For twenty years before the institution of the decemvirate Rome was visited by all imaginable scourges, mortalities, earthquakes, calamitous defeats, as though heaven had resolved to exterminate the distracted nation from the face of the earth; and manifold signs, betokening an inward coil and stir of nature, announced that the times were out of joint. A similar combination of all natural horrours with the last extreme of human misery came again upon the city after the lapse of a thousand years, and left it desolate as a grave, three hundred years after Rome had experienced the first pestilence the ravages of which can be compared with those of this earlier period.

The first of these epidemic disorders makes its appearance in the year 282: its peculiar character is not described, only that it attackt every one without distinction of age or sex; that it rolled over the city like a torrent or a lava-stream, and would have swept all before it, had it made a longer stay. This sickness is expressly said to have visited the rest of Italy. The same thing is not stated of the second, which raged nine years after, in 291, though it is impossible to doubt that it was no less widely spread: an account has been preserved of its victims, sufficient to give a notion of its ravages, and deserving unqualified credit. It carried off both the consuls, three out of the five tribunes, two of the four augurs, the chief curio, and the fourth part of the senators.

By having the arbitrary power of fixing the value of every man's taxable property, and the exclusive management of the register of the citizens, the ruling order was enabled to pack the centuries in such a manner as for the most part decided the event of proceedings at their assemblies. If a man's taxable property might be multiplied by way of penalty, the same thing might be done under the plea of a well-earned reward: still oftener might general regulations be made, by the application of which the property of some stood higher, that of others lower in the classes than before: and how many direct falsehoods may have been resorted to, for the sake of getting a majority? Party-spirit is blind to the baseness of such frauds. So long as the army received no pay, too high an assessment seldom subjected a man to any other disadvantage than heavier duty in war: even from this the consuls might relieve him, since they made their levies at discretion: and if a tax was ever laid on, the quaestors, who were exclusively patricians, might pass over whom they chose in collecting it. The tribunes indeed undoubtedly took the part of those whose property the censors rated too low, in order to transfer them into an inferior class: but how were false voters to be convicted?

This is the war which Dion charges the patricians; with having excited for the sake of employing the commonalty: the Fabii, at that time the heads of the oligarchy, must accordingly have been the authors of this piece of statecraft: this guilt they expiated fearfully, and that too, as not seldom happens, after having done everything to atone for it.

During the first two years, 271 and 272, the hostilities seem to have been of little importance. I have already mentioned the unfortunate turn they took in 273, owing to the internal dissensions of the Romans. The infantry under Cæso Fabius agreed together that their general, whom they did not acknowledge as consul, should gain no triumph in a war which he and his house had stirred up, and which the centuries had not decreed. The cavalry, part of them as patricians, part carried along by the spirit which characterizes such troops, had broken the Etruscan line: but the cohorts refused to follow; and in spite of the consul's vehement exhortations that at least they would maintain their ground, in spite of his entreaties, of his threats, they gave way, abandoned their camp to the enemy, and soon fled in disgraceful confusion to Rome.

The departure of the Gauls gave the Romans nothing within the city except the desolate scene of a conflagration: and at least on the left bank of the Tiber it can only have been by accident if any house in the country had escaped destruction. The Peloponnesians in their invasions of Attica left no house and no tree standing, wherever they marcht; and the Gauls were barbarians, beneath whose tread everything living perisht. Ostia may have held out: with regard to the small Latin towns incorporated in the Roman territory, it is no less improbable that the Gauls should have refrained from attacking any place where booty was to be won, than that such places should have been able to resist them. The greatest part of the citizens had been swept away: most of the men in the prime of life fell on the Alia: an enormous number, including women and children, who could not effect their escape, must have died by the sword or been carried into slavery by the conquerors. How is it possible to believe that the Tiber can have covered the territory of Veii, at least so long as the Gallic army kept together? and many of the fugitives must have been overtaken by destruction in the very heart of Latium.

