Carthage was concluded-as the first Punic war had begun about the middle of 487. And thus the correctness of Sigonius’ alteration of Livy’s date from CDLXXVIII. to CDLXXXVI. is indeed established, although, as I think, his way of justifying it is erroneous, and so also is his interpretation of it; for Livy does not say that App.

Claudius was consul in 486, but that his own fifteen first books, which stopped at the beginning of App. Claudius’ consulship, had contained the events of 486 years. And, therefore, according to Livy, the first year of the war with Pyrrhus would fall in 471, the first year of the first Punic war in 487, and the end of the second Punic war in 550. Meantime I follow the common chronology of the years of Rome, because it is hopeless now to endeavor to supersede it by any other system, and it would be a mere perplexity to my readers if they were to find every action recorded in this history fixed to a different year from that with which they had been accustomed to connect it. Nor does there seem ally adequate object to be gained by the attempt. The era of the foundation of Rome is itself a point impossible to fix accurately; nor can we determine the chronology of the fourth and fifth centuries of Rome either in itself or as compared with the chronology of Greece. Our existing authorities are too uncertain and too conflicting to allow of this; and, as I have said already in another place, the uncertainty of the history and chronology act mutually on each other, and a sure standing-place is not to be found. The five years of anarchy during the discussions on the Licinian laws are, indeed, utterly improbable, and we may safely assume that they could not have happened exactly as they are represented. But Cn. Flavius, in the middle of the fifth century, recorded on his Temple of Concord’ that it was dedicated 204 years after the dedication Pliny, Hist. Natur. XXXIII. ~ 19. Ed.

Sillig.

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648 HISTORY OF ROME. of the Capitol; and this agrees exactly with the Fasti Capitolini, which place the wdila ship of Flavius and the censorship of Fabius and Decius in the year of Rome 449. It is, indeed, probable that the Gaulish invasion should be placed later than its common date; and the five years of the anarchy may well be inserted in the early part of the comrn. monwealth, a period for which we have neither a history nor a chronology that will bear any inquiry. Yet Polybius followed the common date of the Gaulish invasion, and his chronology of the subsequent Gaulish wars is all based on the assumption that Rome was taken in the 98th Olympiad, and not later. Polybius doubtless may have been misled, and Cn.

Fulvius may have had no sufficient authority for fixing the interval between the dedication of his temple of Concord and that of the Capitol; but if they were both mistaken, where are we to find surer guides? and if the records on which they relied were uncertain, as indeed they very possibly were, what evidence or what probability can we find now, so as to be enabled to arrive at a more certain conclusion? I follow, then, the common chronology of Rome; not, indeed, as thinking with th.e authors of “

L’Art de v6rifier les Dates,” that it is possible to fix the very year, and even the day of the month, on which the several consuls of the fifth century entered upon their office, but because it is a convenient standard of reference; and if not correct, which in all probability it is not, yet is quite as much so as any other system which could be set up in its room.

And this has determined me not to adopt Niebuhr’s dates even on his authority, because I cannot persuade myself that the certainty of his amended chronology is so clear as to compensate for the manifest inconvenience of departing from a system which is fixed in the memories of all the readers of Roman history throughout Europe. CORRECTION OF NOTE

15.-PAGE 37. 1 might have spared the first part of this note had I known, when I wrote it, ihat the reading, “Turrianum a Fregellis accitum,” is undoubtedly corrupt. The Bamberg MS reads “vulcaniveis accitum;” one of those at Paris (called by Ilarduin and Brotier ” Re. gins II.” and numbered at present in the Catalogue of the Library, 6797) reads ” at vul gamulis accitum:” both show that the common text, like so many others in Pliny, is merely a false restoration of a passage which in the oldest and best MSS. is unintelligi ble, but which clearly contained a meaning very different from that exhibited in the later MSS. Sillig, in his Dictionary of ancient Artists, has conjectured that the true reading was ” et Volsiniis accitum;” but in his edition of Pliny he approves rather of Jahn’s conjecture, ” Vulcanium a Veils accitum,” as agreeing more nearly with the traces preserved in the Bamberg MS. At any rate, Pliny is relieved from an apparent contradiction, and Turrianus or Turianus should no longer be quoted as an artist on Pliny’s authority. I find that Mr.

Millingen had already anticipated me in correcting “Fregenis” instead of “Fregellis,’ he not knowing, I suppose, any more than I did, that we were but fightind with a shadow.

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ADDENDA. TiE following notes are extracted from manuscripts of. the Author’s, some of them written while he was collecting materials for the latter portion of this history, but the chief part in 1833, when he was thinking of converting the series of Biographies in the Encyclopoedia Metropolitana into a continuous history of Rome, which was to open with the first Punic war, the period where Niebuhr’s great work had just been broken off by his death. As they contain information, and express opinions on several interesting questions connected with Roman history, it has been thought expedient to insert them. NOTE A, to p. 455, 1. 54. If we endeavor to picture to ourselves what the Roman people were at the beginning of the sixth century of their history; to represent to ourselves the size and aspect of their city and its neighborhood; their language, their manners, their social and domestic habits, their wealth, private and public, their principles of religion and of law; their character and condition, in short, as men and as citizens; where are the eyes so piercing as to discern the almost vanishing forms of these objects amidst the dimness of antiquity? or how can we supply, and arrange into an intelligible whole, the disjointed and seemingly unmeaning images, which our fragments of information offer, as perplexing and incongruous as the chaos of a dream?

The city of Rome, properly so called, was still contained at the beginning of the sixth century, and for some centuries afterwards, within the walls ascribed to Servius Tullius. Its circumference was about seven miles; but this enclosure was far from being all built over. Sacred groves, the remains of the forest which in the earliest times had covered all the higher grounds, were still very numerous; gardens, orchards, perhaps copsewood, such as still grows on the sides of the Monte Testaccio, also occupied a considerable space.’ As in so many other towns in their original state, the walls did not come down close to the river,2 but ran parallel to it at some distance, passing from the Capitol to the Aventine by what is called the Janus Quadrifons, and the western extremity of the Circus Maximus. But, as was natural, one of the earliest suburbs sprang up in this quarter; and the space between the walls and the Tiber, without the Porta Flumentana, was already covered with houses in the time of the second Punic war.3 Buildings had probably grown up beyond the Tiber also, connecting the fortress on the Janiculus with the city: on the eastern side of Rome, from the Esquiline to the end of the Quirinal, the space before the walls seems to have been open. The streets were narrow and winding,4 and the houses lofty; the different floors5 being occupied by different families, according to the practice still so common in Scotland and on the continent. There was as yet little of ornamental 1 Bunsen’s Beschreibung der Stadit Rom,’ Niebuhr, Abriss der Geschichte de Stadt Vol.

I. p. 678. [in Bunsen’s Rome, p. 112]. 2 Bunsen, p. 628, &c. Niebuhr, Rom.

Hist. 4 Tacitus, Annal. XV. 43. Vol. III. p. 36G, note 525. 5 This is said expressly by Dionysius, X. 32, of the houses on the Aventine.

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650 ADDENDA. architecture, such as was introduced at a later period from Greece; and of the style of the older temples we have no means of judging.

Those great works which peculiarly characterize Rome, her aqueducts and her roads, were as yet in their infancy. Of the former, only two were in existence, the Appia and the Anio Vetus; but these were not carried upon a long line of magnificent arches, like the aqueducts of a later age; their course was almost wholly underground;* for it was not yet beyond possibility that the Romans might see an invading enemy in the neighborhood of their city, and it was of the utmost importance to conceal the line by which they obtained their supplies of water, Of the roads there existed the Appian, which in the year 459 had been paved with basalt,’ as far as Bovillae, that is, to the foot of the Alban hills, ten miles from Rome; and according to Niebuhr, there must also have existed the Latin, the Salarian, the Nomentan, and the oldest Tiburtine. Whether these were as yet paved, we have, I believe, no information. If we look to the neighborhood of Rome, we shall find that many of the old towns with which Latium was so thickly set in early times, had already been utterly destroyed. Nothing more surprises those who fancy the Campagna of Rome to be like Champagne, or like the great chalk plains of Hampshire and Wiltshire, than the sight of its actual scenery. The swellings of the ground continually end in little precipitous cliffs; and the numerous streams flow between deep rocky banks, offering exactly such situations as the old Italians loved to choose for the citadels of their towns.

Accordingly, Pliny reckons up the names of fifty-three8 people of Latium, who had all perished without leaving a trace of their existence behind.

Many of these indeed were destroyed at a period not only beyond historical memory, but even beyohd the reach of those traditions which once passed for history; some, however, occur in the early annals of the commonwealth, and are afterwards lost to us altogether, as Crustimeria, Corioli, Longula, Polusca, &c., while others, as Gabii and Fidenae, though not actually destroyed, fell into such a state of decay that they became a proverb to express the extremity of loneliness and desolateness.9 No doubt the law of conquest had been applied to these states in its full extent; and their lands, having been taken in war, had mostly been occupied by the patricians, and thus became, in fact, though not in law, the property of individual Romans. Thus, at a very early period, we find that the fortunes of the nobility consisted chiefly in land”’ conquered from an enemy; the old Ager Romanus, or original territory of Rome, extending only about five miles” from the city towards Alba, and still less in other directions.