That legend related that Aruns, a citizen of Clusium, had been the faithful guardian of a Lucumo, who, when he grew up, abused his intimacy with the family of Aruns to seduce his wife. The tribunals and magistrates refused to give the wronged husband legal satisfaction; whereupon despair drove him, like count Julian, to call in an irresistible foe. He loaded a number of mules with skins of wine and oil, and with rush-mats full of dried figs: with these he went over the Alps to the Gauls, and told them that, if they would follow him, the land which produced all these good things would be theirs; for it was inhabited by an unwarlike race. Forthwith the whole people arose with its women and children, and marcht across the Alps straight to Clusium.

The Clusines called upon the Romans for aid: the senate imagined that the very name of Rome would be enough to make the barbarians withdraw. Three of the Fabii, sons of the chief pontiff, M. Ambustus, were despatcht to tell them in the name of the senate that they must not touch the allies of Rome. The Gauls made answer that their own country was too small for them, that however they did not want to destroy the Clusines, provided the latter would share their territory with them.

The fact that the Latins by virtue of the league enjoyed the privilege of isopolity, has likewise been preserved by Dionysius alone. If he had considered this as no more than the renewal of a previous mutual relation, it would not be very surprising that nothing appears about it in the articles of the treaty which he has recorded: but the omission is remarkable in so circumspect a writer, because he regards this isopolity as a new and high privilege conferred on the Latins. I am inclined to suspect that he did not find and insert his extract from the original instrument, till after he had written the passages just quoted and the others which even contradict it, nay till after he had publisht his work; and moreover that either nothing was said about isopolity in the few articles selected out of a great number by the Latin annalist from whom he took his account, because it was implied in the notion a league between equals, or that the annalist had retained the old lawterm, which the forein historian could not understand. In the other passages likewise he was treading in the footsteps of an annalist who had written in plain terms of certain civic rights having been granted: he was far too conscientious to interpolate a clause in his report of the treaty, for the purpose of justifying his assertions: and he may have neglected to correct the statements in other places which might now have struck him as erroneous.

One cannot help doubting whether in all that is said of the agrarian law of Cassius there is a single point that comes from any other source than the desire of the later writers to give some account of so important a measure. Since the old chronicles were totally silent about the nine nobles who were condemned to death, they must at all events have been very brief on the fate of Cassius: and what should make them deem it necessary to do more than name his agrarian law? Its purport can have been nothing but a revival of that which I suppose to be the law of Servius. It must have directed that the portion of the populus in the public lands should be set apart, that the rest should be divided among the plebeians, that the tithe should again be levied, and applied to paying the army. Now this is just what Dionysius makes the senate ordain: only by a law meant in earnest, as will be noticed presently, the carrying the measure into effect would have been entrusted to very different hands from those selected in that ordinance of the senate. In trying by induction to restore the purport of the law of Cassius, the only other thing we have to add is that the lands divided between the orders were solely those which the state had acquired since the general assignment by king Servius, and which it still retained.

This volume appears three years later than, when the second edition of the first was publisht, I confidently thought it would have done; and I am bound to explain the occasion of this delay to the friendly reader who may have complained of it.

Ever since the continuation of my history was interrupted, my mind had been in a very different state with regard to the contents of the second volume and to those of the first. With the latter I was incessantly busied: every fresh piece of information I acquired concerning the original institutions of other nations combined itself with the researches there commenced into kindred institutions at Rome; and many of my views were modified by the sight of Rome and of Italy. To the second volume, which relates only to particular points in the condition and laws of the Romans, and was never recalled to my thoughts by any such occasions, I had become a stranger. At the same time I knew very well that the dissertations comprised in it were incomparably more mature and complete than those in the first: in the former, especially in that on the agrarian institutions, the investigation of which had been gone through before the design of treating the history of Rome arose in my mind, there was nothing to correct, little to add.