Accordingly, Strabo says expressly that Antemnae and Fidenve, the latter five miles from Rome, the former less than three, were in his time the property of private persons. By property, vx7ssie, he meant possessiones, land which had been originally won from an enemy, and never divided out as a colony; which was the possession of individuals, sold, let, and bequeathed, like actual property, so long as the state did not choose to exercise its right of resuming it. Polybius has remarked,“2 that the old Latin language differed so much from 6 Frontinus, de Aquonductibus, 7, 18.

The of its course was forty-three miles, all of which, Aqua Appia had its source near the road to except 221 paces, was underground.

FrontiPraeneste, between the seventh and eighth mile-nus, c. 6. stones from Rome; and the whole length of its Livy X. 47. Silice perstrata est.

Silex is course to the point at which the distribution lava basaltina, of a blackish gray color, made of the water took place, near the Porta Tri-up of a crystallized mass of augite, leucite, zegemina (at the foot of the Aventine, looking elite, &c. See Bunsen’s Rome, p. 50, note. towards the Palatine), was 11 miles and 190 8 III. 5. paces. It was carried underground the whole 9 Gabiis desertior atque Fidenis Vicus. See of the distance, except for sixty paces close to also Cicero, pro Plancio. the Porta Capena (in the low ground, just un-‘O Livy, IV. 48. Nec enim ferme quicquam der the southern end of the Coolian). The Anio agri, ut in urbe alieno solo positS, non armis Vetus was contracted for in the year 482

(481 partum erat. according to Frontinus), and completed a few n1 Strabo, V. p. 159. Compare Livy, I. 258 years afterwards. Its source was twenty miles and II. 39. from Rome, above Tibur; and the whole length III. 22.

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ADDENDA. 651 that spoken in his time, that even those of the Romans who understood it best met with expressions in it which they found great difficulty in interpreting. This refers to the language spoken at the beginning of the commonwealth; and the famous hymn of the Fratres Arvales, which has been preserved to our own times, enables us to confirm the truth of the statement. But in the Punic wars the Latin language was substantially the same as in the age of Cicero and Virgil: the inscription on the Duillian column, and that on the tomb of L. Scipio, who was consul in 495, are both perfectly intelligible to us, and only differ in the forms of the words from the writings of the Augustan age. The free male population of Italy of an age to bear arms, exclusive of Bruttium, of the Greek cities of Magna Grsecia, and of the whole country north of the Rubicon and the Macra, is said by Polybius to have amounted to 770,000
men, in the year 529. It is not clear however whether there is not some confusion3 in the reckoning, and whether the sum total ought not to be reduced by nearly 50,000. Even adopting the lower number, we get a free population of 1,440,000 persons in the vigor of life; and if we add half as many for those of both sexes who were under seventeen or above sixty, it makes the whole free population of Italy, with the important omissions already noticed, to amount to 2,120,000 souls. The slave population it is impossible to calculate. In Campania the slaves must have been numerous: in Etruria those who were not reckoned amongst the citizens, that subject population who, though not strictly slaves, are often carelessly called so, must have greatly outnumbered those properly called Etruscans. But in Latium, in Samnium, amongst the Sabines, and in Rome itself, the slaves were as yet perhaps a minority of the whole population. Still, if we reckon the whole population, free and slave together, at five millions, and consider the number and populousness of the Greek cities, of which no account is given, the sum for the whole peninsula south of the Macra and the Rubicon will appear sufficiently great. No doubt it had once been far greater; but the long and bloody wars which led to the Roman conquest of Italy, must have diminished it enormously, to say nothing of the wasting invasions of the Gauls. Extensive tracts of land had been seized by the Romans, and were mostly held in occupation by a small number of proprietors; nor must we conceive of these large estates, as of the large farms of modern times, which are supposed to be so favorable to agriculture. On the contrary, they were cultivated carelessly and partially: and ground, which the necessities of the small proprietor had forced into productiveness, was allowed to return to its natural barrenness. Besides, the extent of the woodlands must have been much greater than at present; and if some spots were then well peopled, which the malaria has now rendered uninhabitable, yet, on the other hand, there were places, as particularly in the valley of the Arno, which have only been reclaimed in later times from the state of impraoticable marshes; and the number of individuals supported by trade, or by any other means than agriculture, was beyond all comparison smaller than in modern Italy. I know of only one fact which seems to indicate the existence of a commercial spirit among the Romans at the period with which we are now engaged. This is the law of Q. Claudius,‘4 one of the tribunes, passed a short time before the second Punic war, which made it unlawful for any senator, or father of a senator, to possess a ship of the burden of more than three hundred amphorae. 13 Polybius reckons the four Roman legions citizens of foreign states, who were mun’cipes employed in the field, and the reserve which of Rome, it -would on this occasion comprise covered the city, as exclusive of the census of the Campanians; and we thus get a number the Romans and Campanians; that is, the comr-very closely agreeing with the sum of the Roplete census, including the legions stationed in mans and Campanians as given by Polybius, Sicily and Tarentum, would have given a sum 273,000, if we suppose that he ought to havo total of 324,900.

But the census for the year included the soldiers actually employed in this 532, gives only 270,213 citizens. Now if, as amount, instead of reckoning them separately Niebuhr supposes, the census included all those 1 Livy, XXI. 63.

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652 ADDENDA. The avowed object of this law was to exclude the nobility from engaging in maritime commerce; the professed reason for the exclusion was, that trade was degrading to the dignity of a senator: but the circumstance that it was resisted strenuously by the whole senate, and carried in despite of their opposition, proves that they felt the restriction much more as an injury than an honor, and makes it probable that the real object of the friends of the law was to monopolize the profits of trade to the middling classes, and to exclude the competition of the nobility, whose superior wealth would have given them great advantages in every market. But the commercial spirit of the Romans had no time to develop itself; the invasion of Hannibal was fatal to the security, and much more to the acquisition of capital; and after the struggle was over, society had undergone a change which fixed the attention of the people on other objects. Trade therefore contributed but little to the greatness of Rome: indeed it is ridiculous to speak of the trade of a country, where some of the simplest callings‘5 were as yet unknown, and where silver money had been coined‘6 for the first time only five years before the first Punic war. Were the manners of Rome, then, as pure as those writers would imagine, who consider an agricultural people to be placed in so much healthier a moral condition than a commercial or manufacturing one? Undoubtedly the Roman character before the second Punic war was full of nobleness; but it is idle to connect its excellence with the preference given to agriculture, rather than to trade. The Roman people were as yet in the youth of their existence; and their minds enjoyed a youthful freshness. They had not lost the feelings of admiration and veneration; feelings which knowledge and experience, inasmuch as their field is an evil world, surely lessen; feelings whose destruction is the worst degradation of human nature. Respect for the gods, respect for the laws, respect for the aged, respect for the judgment of the good and tile wise, powerfully influenced a Roman’s mind; and, opposed to these, self-confidence and self-indulgence could as yet do nothing. What there was of crime was not the mere wickedness of individual gratification: of whatever offences a Roman was guilty, his idol was not that vilest of all, his own single pleasure or pride. He was cruel and treacherous to foreigners; for such conduct might save the majesty of Rome from humiliation: if a patrician, he might be oppressive and insolent to the commons, or the mob of the forum, turba forensis; but he was striving against the confusion of sacred things with vile, against dishonoring the images of his ancestors, whose spirits watched over the welfare of their race, and required of their descendants in every generation to transmit its honor and dignity to their children unimpaired. So in Rome, as ih more corrupted states, there was violence and injustice, and towards foreigners cruelty and falsehood; but there was, withal, a surrender of self to some more general interest;: and where the commands of that interest were in accordance with truth and justice, there was exhibited virtue in some of its most heroic forms, resolute control of appetite, obedience even to death, unshaken fortitude, and entire selfdevotion in the cause of duty.

In such a state of things the domestic relations are purely and faithfully discharged; for on these points law and public opinion always speak the language of nature and of truth; it is only individual wickedness that leads to the violation of these plain duties. Accordingly we find that the marriage tie was seldom broken, either by adultery or by divorce;17 and the obedience of children 15 Barbers were unknown at Rome, accord-? 17 It is a wellknown story that Sp. Carvilius ing to Varro (Pliny, VII. 59), till the year 554; was the first Roman who divorced his wife; bakers, or rather bread-makers, till the year and that this took place after the end of the 580. (Pliny, XVIII. 11.) But the oldest food first Punic war (See Aul. Gellius, IV. 3. Valor. of the 1Romans was puls, a sort of paste made Maximus, II. 1, ~4). Niebuhr (Roin. HIist.Vol. of spelt (far); like the polenta ofmaize, so com-III. p. 414) and Hugo (Geschichte des Rom. rnonly eaten in Italy now. Rechts, p. 114) consiCler this as a mistalle; and i Pliny, XXXIII. 3. possibly it is not to be taken to the letter. But

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ADDENDA. 653 to their parents was secured at once by the general feeling and by law. The laws indeed relating to the patria, potestas confer on the parent an exclusive authority, and even profane one of the most sacred of human relations by placing it on the footing of that of master and slave.

Yet so strong is parental affection, that there is little danger of a father’s tyrannizing over his children; and this natural love makes the great distinction between domestic government and political; neglect and disobedience on the part of the child being the evil most to be dreaded in the one, as oppression on the part of the rulers is in the other. But although in the early times of Rome, the marriage tie was most rarely broken, yet we are not to imagine that the standard of morals approached nearly to the purity required by Christianity. As if compromising with passions which it could not wholly extirpate, public opinion almost tolerated some kinds of sensual indulgence, in order more effectually to put down others. The plays of Plautus, although the stories are of Greek: origin, could not have been relished by a Roman audience, had not the state of morals which they describe resembled actual life at Rome, no less than that at Athens. So universal is the tendency of our nature to impurity, that we could readily believe, even without express testimony,“8
that the conversation of the Romans at their entertainments, even in the most ancient times, was unfit for a modest woman to hear. Nor can we wonder that the young Romans acted in the entertainments known by the name of Fabule Atellanee,“9 without any degradation, although these20 in the coarseness of their ribaldry went far beyond the regular drama. It seems as if the ancient commonwealths acted on the famous principle of Aristotle, and deemed it wise to give the passions their full range on particular occasions, that their violence might so be exhausted, and the general course of life preserved safe from their dominion. Thus, while the purity of the Athenian tragedy has been guarded with such scrupulous care, the comedy of the same people indulged in the grossest indecencies; and thus, as the slaves had their season of liberty at the Saturnalia, so the Floralia, the Liberalia, and other religious festivals, gave free license to the lowest and most slavish passions of our nature; and abominations were then practised and publicly sanctioned, which would be utterly inconsistent with the severity of the Roman discipline in other respects, did we not believe that they were looked upon as a sort of safety-valve, whereby it was possible to regulate the escape of feelings too powerful to be repressed altogether NOTE B, to page 460, 1. 39. The expression in Varro is remarkable, “T. Manlio Consule bello Carthaginiensi primo confecto” (Ling. Lat. IV. p. 39, Ed.Varior. 1619), and again in Livy, if, as the story seems to imply, Carvilius di-therefore, in later times, when divorces were vorced his wife in order to marry another (and frequent, it fell into disuse, as did, in fact, the this is the notion of the word “

Divortium,” Conventio in ianrum altogether; and a less forgiven in Scholium on Cicero de Oratore, I. 40, meal marriage came into general use, founded Divortium est, quoties dissolute matrimonio merely on the consent of the parties, which alter eorum alteras nuptias sequitur), then it could be dissolved more readily. may have been one of the earliest instances of 18 See Fragm. Varro, Satyr. Menipp. in such a divorce, if not absolutely the very earli-Agathon. est. For the Romans in early times, no less 19

Livy, VII. 2. Festus in Personata Fabula. than the Germans in the days of Tacitus, ab-20 Augustine, Civit. Dei, II. 8. ” linec sunt horred second marriages (Valor. Maxim. II. 1, scenicorum tolerabilia ludorum, comcedim sci3). Again, marriages celebrated with the re-licet et tragcedie, hoc est, fabule, poetarum ligious ceremonies known by the name of Coo agenda in spectaculis, multa rerum turpituf hrreatio were held to be indissoluble, except dine, sed nulla’ saltem, sicat alia multa, verboby the performance of certain other ceremonies, rum obsccenitate compositm.”

That the ” alia which were purposely made horrid and revolt-multa”

include the Atellanve Fabule is clear ing, in order to deter any one from having re-from the distinction between them and regular course to them.

This shows the old feeling comedy, and from Livy’s words, “Juventus,‘with regard to divorce; for marriage by CoLb histrionibus fabellarum actu relicto, ipsa inter farreatio was doubtless considered originally se more antique ridicule intexta versibus jactias the only true and solemn marriage. And tare ccepit.1”

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654 ADDENDA. I. 19, “T. Manlio Consule, post Punicum primum perfectum bellu-m.” TIhis cannot allude to the first treaty concluded by Catulus six years before, but must relate to the apparently entire termination of all disputes by the solemn confirmation of it in 518-19. And thus, according to the expression of Paterculus, ”’ Certae pacis argumentum Janus geminus clausus dedit.” The gate of Janus was the Porta Janualis, one of the gates of the original Rome on the Palatine. Afterwards, by the addition of the Sabine settlement on the Quirinal and Capitol, it became a passage gate, rather than an entrance gate, being now in the middle of the city, just like Temple Bar. It stood near the present arch of Sep. timius Severus, on the edge of the Forum, and close upon the Via Sacra. Livy places it in the Argiletum; that is, in the low ground between the Capitol and the Tiber, near the site of the existing arch of Janus Quadrifons; but this is probably a confusion, as we read of a temple of Janus in this quarter, but one which had been built by C. Duillius in the first Punic war. (Tacitus, Annal. II. 49.) The notion of opening the gates of Janus in war was, that this god, who under his name of Quirinus was worshipped by the old Italians, as the god of battles, might go out to war in defence of his people. And his statue was set up at the Porta Janualis, rather than at any other place, because tradition recorded, that in the battle between the Romans and Sabines, in the reign of Romulus, he had wrought a signal deliverance for Rome on that very spot. See Macrobius, Saturnal. I. 9. I am aware that Niebuhr (Vol. I. p. 202, 2d edit.) gives a different explanation of the origin of the custom, and supposes that the Porta Janualis, connecting the Roman and Sabine towns with each other, was closed in peace, to show that they were distinct and independent states, but opened in war to imply that then they were allies, and rendered one another mutual aid. This seems to me rather forced; whereas the statement given above from Macrobius is simple and probable. Besides, Virgil, a high authority in such matters, declares that the custom of opening the gates of Janus in time of war was not of Roman origin, but borrowed from the general practice of the Latins. (-,n. VII. 601.) It could not, therefore, have referred to any local peculiarities in the situation of Rome. NOTE C, to p. 461, 1. 19. Nothing is known of the language or customs of the Illyrians, by which we can confidently ascertain their race. A legend recorded by Appian (Illyrica, c. I.), which makes Keltus, Illyrius, and Gala to have been three brothers, the sons of the Cyclops Polyphemus, is grounded probably on the known intermixture of Keltic tribes, the Boii, the Scordisci, and the Taurisci, amongst the Illyrians at a later period; and the Japodes, a tribe on the borders of Istria, are described by Strabo (IV. p. 143) as half Kelts, half Illyrians. In the practice of tattooing their bodies, the Illyrians resembled the Thracians (Strabo, VII. p. 218, Herodot. V. 6); the custom of one of their tribes, the Dalmatians, to have a new division of their lands every seven years (Strabo, VII. p. 218) resembles the wellknown practice of the Germans, only advanced somewhat further towards civilized life; and the names of Teuta and Teutus might make us fancy a connection between them and the Teutonic race. The author of the Periplus ascribed to Scylax speaks of the great influence enjoyed by their women, whose lives in consequence he describes as highly licentious; but Scymnus Chius, writing about a hundred years before the Christian era, calls them ” a religious people, just and kind to strangers, loving to be liberal, and desiring to live orderly and soberly,” a character which often marks the first growth of the virtues of peace amongst a people newly reclaimed from barbarism; while they yet retain the simplicity of their earlier state, but have laid aside its lawlessness and cruelty. These happy fruits of Roman conquest and dominion were exhib:ted in Illyria in

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ADDENDA. 655 the time of Scymnus Chius, as at a later period they were displayed among the Cisalpine Gauls, who in the time of Pliny preserved a simplicity and purity of manners unknown in the rest of Italy. (Pliny, Epist. I. 14.) But at the time of the first Illyrian war, the Illyrians were as yet merely barbarous, dreaded for their ferocity, and with that low sense of justice or true nobleness which commonly characterizes the barbarian. NOTE D, to p. 463, 1. 3. The Spaniards value the harbor of Carthagena so highly, that, according to their proverb, ” there are four harbors in the Mediterranean:-Carthagena, June, July, and August.” NOTE E, to p. 464, 1. 29. From the mention of Greeks on this and other similar occasions (as in Livy, XXII. 57), Niebuhr concludes that the prophecies referred to cannot have been of Greek origin, and therefore not what were properly called ” Sibylline books,” but rather of Etruscan origin, or Latin, some of which were kept together with the Sibylline books, under the care of the same officers. But it does not appear that the prophecy and the method of evading it were contained in the same books; nor is it likely, for no prophecy would seek to render itself nugatory. If the books were Greek, they were likely to contain prophecies of Greek triumphs; and such must undoubtedly have been the meaning of the declaration, that the Greeks should take possession of Rome. Prophecies relating to the Gauls may have been of Etruscan origin, dictated by that fear of the Gaulish arms, which the Etruscans had learnt in earlier ages, when the Gauls had driven them from their settlements on the north of the Apennines. The evasion of these prophecies was merely the commentary of the Roman pontifices, such as was generally practised in order to avert a prediction, whose authority it was not thought proper to deny. Niebuhr refers to a similar trick practised by the Apulians against the Brundisians. An oracle had declared that the ~tolians, the followers of Diomedes, should possess Brundisium forever; so, when the Apulians had expelled them from Brundisium, and they on the assurance of this oracle sent an embassy to reclaim it, the Apulians put the ambassadors to death, and buried them within the city; thus fulfilling the prophecy, and preventing its fulfilment in any other sense. (Justin, XII. 2.) NOTE F, to p. 465, 1. 23. Nothing shows more clearly the great rarity of geographical talent, than the praise which has been commonly bestowed on Polybius as a good geographer. He seems indeed to have been aware of.the importance of geography to history, and to have taken considerable pains to gain information on the subject; but-this very circumstance proves the more the difficulty of the task; for his descriptions are so vague and imperfect, and so totally devoid of painting, that it is scarcely possible to understand them. For instance, in his account of the march of the Gauls into Italy, and of the subsequent movements of their army and of the Romans, there is an obscurity, which never could have existed, had he conceived in his own mind a lively image of the seat of war as a whole, of the connection of the rivers and chains of mountains with each other, and of the consequent direction of the roads and most frequented passes. The Gauls, he tells us, crossed the Apennines into Tuscany, and advanced to Clusium; and thus placed themselves on the rear of the praetor’s army, which had been destined to cover th