No truce, even though it was for a long series of years, could remove the causes of war, like a treaty of peace and alliance: when that concluded with Veii after the taking of Fidenæ had expired, the Romans demanded satisfaction for the crime of Tolumnius. The Veientines were afraid of war. Even seventy years before this it was only after they had collected succours from the whole of Etruria, and so long as these remained with them, that they carried it on with success, at a time when the confederates of Rome had to exert all their strength in their own defense. At present though many of these confederate towns had been destroyed or alienated from Rome, the cohorts of the rest were bound to accompany the legions whenever the senate commanded them to do so; while in more than one congress at the temple of Voltumna the Etruscans refused to send any aid. They cannot have failed to perceive that the town they were thus abandoning to its fate was the bulwark of their whole nation: and though unfortunately in the history of ill-connected confederacies there never was, nor ever will be, a want of examples where one of them, on the preservation of which the prosperity of all the rest depends, is abandoned to destruction by their envy and jealousy, still at all events the election of a king at Veii cannot possibly have excited any senseless ill humour among the other Etruscans: for Tolumnius had also been king: and indeed we have no ground whatever to suppose that any city of the whole nation ever had a chief magistrate of any other kind.

There was the stronger necessity for trying to dissolve the union between the two Ausonian nations, since the Sabines were continually making inroads into the Roman territory: nay the Æquians by themselves were strong enough to bring the Romans to repent that they had deemed a single consular army able to withstand their power. L. Minucius was defeated on the Algidus in 296, and besieged in his camp: from this strait he was rescued by aid sent to him from Rome, his collegue being in the field against the Sabines: as the battle however had been lost through his fault, he was forced to resign; and Q. Fabius took the command of the army in his stead.

This colourless outline is the utmost share that history takes in the narrative of this campaign. One annalist indeed ascribes the command of the troops that relieved the army to T. Quinctius; but this assuredly is merely a transfer of his name to this year from 290. According to the system explained above, the reserve, which must have brought the relief, was headed by a general with consular authority: but it is exceedingly improbable that this command should have been committed to one of the quæstors of blood, which office T. Quinctius filled at this very time. Either a dictator was actually appointed, or Q. Fabius, who afterward took the command of the army, was also the person who saved it.

When the envoys had executed their commission, a delay nevertheless took place in the appointment of the lawgivers: nor would the point have been settled peacefully, had not the plebeians given up their original demand that the board should be composed of both orders. The arrangement the ruling order agreed to was, that the consulship should be suspended, and that in the mean while ten senators, like a college of interrexes, should be invested with consular, and at the same time with legislative power. Among the ten appointed by virtue of this agreement we find both the consuls of the year 302: and as these were indemnified for the dignity they were forced to resign, so it is probable that the quaestors of blood and the warden of the city, whose offices were likewise transferred to the decemvirate obtained seats in it. Thus the patricians would have four deputies appointed exclusively by themselves, and one whose election they had confirmed; while five places were left open for the free choice of the centuries. Livy evidently must have heard a faint report of an election by which a certain number were added to others previously appointed.

The patricians were the more determined to allow the plebeians no share in this decemvirate, because it was understood as of course, that it was not only to draw up a scheme of laws, but to enact them, and to be the sole magistracy of the state: for in the ancient, commonwealths, when legislators were appointed, they were always entrusted with the whole government; as was the case with Solon, and with that body which from its actions received the name of the Thirty Tyrants.