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656 ADDENDA. Etruscan frontier. We must suppose, then, that the praetor’s army was posted between Faesulae and Pistoria, expecting the Gauls to cross the Apennines nearly by the line of the present road from Modena to Florence by Pistoria; and that the Gauls, instead of taking this line, came in the direction of the modern road from Bologna; except that after descending the main chain of the Apennines, near Moncarelli, they followed the Val Mugello, or Valley of the Sieve, to their left, and thus came out on the Valdarno, about half way between Florence and Incisa: from thence they may either have ascended the Valdarno, till they crossed over from it to the Val di Chiana by the line of the Valdambra; or else, as is more probable, they may have moved at once in the direction of Sienna, and then crossed from Sienna, by the upper part of the Val d’Ombrone, and Montepulciano, to Chiusi or Clusium. NOTE G, to p. 466, 1. 38. The text of Polybius (II. 25) places this battle at Fcesulce; this should clearly te corrected into Rusalce. The Italian names of places in our manuscripts of Polybius are continually corrupt, as the Constantinople copyist knew nothing about them. Note II, to p. 466, 1. 1. In Polybius, the Gauls are said to be intercepted, csAge TXcha vM f,is Tv”PP vcag. This is evidently a mistake. Frontinus (I. 2, 7) places the scene of the battle at Poplonia, which is far more intelligible. NOTE I, to p. 466, 1. 20. It was probably about eighty years after this period that the historian Polybius travelled through Cisalpine Gaul, and was struck with the unrivalled productiveness of the country. It yielded wine and all sorts of grain in the greatest abundance; its oak woods, scattered at intervals over the plain, fed the largest part of those immense droves of swine which were annually consumed in Italy, or required for the use of the Roman army; and travellers at the inns were provided plentifully with every thing that they wanted after their day’s journey, at the rate of a quarter of an obulus for each person. Such are the fruits of the first application of the security and energy of civilization to a soil highly favored by nature. The earth is in its first freshness and vigor; the woods thinned, but not destroyed: the population flourishing and increasing, but far below the number of inhabitants capable of being maintained in comfort; and whilst the vices of barbarism have been put down, those of corrupted and ill-watched civilization have not yet had time to grow up. But this was the state of Cisalpine Gaul after it had been subjected for more than half a century to the dominion of Rome. It must have presented a very different aspect to the first Roman settlers of the year 534. The roads or tracts were cut through a wide extent of forest and marshes; and only a small space of the most inviting character had been hardly recovered from its natural wildness by the lazy and careless cultivation of the Gauls. Towns were nowhere to be seen; the population was scattered about in unwalled villages, if the name of village may be given to a collection of wretched huts, so devoid of the commonest articles of furniture, that ” man’s life”

spent in them was literally ” as cheap as beasts’.” And along with this state of physical degradation, there was the total absence of civil society. There were men in the country; there were families, bands, and hordes; but there was no commonwealth. One relation alone, beyond those of blood, seems to have been ac

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ADDENDA. 657 knowledged; the same which, introduced into Europe six hundred years afterwards by the victories of the German barbarians, has deeply tainted modern society down to this hour; the relation of chief and followers, or, as it was called in its subsequent form, lord and vassals.

The head of a family distinguished for his strength and courage, gathered around him a numerous train of followers from other families; and they formed his clan, or band, or followers, bound to him for life and death, bestowing on him those feelings of devoted attachment, which can be safely entertained only towards the commonwealth and its laws, and rendering him that blind obedience, which is wickedness when paid to any less than God.

This evil and degrading bond is well described by the Greek and Roman writers, by words expressive of unlawful and antisocial combinations (“

Factio,” Cmsar, de Bell. Gallic. VI. 11; Tlgsjc, Polybius, II. 17): it is the same which in other times and countries has appeared in the shape of sworn brotherhoods, factions, parties, sects, clubs, secret societies, and unions, everywhere and in every form the worst enemy both of individual and of social excellence, as it substitutes other objects in place of those to which as men and citi. zens we ought only to be bound, namely, GOD and LAW. NOTE K, to p. 468, 1. 42. The remova of the freedmen into the four city tribes is recorded in the Epi. tome of the 20th book, nearly in the same words as in the Epitome of the 9th. There it is said, “forensis factio cum comitia et campum turbaret… a Q. Fabio censore in quatuor tribus redacta est, quas urbanas appellavit.” In the 20th Epitome it is said, “libertini in quatuor tribus redacti sunt, cum antea dispersi per omnes fuissent, Esquilinam, Palatinam, Suburranam, Collinam.” The “
forensis factio” of the 9th book is said to have consisted of ” humiles,”

”’ humillimi;” and they are called also “forensis turba,” as if their occupation were described rather than their birth. In the 20th book, the persons removed are called simply ” libertini.” But libertini in general must have followed city employments from the necessity of the case; few can have had landed property. We must therefore suppose that Fabius’

measure was considered as a remedy for a crying evil, rather than a general rule for the time to come; and that, when slaves were set free, they were generally entered in their late master’s tribe, which, as he was still in a close relation with them, that of patronus, would be the most natural course to take, when no particular political excitement was stirring. But that such an excitement was stirring in the years immediately preceding the second Punic war, appears from what Livy says of C. Varro: ” Proclamando pro sordidis hominibus causisque adversus rem et famam bonorum primum in notitiam populi, deinde ad honores pervenit.”

XXII. 26. Varro was praetor in 536, and before that time had been quoestor, wedile, and curule aedile; so that he must have come into notice before the censorship of Flaminius. Now it is easy to conceive that, under such circumstances, the aristocracy would wish to lessen the influence of the poorer citizens in the tribes; but the wonder is, how C. Flaminius should have become their instrument in doing this, after his violent contests with them about his Agrarian law, and afterwards about his recall from Cisalpine Gaul, both of which took place before his censorship. Nor could his colleague have done it against his will, according to the wellknown law, ” Me. lior est conditio prohibentis.” The solution can only be, that Flaminius was a very honest man, and, whilst he liked the agricultural commons, did not like the populace of the Forum. He was like M. Curius, who also vehemently upheld an Agrarian law, yet sold as a slave a citizen who refused to serve as a soldier. He was, like P. Decius, the colleague of Fabius in the former clearing of the tribes, yet forward as a supporter of the Ogulnian law. He was, like Marius, the stoutest opposer of the 42

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658 ADDENDA. aristocracy, yet a resolute opposer also of a Lex Frumentaria. (Plutarch, Ma. rius, 4.) Perhaps, too, his notions were wholly against giving political influence to any thing but agriculture; and his support of the Claudian law, the object of which was to prevent the senators from becoming merchants, was perhaps conceived in the same spirit as his removing the freedmen into the four city tribes. In this, and perhaps in the vehemence of his temper, he seems to have resembled Cato the censor. NOTE L, to p. 478, 1. 25. The question, in what direction this famous march was taken, has been agitated for more than eighteen hundred years; and who can undertake to decide it? The difficulty to modern inquirers has arisen chiefly from the total absence of geographical talent in Polybius. That this historian indeed should ever have gained the reputation of a good geographer, only proves how few there are wlE o have any notion what a geographical instinct is. Polybius indeed labored with praiseworthy diligence to become a geographer; but he labored against nature; and the unpoetical character of his mind has in his writings actually lessened the accuracy, as it has totally destroyed the beauty of history. To any man who comprehended the whole character of a mountain country, and the nature of its passes, nothing could have been easier than to have conveyed at once a clear idea of Hannibal’s route, by naming the valley by which he had ascended to the main chain, and afterwards that which he followed in descending from it. Or admitting that the names of barbarian rivers would have conveyed little information to Greek readers, still the several Alpine valleys have each their peculiar character, and an observer with the least power of description could have given such lively touches of the varying scenery of the march, that future travellers must at once have recognized his description. Whereas the account of Polybius is at once so unscientific and so deficient in truth and liveliness of painting, that persons who have gone over the several Alpine passes for the very purpose of identifying his descriptions, can still reasonably doubt whether they were meant to apply to Mont Genevre, or Mont Cenis, or to the Little St. Bernard. On the whole, it appears to me most probable, that the pass by which Hannibal entered Italy was that which was known to the Romans by the name of the Graian Alps, and to us as the Little St. Bernard. Nor was this so circuitous a line as we may at first imagine. For Hannibal’s object was not simply to get into Italy, but to arrive in the country of those Cisalpine Gauls with whom he had been corresponding, and who had long been engaged in wars with the Romans. Now these were the Boii and Insubrians; and as the Insubrians, who were the more westerly of the two, lived between the Addi and the Ticinus, the pass of the Little St. Bernard led more directly into the country of his expected allies, than the shorter passage into Italy by the Cottian Alps, or Mont Genevre. NOTE M, to p. 481, 1. 2. Such is the story of the earliest recorded passage of the Alps by civilized men, the earliest and the most memorable. Accustomed as we are, since the completion of the great Alpine roads in the present century, to regard the crossing of the Alps as an easy summer excursion, we can even less than our fathers conceive the difficulties of Hannibal’s march, and the enormous sacrifices by which it was accomplished. He himself declared that he had lost above thirty thousand men since he had crossed the Pyrenees, and that the remnant of his army, when he reached the plains of Italy, amounted to no more than twenty thou. sand foot, and six thousand horsemen: nor does Polybius seem to suspect any

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ADDENDA. 659 exaggeration in the statement. Yet eleven years afterwards Hasdrubal crossed the Alps in his brother’s track without sustaining any loss deserving of notice; and “a few accidents”2’ are all that occurred in the most memorable passage of modern times, that of Napoleon over the Great St. Bernard. It is evident that Hannibal could have found nothing deserving the name of a road, no bridges over the rivers, torrents, and gorges, nothing but mere mountain-paths, liable to be destroyed by the first avalanche or landslip, and which the barbarians neithei could nor cared to repair, but on the destruction of which they looked out foi another line, such as for their purposes of communication it was.not difficult to find. It is clear also, either that Hannibal passed by some much higher point than the present roads over the Little St. Bernard, or Mount Cenis; or else, as is highly probable,2a that the limit of perpetual snow reached to a much lower level in the Alps than it does at present.