The population of the greatest part of Italy was probably as much lessened by the two great pestilences, as it was forty years after Charles VIII undertook his disastrous expedition across the Alps, in comparison with its state at that epoch. But depopulation is everywhere soon repaired by an increase of births and a diminution of deaths, except where the vital energy of a people is checkt by the influence of deeprooted general distress; and thus at Rome it was not so lasting as the effects which the mortality had on the proportion between the two orders. It affected the close body far more sensibly than that which was open to fresh supplies; and thus it necessarily weakened the houses in comparison with the commonalty. Many of them must have become utterly extinct at this time, as in the fifth century was the case with the Potitii at a similar season: after these years of mortality no Larcius, Cominius, or Numicius, no patrician Tullius, Sicinius, or Volumnius, occurs in the Fasti: three of the houses have a consul at the end of the third century for the first and last time: for the first, because perhaps the decay of such a number of houses had made room for theirs; for the last, because theirs too had been reduced to a single representative or a few more, and soon afterward failed: several others, though they are found in the Fasti till toward the time of the Gallic invasion, disappear then, or shortly after; so that they probably numbered very few families.

The old commonalty was no less anxious for the reelection of the tribunes than of the consuls; nor could the former be prevented by any interference from without. But M. Duilius, whose lot it was to preside at this election, declared that he would take no vote either for his collegues or himself. This resolution was met by one equally firm on the part of the old plebeians, not to vote for anybody except the tribunes who were going out: and their superiority in number to the newly admitted tribesmen was so decided, that the latter, and such individuals as may have joined them, could not supply more than five candidates with the requisite votes in the majority of the tribes. Now it being necessary that all proceedings of the plebs should be completed in one day, an election which had not furnisht the full number might have been held void; and those who were desirous to carry the reelection of the late tribunes insisted that it ought to be so: Duilius on the other hand maintained that it was enough if there were any tribunes elected to begin the new year, and that these had a legal right to fill up the vacant places. The people was forced to acquiesce in this decision: but the majority of the new tribunes, as might have been lookt for from the mode of their election, were so entirely devoted to the patricians, that among the new members with whom they made up the complement of their college, two were even taken from that order,—Sp. Tarpeius and A. Aternius, to whom, it is true however, the commonalty was indebted for their law to regulate fines.

When the remnant of the Romans were collected in the city, and able to look about them again, they found that the state was bereft of its subjects, and had shrunk within its own limits; like Florence after the expulsion of the Duke of Athens. The towns which after the fall of Latium had placed themselves under the soverainty of Rome for the sake of enjoying her protection, now disdained to submit to her. Even under the year 366 we already find mention of the revolt of the Latins and Hernicans: which however only means that the league then subsisting was dissolved. Still even if the Latins were not animated by any hostile feelings at the time of their separation, some such must are long have inevitably taken root in their minds. As soon as the remains of that people had resumed its independence, its national assembly was of course restablisht. To this assembly the Roman senate complained in 369 that no aid had been afforded them for the last three years; and the sense of their own weakness compelled them to take up with an empty evasion. Still the union among the Latins at this time must have been very lax: several towns were induced by their situation or by other circumstances to stand by the Romans; and this affords an explanation how Latin colonies subject to Rome came to be founded during this period, such as Sutrium and Nepete, as well as Setia, which probably was one of the towns taken from the Volscians before the year 365.

I Have already intimated in the former volume that the Veientine war cannot have been the occasion on which the practice of giving the troops pay was first introduced; that the serarians must undoubtedly have always continued to pay pensions to the infantry, as single women and minors did to the knights; that the change consisted in this, that every legionary now became entitled to pay, whereas previously the number of pensions had been limited by that of the persons liable to be charged with them; and hence that the deficiency was supplied out of the ærarium, from the produce of the tithe, and, when this failed, by a tribute levied even from those plebeians who were themselves bound to serve. Not only however is it utterly inconceivable that the paternal legislation which introduced the census, should have allowed that, while the wealthiest knights were to receive pay, the infantry was to serve without any kind of wages: I can also bring forward unequivocal indications that both services were originally paid according to the same system.

Polybius, it is well known, states the daily pay of a legionary to have been two obols: which,—since he takes a drachm as equivalent to a denary, and since the latter, in paying the soldiers, even after the introduction of a small currency, was not reckoned, as in all other transactions, at 16 ases, but at 10—are equal to uses, and in 30 days amount to 100.