For the passage of the main chain is described as wholly within this limit; and the ” old snow” which Polybius speaks of was no accidental patch, such as will linger through the summer at a very low level in crevices or sunless ravines; but it was the general covering of the pass, which forbade all vegetation, and remained alike in summer as in winter.

How great a contrast to the blue lake, the green turf, the sheep and cattle freely feeding on every side tended by their shepherds, and the bright hues of the thousand flowers which now delight the summer traveller on the Col of the Little St. Bernard! I have little doubt as to Hannibal’s march up the Tarentaise; but the Val d’Aosta puzzles me. According to any ordinary rate of marching, an army could never get in three days from the Little St. Bernard to the plains of Ivrea; not to mention that the Salassians of that valley were such untameable robbers, that they once even plundered Coesar’s baggage, and Augustus at last extirpated them by wholesale. And yet Hannibal, on the Italian side of the main chain, sustains little or no annoyance. I have often wished to examine the pass which goes by the actual head of the Isere, by Mont Iseran, and descends by Usseglio, not exactly on Turin, but nearly at Chivasso, where the Po, from running N. and S., turns to run E. and W. In some respects also, I think, Mont Cenis suits the description of the march better than any other pass. I lay no stress on the Roche blanche; it did not strike me when I saw it as at all conspicuous; nor does the Xsuxo’,rspov mean any remarkably white cliff, but simply one of those bare limestone cliffs, which are so common both in the Alps and Apennines NOTE N, to p. 484, 1.

2. There is a passage in the third volume of Niebuhr’s life, in a letter to the Count de Serre, in which he says that Hannibal at the Trebia acted like Napoleon at Marengo, throwing himself between the Romans and the line of their retreat, by Placentia and Ariminum. I believe that this is right, and that Hannibal was on the right bank of the Trebia between the Romans and Placentia, so that the expression in Livy is correct. The Romans had several emporia on the right bank of the Po, above Placentia, Clastidium, Victumvim, &c. From these, their army, I suppose, was fed; and the taking of Clastidium thus helped to force them to a battle. Polybius’ words are equally clear with Livy’s. The front 21 On n’eut que peu d’accidens.”

Napo-luxuriant about the village, that the road seems leon’s Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 261. to run through an ornamental park. And 23 Even as late as the year 1646, Evelyn’s again above Sempione, Evelyn was told by the description of tlhe passage of the Simplon in country people that ” the way had been covered September can scarcely be recognized by those with snow since the creation; no man rememwho know only its present state. He speaks of bered it to be without.” And he speaks of the the house in which he lodged at Sempione, as descent towards Brieg by the old road as being “half covered with snow,” and says that made for some way “through an ocean of “there is not a tree or bush growing within snow.” Memoirs, Vol.

I. p. 220, 221. many miles;” whereas now the pines are so

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660 ADDENDA. of the Roman centre, he says, despaired of retreating to their own camp xwvi.KsVol 1i M Q-v 7OfrucIp,0 Xv; xra T’v SqIpogav xcd UdCv~rgopv ro xacTr’ xsapMsv io’,gou (the rain having made the river deeper than it had been in the morning:) r’gPouvrs7 6S’aS &r&ks s; JaigoJ
isr’odaaqXsccS dcsisaXg’av s IIocHxsvwrfcv. It is still a difficulty how Sempronius could have been allowed to effect his junction with Scipio, while Hannibal was actually lying between them; but I suppose that he must have turned off to the hills before he approached Placentia, and so have left Hannibal in the plain on his right. NOTE 0, p. 486, 1. 3 5. Niebuhr in the same letter speaks of the following view of Thrasymenus as absolutely certain. Flaminius, with Servilius, was originally at Ariminum, expecting Hannibal by that road. But when he heard that Hannibal had entered Etruria by the marshes of the Lower Arno, he hastened over the Apennines to Arezzo, eager to cover the road to Rome. He moved then by Cortona upon Perugia; but Hannibal turned to the right, and followed the western side of the lake towards Chiusi; then turning short round, occupied the defile of Passignano, and spreading out his right upon the hills, forced the long Roman column by a flank attack into the lake, while he engaged the head of it in the defile. Polybius and Livy differ decidedly as to the scene of the main battle: the latter represents it as taking place in the defile of Passignano, where the Romans had their right flank to the lake. But Polybius says, that only the rear was caught there; most of the army had cleared the defile, and turned to the left into a valley running down at right angles to the lake, so that the lake was exactly on their rear. And the modern road does so turn from the lake tc ascend the hills towards Perugia: the only difficulty is (I have been twice on the ground), that there is nothing that can be called a valley; for the road ascends almost from the edge of the lake: still it is true that the hills do form a small comb, so that an army ascending from the lake might have an enemy on both its flanks on the hillsides above it.

NOTE P, to p. 505, 1. 43. It seems to me that the Latin colonies and Hannibal’s want of artillery were the main causes of his failure. The Romans had in these colonies, not one of which he ever took, fortresses in the heart of the countries which revolted to him. Thus Apulia revolted; but the Romans still held Luceria, Venusia, and Brundisium: Samnium revolted; but the Romans held AEsernia and Beneventum; and so on, Casilinum cost him a siege of several weeks, but the Romans recovered it in a much shorter time. If he had engaged Archimedes as his engineer in chief, and got Philip to send him artillery, he would have done far better; for the Macedonian princes seemed to have carried their artillery to great perfection. As it was, his only very strong arm was his cavalry: for his infantry, veterans as they were, could never beat the Roman raw levies behind works. It appears to me that the sieges are the great defect of Hannibal’s operations in Italy; and thus as soon as his army moved from any place, the inhabitants who had joined him were at the mercy of the Roman garrisons. And their colonies were very strong garrisons: Venusia was originally settled with 20,000 colonists. NOTE Q, to p. 536, 1. 25.

According to Livy, Hannibal collects all the boats which are to be found on the Vulturnus, orders his men to provide themselves with provisions for ten days, and crosses in the night. (XXVI.‘7.)

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ADDENDA. 661 He remains on the right bank the next day and night, then moves bly Cales in Agrum Sidicinum, and there remains one day plundering.

He advances by the Latin road, per Suessanum, Allifanumque et Casinatem agrum. He then rezmains for two days under Casinum, plundering the country in all directions. He goes on by Interamna and Aquinum to Fregellae, where he finds the bridges over the Liris broken down; he ravages the ager Fregellanus with peculiar spite for that reason; and then advances by Frusino, Ferentinum, and Anagnia, in Agrum Lavicanum. From thence he goes over Algidus to Tusculum, descends to Gabii, thence marches down in Pupiniam, and pitches his camp eight miles from Rome. He moves his camp ad Anienem, three miles from Rome, and there estab. lishes stativa; he himself advancing along under the walls from the Colline gate to the temple of Hercules, to look about him. On the next day he crosses the Anio, and offers battle to the enemy; a storm breaks off the action. Next day he offers battle again, and there comes a second storm. He falls back ad Tutiam fluvium, six miles from Rome. He plunders the temple of Feronia, and marches to Eretum: from thence he goes to Reate, Cutiliwe, and Amiternum. From thence through the Marsian and Marrucinian territory by Sulmo, through the Pelignian territory into Samnium, and from Samnium into Campania. From Campania into Lucania, thence into Bruttium, and thence to Rhegium. Here are traces of two accounts jumbled together. The march from the Vulturnus, as far as the camp in Pupinia, eight miles from Rome, is all highly consistent and probable, and comes, I suspect, either from Fabius or Cincius. But the advance to the Anio, the crossing it to offer battle, and then the retreat ad Tutiam, belong to a different story, that namely which made Hannibal advance upon Rome from Reate. For in advancing by the Latin road, or the Via Gabina, he had nothing to do with the Anio; and if he crossed the Anio to offer battle, he must have been between Rome and the Roman army, and the Roman army would have been between him and the Tutia. This then is all absurd and inconsistent. Again, according to Livy, Fulvius had heard beforehand of Hannibal’s design, and had warned the senate of it; he receives an answer from Rome, selects 15,000 foot, and 1000 horse, crosses the Vulturnus on rafts after a long delay, because Hannibal had burnt all the boats, advances to Rome by the Appian way, and arrives by the Porta Capena just as Hannibal had reached Pupinia. Now, according to Polybius, Hannibal set out for Rome only five days after his arrival before Capua: there was no time therefore for Fulvius to send to Rome and get an answer before Hannibal set out. Again, Casilinum being in the power of the Romans, the passage of the Vulturnus was in their own hands, and the story about the rafts is an absurdity. Appian says, that Hannibal marched with urgent haste through many and hostile nations, some of whom could not and some did not try to stop him; and thus he arrived on the Anio, and encamped at 32 stadia from Rome. The Ro. mans break down the bridge over the Anio; and two thousand men from Alba Marsorum come valiantly to the aid of Rome. This all agrees with Caelius, and supposes evidently that Hannibal advanced through Samnium and by Reate. The “many and hostile, nations” are the Pelignians, Marsians, Marrucinians, and Sabines. Thus, too, he arrives naturally on the Anio; and the Albensians, seeing him pass through their country, set off at once by the Valerian road to Rome, to be ready to meet him. Had he advanced by the Latin road, they would have known nothing about his march, and he would have been between them and Rome. Fulvius then, according to Appian, hastens to Rome, and meets Hannibal on

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662 ADDENDA. the Anio, with the river between them. Hannibal ascends the right bank of the river to turn it by its source. Fulvius ascends the left bank watching him. Hannibal leaves some Numidians behind, who cross the river when Fulvius was gone, plunder all the country round the walls, and then rejoin Hannibal. Hannibal goes round by the sources of the river; and, as it was only a little way to Rome, he steals out by night with three squires to have a look at it, and then takes fright and returns to Capua. Fulvius follows him; and Hannibal, in attempting to surprise his camp on the road, is sadly foiled. He then marches off to winter in Lucania-; and Fulvius rejoins Appius before Capua. This is beneath criticism; but I observe that the story of Fulvius being too cunning for Hannibal is given by Livy at the assault of the Roman lines before Capua, and is probably as true of one as of the other. Again, the line of retreat here indicated is by the Latin road; the ascending the Anio shows this, and is inconsistent with the retreat by Reate. Ceelius Antipater had expressly given Hannibal’s advance upon Rome thus:From Campania into Samrnium, and thence to the Pelignians, that is, by the present great road up the Vulturnus to Venafro; thence by Isernia and Castel di Sangro to the Five Mile plain; then passing by Sulmo to the Marrucinians thence by Alba to the Marsians; thence to Amiternum and Foruli: from Amiternum, by Cutilize, Reate, and Eretum, upon the Anio. What a confusion! which neither Nauta nor Prinsterer meddle with. The road from Sulmo to Amiternum is simple enough; descending along the Gizio to the Aterno or Pescara at Popoli, thence ascending to the high upland plain by Navelli and Citth Retenga, and so by Aquila to Amiternum, S. Vittorino. But conceive a man,-to say nothing of an army in a hurry,-going down from Popoli to Chieti, then turning back to Sulmona, and going over by the Forchetta to Celano, and thence by Rocca di Mezzo into the valley of Aquila. All this folly arises from the untimely correction where the MS. gives corruptly in Marrucinos, Martinos, Martianos, Maceranos, &c. COelius supposed that Hannibal, instead of descending from Sulmo towards Popoli, turned to his left, and crossed the mountains by the Forchetta23 to Cilano, and thence either by Rocca di Mezzo over the mountains to Aquila, or else by the Cicolano, and down the valley of Tornimparte. Instead of Marrucinos, the better condition would be Marrubios, or Marruvios; the people of Marruvium, a Pelignian town on the E. or S. E. shore of the lake Fucinus.

According to Polybius, Hannibal, five days after his arrival before Capua, left his fires burning at night, and set off after supper. He marched by vuiorous and uninterrupted marches through Samnium, always exploring and preoccupying the ground near the road with his advanced guard; and whilst all at Rome were thinking only of Capua, he suddenly crossed the Anio, and encamped at a distance of not more than four miles from Rome. He intended-the next day to assault the city; but the consuls with their two newly raised legions en-,camped before the walls. He then gives up the assault, and sets about plundering the country and burning the houses in all directions. After this (how long after is not said, nor why, but we must suppose after Fulvius had arrived from Capua) the consuls advance boldly, and encamp within ten stadii of Hannibal. Then Hannibal, having filled his army with plunder, and thinking that his diversion must now have taken effect at Capua, commenced his retreat. But the bridges over, the Anio had, been broken down; and in fording the river he was attacked and sustained some loss’: his cavalry, however, served him so well, that the Romans returned to their camp, ircax-ros. He continued his march hastily, which the enemy thought was through fear; so they followed him close, but keeping to the higher grounds. He was moving in haste upon Capua; but on the fifth day of his retreat, learning that the Romans there were still in their m At Raiano. This is still a carriageable road. Keppel Craven calls the pass, Furca Caruso,

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ADDENDA 663 lines, he halted to wait for his pursuers, and turning upon them attacked their camp by night, and stormed it. The Romans rallied by daybreak on a steep hill which he could not force; so he would not wait to besiege them, but marched through Apulia and Bruttium, and nearly succeeded in surprising Rhegium. Again what a narrative! with no details of time or place, jumping at once from a five days’ march from Rome into Apulia, and merely implying that Hannibal’s retreat was on the right bank of the Anio. But this mention of the Anio, connected with the expression “marching through Samnium,” seems to show that Polybius, like Caelius, made Hannibal advance by a circuitous route upon Rome, and not by the Latin road. The season of the year must have been early, according to the Roman calendar, not later than April, whatever that was by true time; because the levy of the two city legions was only half finished. But, unless the Roman calendar was at least two months behind true time, how could Hannibal have passed such defiles as that of Rocca, Vall’ Osuira; or such passes as those between Isernia and Castel di Sangro? Would not the snow have covered the ground at such a season?

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APPENDIX. I.-NOTE ON THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF MANLIUS. ZONARAS, whose history is taken generally from Dion Cassius, relates that 3Ianlium was holding the Capitol against the government, and that a slave, having offered to be. tray him, went up to the Capitol as a deserter, and begged to speak with Manlius. He professed to be come to him on the part of the slaves of Rome, who were ready to rise and join him; and while Manlius was speaking to him apart on the edge of the cliff, the slave suddenly pushed him down it, and he was then seized by some men who had been previously placed there in ambush, and was by them carried off as a prisoner. Then he was tried in the Campus Martins; and as the people could not occdemn him in sight of the Capitol, the trial was adjourned, and the peop.le met again in another place out of sight of the Capitol, and then condemned him. The scene of the second trial is said by Livy to have been the Peteline Grove. Now we find that on two other occasions after a secession assemblies were held in groves without the city walls, and not in the Campus Martius; once after the revolt of the soldiers and secession of the commons in 413, in this very Peteline Grove (Livy, VII. 41), and once after the last secession to the Janiculum, in the Oak Grove, “in Esculeto.” (Pliny, Hist. Nat. XVI. d 37.) Now as there is little reason to doubt that there was a secession also in the disturbance caused by Manlius, it is likely that when peace was restored the terms would have been settled in an assembly held in some sacred grove, and that there a general amnesty would be passed, and any exceptions to the amnesty discussed and determined. And if Manlius had fallen into the power of his enemies in the manner described by Zonaras, his partisans, having thus lost their leader, would have been ready to submit, and could not have opposed his execution, if it were insisted upon by the government as a necessary sacrifice to public justice. The story of his trial before the centuries in the Campus Martius is every way suspicious, and may possibly have been invented to account for the fact of his death having been decreed in an assembly held in the Peteline Grove. It was obvious that trials before the centuries, the only tribunal which could legally try a Roman citizen capitally, were held in the Campus Martius; and as the fact of the secession was more and more glossed over, so the real nature of the assembly in the Peteline Grove would be less understood; and then it was attempted to be explained as a mere adjourned meeting of the centuries, held in an unusual place, because the deliverer of the Capitol could not be condemned in the Campus Martius, where his judges had the Capitol directly before their eyes. I may observe that the law which forbade any patrician’s residing from henceforth in the Capitol strongly confirms the fact of an actual secession. Manlius had occupied the citadel as a fortified position, and had held it with an armed force against the government; and this pointed out the danger of allowing any one to reside within its precincts. II. ON THE LATER CONSTITUTION OF THE CENTURIES. THE
constitution of the comitia of the centuries, as it originally existed, is perfectly familiar to every reader. But it is remarkable that this wellknown form of it never ex.. isted during those times of which we have a real history; and the form which had suc. ceeded to it is a complete mystery. It is strange, but true, that we know how the cen. turies were constituted in the times of the later kings, but that we do not know what was their constitution in the time of Cicero and Ceesar. It is quite clear that the old constitution of the centuries gave a decided ascendency to wealth. The first class, together with the centuries of the knights, formed a majority

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666 APPENDIX. of the whole comitia. Thus every election would have been in the hands of the ritgh and such a state of things as existed in the last years of the commonwealth, when the aristocracy had no other decided influence than what they could gain by bribery, is alto gether inconceivable. Again, the division of the people into tribes had nothing to do with the earlier constitution of the centuries; the votes were taken by classes, and a man’s class depended on the amount of his property. But in the later constitution the votes were taken by tribes, and a man’s tribe, except in the case of the four city tribes, implied nothing as to his rank or fortune. The agents employed to purchase votes were called divisores tribuum; such and such tribes are mentioned as interested in behalf of particular candidates (Cicero pro Plancio); and some one tribe was determined by lot to exercise the privilege of voting before the rest.

In short, the tribes are mentioned as commonly at the comitia in the Campus Martius, whether held for trials or for elections, as at the comitia held in the Forum. On the other hand, the division by classes continued to exist in the later constitution. Cicero speaks of the comitia of centuries differing from the comitia of tribes, inasmuch as in the former, he says, “the people are arranged according to property, rank, and age, while in the latter no such distinctions are observed.” De Legibus, III. 19. The centuries of the first class are spoken of both in trials (Livy, XLIII. 16) and in elections (Cicero, Philippic. II. 33); and in the second oration of the pseudo-Sallust to Cuesar, de Republica Ordinanda, the author notices, as a desirable change in the actual constitution, that a law formerly proposed by C. Gracchus should be again brought forward and enact. ed, thatthe centuries should be called by lot from all the five classes indiscriminately. This proves not only that the division into classes existed to the end of the commonwealth, but also that the first class continued to enjoy certain advantages above the others. The problem, therefore, is to determine how the system of classes was blended with that of tribes, and in what degree the centuries of the historical period of the commonwealth retained or had forfeited the strong aristocratical character impressed on them by their original constitution. Various solutions of this problem have been offered at different times by scholars of great ability. Octavius Pantagathus in the 16th century supposed that each of the five classes had two centuries belonging to it in each of the tribes, and that the Equites had one century in each tribe, making the whole number of centuries to amount to 385, out of which those of the Equites and the first class together would amount to 105, while those of the other classes were 280; so that the two former, instead of being a majority of the whole comitia, stood to the other centuries only in the proportion of 3 to 8. This notion of seventy centuries in each class, or ten centuries in each tribe, has been maintained also by Savigny, according to Zumpt; and by Walther, in his History of the Roman Law, Vol.

I. p. 136. This also is the opinion of another living autiority of the highest order, who has expressed to me his full acquiescence in it.

Niebuhr, on the contrary, held that the whole division into five classes was done away with; that each tribe contained two centuries only, one of older men, the other of younger; that the thirty-one country tribes constituted the first class under this altered system, and the four city tribes the second class; and that besides these two classes there were no more. He held the aristocratical character of the comitia of centuries, as compared with the assembly of the tribes, to consist in the following points: that the plebeian knights voted distinctly from the rest of the commons, and that the patricians also had their separate votes in the sex suffragia, or six old centuries of knights; 2d, that the centuries of each tribe were divided according to their age, one of older men, and the other of younger; 3d, that the proletarians, or those who possessed property under four thousand ases, were altogether excluded; and 4th, that the auspices were necessa. rily taken at the comitia of centuries, and that they were thus subjected to the influence of the augurs. Niebuhr held also that the prerogative century could only be chosen out of the tribes of the first class, and never out of the four city tribes. Zumpt, in a recent essay on the constitution of the comitia of centuries, read before the Prussian academy in 1836, maintains that the old centuries,f Ser. Tullius subsisted to the end of the commonwealth without any material alteration, except that those of the first class were reduced from eighty to seventy.

He then supposes that two of these centuries were allotted to each of the thirtyfive tribes, together with three centuries: from the four remaining classes; and of these three one, he thinks, was taken from the fifth class, and two-thirds of a century from the second, third, and fourth classes. Thus the richer citizens still retained an influence in the comitia more than in proportion to their numbers, although much less than it had been in the original constitution of Sert Tullius.

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APPENDIX. 667 Lastly, Professor Huschke, of Breslau, in his work on the constitution of Ser. Tul-,ius, published in 1838, agrees with Niebuhr in supposing that the whole number of centuries was reduced to seventy, each tribe containing two, one of older men and the other of younger; but these seventy centuries were divided, he thinks, into five classes; so that about ten tribes, or twenty centuries, would contain the citizens of the first class, a certain number of tribes would, in like manner, contain all the citizens of the second class, and so on to the end: some tribes, according to this hypothesis, consisting only of richer citizens, and others only of poorer. But I confess that all these solutions, including even that of Niebuhr himself, are to me unsatisfactory. If the first class had contained thirty-one out of the thirtyfive tribes, while each tribe contained only two centuries, we should hear rather of the tribes of the first class, than of the centuries; whilst on the other hand the positive tes.onony of the pseudo-Sallust, who, according to Niebuhr himself, could not have lived later than the second century after the Christian era, to the existence of five classes down to the time of the civil war, seems to be on that point an irresistible authority. It appears to me to be impossible to ascertain with certainty either the number o.f the centuries in the later constitution, or their connection with the five classes. To guess at points of mere detail seems hopeless, and positive information on the subject there is none. But we know that the comitia of centuries differed from those of the tribes expressly in this, that whereas all the members of a tribe voted in the comitia tributa without any further distinction between them, and, as far as appears, without any subdivisions within the tribe itself, so in the comitia of centuries the members of the same tribe were distinguished from each other; the older men certainly voted distinctly from the younger men, and probably the richer men also voted distinctly from the poorer: so that the centuries were a less democratical body than the tribes. In the account given by Polybius of the composition of the Roman army, we find traces at once of the existence of something like the old system of classes, and of the changes which it must have undergone.. All citizens whose property exceeded four thousand ases, were now enlisted into the legions, whereas in old times none had been required to provide themselves with arms whose property fell short of twelve thousand five hundred ases. But one hundred thousand ases still appear to have been the qualification for the first class; and it is remarkable that the peculiar distinction of this class, the coat of mail, was the same as it had been in the oldest known system of the classes. All distinctions of arms, offensive or defensive, between the second, third, and fourth classes, seem to have been abolished: but the fifth class still, as in old times, supplied the lightarmed soldiers of the legions, or the velites. But however much of the old system of the classes was preserved in the later constitution of the centuries, the difference in the political spirit of the tribes and centuries is scarcely, I think, perceivable. We do not find the votes of the centuries ever relied upon by the aristocracy to counterbalance the popular feeling of the tribes. It might have been conceived that a popular assembly, where wealth conferred any ascendency, would have been decidedly opposed to one of a character purely democratical; that the centuries, in short, like our own House of Commons, during more than one period of our history, should have sympathized more and more with the senate, and have counteracted to the utmost of their power on the Campus Martius the policy embraced by the tribes in the Forum. But this is not the case; the spirit of the Roman people, as distinguished from the senate and the equestrian order, appears to have been much the same whether they were assembled in one sort of comitia or another; the centuries elected Flaminius and Varro to the consulship in the second Punic war, although their opposition to the aristocracy seems to have been one of their chief recommendations; and in later times the centuries elected many consuls who advocated the popular cause not less violently than the most violent of the tribunes elected by the tribes. The cause of this is to be found in the great wealth of the equestrian order and of the senate, which drew a broad line of separation between them and the richest of the plebeians, and thus drove the members of the first class to sympathize with those below them rather than with those above them. While the possession of the judicial power was disputed by the senate and the equestrian order, it was only after many years that any share of it was communicated to the richest of the plebeians. Thus it is probable that the middle classes at Rome, as elsewhere, repelled by the pride, of the highest classes, were forced back, as it were, into the mass of the lower; and entered as bitterly into all measures galling to the aristocracy, as the poorest citizens of the tribes. If this be so, the question as to the exact form of the comitia of centuries in later times, however curious in itself, is of no great importance to our right understanding of the subsequent history. For whether the influence of the first class as compared

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668 APPENDIX. with that of the lower classes was greater or less, it does not appear that the character of the comitia was altered from what it would have been otherwise; the first class was as little attached to the aristocracy as the fourth or fifth. After the unsuccessful at. tempts of so many men of ability and learning, I have no confidence that I could ap.

proach more nearly to the true solution of the problem; and, in fact, there seem difficulties in the way of every theory, which our present knowledge can hardly enable us to remove. I must at present express my belief that the exact arrangement of the classes in the later comitia of centuries is a problem no less inexplicable than that of the disposition of the rowers in the ancient ships of war. III.-OF THE ROMAN LEGION IN THE

FIFTH CENTURY7 OF ROME. THE accounts of the Roman legion in the fourth and fifth centuries of Rome are full of perplexity. Nor is this to be wondered at, for as there were no contemporary historians, and as the military system afterwards underwent considerable changes, the older state of things could be known only from accidental notices of it in the stories of the early wars, or from uncertain memory. How little help in these inquiries is to be expected from Livy, may be understood from this single fact: that although he himself in two several places (I. 43 and VIII. 8) has expressly stated that the ancient Roman tactic was that of the phalanx, yet in no one of his descriptions of battles are any traces to be found of such a system; but the sword and not the pike is spoken of as the most efficient weapon, just as it was in the tactic of the second Punic war, or of the age of Marius and of Casar. Livy, however, has preserved in one place a detailed account of the earlier legion, as it existed in the great Latin war in the beginning of the fifth century. And Polybius, as is well known, has described at length the arms and organization of the legion of his time, that is, of the latter part of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century of Rome. I shall notice the similar and dissimilar points in these two accounts, and then see how far we can explain the changes implied in them; and, finally, notice some statements in other writers which relate to the same subject. Both accounts acknowledge the existence of four divisions of fighting men in the legion: the lightarmed (ypoa@c6,axot, Polyb. rorarii, Livy), the hastati, the principes, and the triarii. But to these there was in the older legion a fifth added, the accensi, or supernumeraries; who, in ordinary cases, were not armed, but went to the field to be ready to take arms and supply the places of those who fell. In both accounts the hastati, when the legion is drawn up in order of battle, are placed in front of the principes, and the principes in front of the triarii. But in the old legion the greater part of the lightarmed soldiers are described as stationed with the triarii in the third line, and only about a fourth part of them are with the hastati in the front. Whereas, in the later legion, the light troops are divided equally among the three lines. Again, in the older legion the triarii were equal in numbers to the hastati and principes, respectively, each division consisting of somewhat more than nine hundred men. Whereas, in the later legion, the triarii were never more than six hundred men; while the hastati and principes were regularly twelve hundred each, and sometimes exceeded this number. In the older legion the lightarmed troops carried each man a pike, “hasta,” and two or more javelins, “gaesa.’ These were the arms of the fourth class in the Servian constitution, ” nihil printer hastam et verutum datum:” verutum and gssa alike signifying missile weapons or javelins as opposed to the hasta or pike. But in the later legion, the lightarmed soldier carried no pike, but had a round shield, xrdpeP7, and a dirk or cut. lass, tdaxaea, together with his javelins. In the older legion tagain the hastati, principes, and triarii, all bore the arms of the second and third classes in the Servian constitution; that is to say, the large oblong shield, ” scutum,” the pike, and the sword, “
gladius.” But in the later legion, the hastati and principes had both dropped the pike,-and were armed instead of it with two large javelins, of about six feet in length, which Polybius calls ~a*ot, and which were no *ther than the formidable pila.

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APPENDIX. 669 Further, we have a remarkable notice that there was a time when the triaril alone earried pila, and were called pilani, while the hastati and principes still carried pikes.2 Again, the older legion was divided into fortyfive maniples or ordines; fifteen of hastati, fifteen of principes, and fifteen of triarii; but as the triarii were, in fact, a triple division, so their maniples contained one hundred and eightysix, or possibly one hundred and eighty-nine men each, while those of the hastati and principes contained only sixty-three men each. In the later legion, the hastati, principes, and triarii contained ten maniples each; and those of the two former divisions consisted of one hundred and twenty men each, while those of the triarii contained only sixty. The light troops were divided into thirty divisions, one of which was added to each maniple of the heavyarmed troops, in just proportion to its respective strength; that is, that twenty-four lightarmed men were added to each maniple of the triarii, and forty-eight to each maniple of the hastati and principes. It may be, however, that the divisions of the lightarmed troops were all equal: in which case they would have raised each maniple of the triarii to one hundred men, and each maniple of the hastati and principes to one hundred and sixty. in the older legion, each maniple contained two centurions; that is, it consisted of two centuries.

Therefore the century of the old legion consisted of thirty men. In the later legion each maniple also had two centurions; but the maniples being of unequal numbers, the centuries were unequal also; the centuries of the triarii contained thirty men each, as in the older legion, but those of the hastati and principes had each sixty. On comparing these two forms of the legion, it is manifest that in the older there is retained one of the characterestic points of the system of the phalanx, or of fighting in columns, the keeping of the lightarmed or worst-armed men mostly in the rear. The old legion consisted of a first division of about nineteen hundred men, of whom only three hundred and fifteen had inferior arms; and of a second division of nearly twentyeight hundred men, of whom only nine hundred and thirty were well armed; nine hundred and thirty were light armed, and the remaining nine hundred and thirty, the accensi, were not armed at all. Nay, it appears doubtful whether even the triarii, properly so called, were quite equal to the hastati and principes; for in the Latin war it seems to be a mistake of Livy’s to suppose that, they carried pikes; they appear at that time to have borne only pila and swords, and were therefore less fitted than the hastati and principes for the peculiar manner of fighting then in use in the Roman army. But even in this earlier form of the legion there seems to have been some change introduced from a form still earlier. The mixture of lightarmed soldiers in the front ranks of the phalanx, unless we are to suppose that they were always thrown forward as mere skirmishers, and had no place in the line, seems to show that a modification ot the tactic of the phalanx had already been found necessary, and that the use of the javelin instead of the pike was already rising in estimation. This alteration seems to derive its origin from the Gaulish wars. The Gauls used javelins themselves, and the weight of their charge was such that the full-armed soldiers of the Roman legions were not numerous enough to withstand them; it became of importance, therefore, to improve the efficiency of the lightarmed soldiers, and at the same time to enable the Roman line to reply to the Gaulish missiles, if the enemy preferred a distant combat to fighting hand to hand. That something of this sort was done is directly stated; but as usual the accounts are conflicting and inconsistent with themselves. Dionysius makes Camillus say to his soldiers, that whereas ” the Gauls had only javelins, they had arrows, a weapon of deadly effect.“‘Avri Xdyxnl dYcals,,,vX:ov YiXos.

Fragm. Vatic. XXX. Plutarch says that Camillus instructed his soldiers “to use their long javelins as weapons for close fight,” rots bavo4s uaKpoz’s 3a XSpas xp~0,, Camill. 40, and in the next chapter he describes the Gauls as grappling with the Romans, and trying to push aside their javelins, which evidently supposes them to have been used as pikes. And yet in the very sentence before he ta’ks of the Gaulish shields as being weighed down by the Roman javelins, which had run through them, and hung upon them, 7roaS z Ovpcovg awvpzrEradpOa ical Paaptv’aaOat rbaeYv FlKXKoPIWV (Camill.

41), a description applicable only to weapons thrown at the enemy, and not used as pikes. A passage i!- Livy seems to offer the solution of this difficlty. When the Gauls attacked the Roman camp in their invasion of the Roman territory in the year 405, only ten years before the Latin war, the triarii were engaged in throwing up works, and the a Livy says that the hastati and principes were called ler) and Ovid (Fasti, III. 129) call the triarii expressly antepilani-VIII. 8. Varro (Ling. Lat. V. ~ Ed. Mll-pilani.

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670 APPENDIX. hastati and principes covered them. Then, as the Gauls advanced up hill to attack the Roman position, ” all the pila and spears,”

“pila omnia hastsque,” “took effect,” says Livy, “firom their own weight; and the Gauls had either their bodies run through, or their shields weighed down by the darts that were sticking in them.” VII. 23. It appears, then, that both the pilum and hasta could be used as missiles; but both also could be used as pikes, for the pilum was six feet in length, and therefore it is very possible that Camillus may have shortened the spear of the hastati, to render it available as a missile, and also strengthened and lengthened the pilum to make it serve on occasion the purposes of a pike. Thus the hastati and principes were armed with swords, with large oblong shields, scuta, and with spears, hastae; but the large shield already fitted them for a more independent and personal mode of fighting than that of the phalanx, and the spear might be used as a javelin, no less than as a pike. The Samnite wars, following so soon afterwards, decided the Romans to give up the tactic of the phalanx still more entirely: the spear which might be used as a javelin, but was more fitted for close fight, was now given only to the soldiers of the third line; while the pilum,‘Which might be used as a pike, but was properly a missile, was taken from the third line, and given to the soldiers of the first and second lines. At the same time those citizens whose properties were rated between four thousand ases and twelve thousand five hundred, and who were not formerly required to provide themselves with arms, were now called upon to do so, and therefore the accensi are no more heard of; while the rorarii, who seem to have belonged to the fifth class of the old Servian division, and to have gone to battle with no other weapons than slings, were now called upon to provide themselves, with light arms of a better description, and became the velites of the new legion. Why the triarii should have been also reduced in number does not certainly appear; except that as the whole Roman tactic was now become a very active system of personal combats along the whole line, it was necessary to have as many men as possible available for the two first divisions, and that the mere reserve, which was not to form any part of the fighting force, except on emergency, should be kept low, and confined to the older soldiers who had no longer sufficient activity to be employed in the constantly moving battle of the regular line. Niebuhr has attempted to explain the number of centuries in the legion, and of men in each century, by a reference to the varying number of tribes, and to the centuries in the classes of the Servian constitution. But his explanation does not seem to me satisfactory; and the question is not essential to our understanding of the military character of the legion.‘It may be observed, however, that the germ of the division of the legion into ten cohorts, may be traced already in the legion of the time of Polybius, as a tenfold division existed in it in each of the three lines of the hastati, principes, and triarii. A cohort then would be merely one maniple of each of these three lines; a miniature legion, presenting the same variety of force on a small scale, which the legion itself did on a large scale.. And thus the cohorts of the legion of four thousand two hundred men would consist of four hundred and twenty men each, as afterwards in the imperial legion they consisted properly of six hundred men each. Sallust, it is well known, makes Coesar say that the Romans had borrowed their arms, offensive and defensive, from the Samnites. (Bell. Catilinar. 51.) And although the Samnites are not named, yet the order of time seems to show that they must, partly at least, be intended, where Diodorus says, Fragm. Vatic.

XXIII. 1, that the Romans, having first adopted the tactic of the phalanx iri their wars with the Etruscans, afterwards exchanged it for the system of fighting in cohorts (uarrepa7? being a certain correction for;retpals, which has no meaning at all), and with the large oblong shield, Svpeoi, because the nations whom they subsequently encountered used this tactic.

And it probably is true, that the peculiar form of the Roman legion was owing to the wars with the Gauls and Samnites, which led to the total disuse of the phalanx, and to the perfecting of those weapons, such as the sword and the javelin, which, in the system of the phalanx, are of the least importance. THE END.

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