There seems to be a similar incorrectness in the statement of the reasons why the military tribunes of the year 353 abdicated two months and a half before the regular time; in consequence of which their successors came into office on the first of October, as continued to be the practice down to the change just spoken of. After the defeat before Veii, caused by the fault of two members of the college, it was right to deprive these of their imperium: but it would have been no less absurd than unjust to depose the whole body at a moment when such a disaster was to be repaired. The alteration however rendered the election of plebeian military tribunes more difficult; and this was no doubt the end the patricians had in view, not a merely incidental advantage. The election of military tribunes as well as that of tribunes of the people was held at the close of the year of office: the latter went out three days before the former; and nothing could be so powerful a recommendation of a candidate against the means which the patricians had of controlling the elections, as his having acted honorably in the tribuneship, from which he had just retired. Now however that the appointment of military tribunes was transferred to the first of October, an ex-tribune was no longer eligible, till he had been above nine months and a half out of office; in the course of which time the people must already have become estranged from him, more especially as he had not the power of addressing them during it.

The only thing that can prevent an aristocracy from splitting into hostile parties, pursuing each other with the bitterest animosity, is the existence of a formidable rustic or civic commonalty: for factions are never wanting in it, which, when it is free from anxiety, break out into irreconcilable fury against one another; as we see in the Guelfs and Ghibellines: these, as is expressly stated with regard to Florence, at the outset were merely parties among the houses, and the commonalty had nothing to do with them. If the aristocratical body comprehends a narrow oligarchy with peculiar privileges, whether resulting from prescription or usurpation, these will excite no less vehement murmurs among those who are thrown into the background, than in an opprest commonalty; and the oligarchs will display the same arrogance and ferocity toward the one as toward the other. The Bacchiads looked upon the Dorians at Corinth as their subjects: the members of the secret council at Freyburg excluded the nobless even in our fathers days from posts of honour and of authority: the same point did the major houses at Rome endeavour to carry against the minor. The latter however found support from individuals of the privileged class, moved whether by benevolent feelings or by mortified pride, and from the commonalty; whose liberties were gaining ground so long as the houses, which after their reconciliation strove to keep it under, were at variance, and vying with each other in courting its favour.

The persons who carried intelligence to Athens of Rome's destruction by the Gauls, related, as Heraclides soon after wrote, that Rome had been taken by a great host of Hyperboreans, that is to say, a people who came over the icy mountains from the unknown regions of the north. Herodotus, writing about the year 330, only knew of the Celts as dwelling in the extreme west of Europe, at so vast a distance that he conceives them to have been seated beyond the pillars of Hercules. He does not place the Celts, but the Umbrians, at the foot of the mountains in which the Drave and the Inn take their rise: nor does he name them among the nations out of which the army led by Hamilcar against Gelo and Thero was raised,—Phœnicians, Libyans, Iberians, Ligurians, Volscians, Sardinians, Corsicans: in aftertimes on the other hand the Gauls always made up a large part of the Carthaginian armies, having already served in those of Dionysius the Elder: so that in the time of Gelo they were still at a distance from those parts where the Carthaginian recruiters might have engaged them and taken them on board ship.

Wherever we have the means of comparing Appian with Dionysius, he has built upon him, so far as Dionysius goes: and as he is not a writer likely to have taken the trouble of seeking for information in more books than one at the same time, we may look upon his express statement, that the Gallic invasion took place in the ninetyseventh Olympiad, as borrowed from Dionysius.

Previous to the unspeakable calamities which befell Rome in these wars, several years had past with great vicissitudes of fortune. The disastrous campaign of 283 must without doubt have added very much to the power of the Volscians: on the other side the Sabines were still carrying on the hostilities which the Veientines had engaged them to commence. Down to the year 285 the Romans were only fighting for the defense of remote insulated districts, and of their confederates: but now the Ausonian tribes had spread so far, that the territory of Rome itself was subject to their ravages: the Sabines even crost the Anio and advanced to the gates of the city. Dissensions had prevented the sending out any legions: they were now raised with the utmost haste, and the plunderers retreated before them. I shall pass over the main part of the occurrences related of these campaigns: for even if they were more attractive, who would give room to stories which may very probably be nothing but idle inventions of some chronicler! This however is not the case with the account that in the same year the Volscians were overtaken and defeated, when they were retiring upon Antium, and that the people of Ceno, a seaport in their territory, went over to the Romans. In the next year, 286, fortune continued to favour Rome; and the Volscians at Antium, after a battle in which they were worsted by the consul T. Quinctius, found themselves so hard prest, that they sent to the Ecetrans and Æquians for succour: at the same time the consul was joined by some cohorts of Hernicans: it was naturally expected that a decisive engagement would soon take place.

The advance of the Celts so near to the southern coasts of Italy attracted the attention of the Greeks even on the other side of the Ionian sea to their migration: and among the many cities which must have fallen before their attack, Rome may probably have been the most powerful and renowned. Its name indeed had not continued down to this time altogether unknown in Greece: it was mentioned in the legends which pursued the destinies of the Trojans after the fall of Troy: and Hecataeus, who spoke of Nola in his Europe, cannot possibly have past over Rome, which was still flourishing in glory under its monarchy when he reacht the maturity of manhood. But the wars it had been carrying on during the hundred and twenty years that followed the banishment of the Tarquins, against tribes utterly unknown and regarded as barbarians, could not possibly engage the attention of the Greeks: still less could Greek writers be led to speak of them: and as the books of Hecatseus sank into complete oblivion, after Eratosthenes publisht his treatise on geography, we may thus understand how the mention of the capture of Rome by the Gauls should be regarded as the earliest notice of any acquaintance with her fortunes among the Greeks.

This equality completely explains why Sp. Cassius alone ratified the league with the Latins at Rome, a fact which has furnisht room for an utterly groundless inference, adopted by Livy. His collegue was absent, because he was taking the same oath among the Latins; and his name would be recorded on the tablet which they set up.

The preservation of the Roman document down to the age of Macer, who undoubtedly read it himself, perfectly authenticates the contents reported by Dionysius, though long before he came to Rome it had disappeared; and we may be assured that he followed his authors literally here, because elsewhere he is misled by the inveterate Roman prejudices to form a totally different conception of the relation of the Latins to Rome. So that the treaty contained these terms, which were ratified by the sacrifice. There shall be peace between the Romans and the Latins so long as heaven and earth shall keep their place: neither state shall war against the other, nor instigate forein powers to do so; nor grant a passage through its territory to forein armies against its ally: but when either suffers damage or vexation, the other shall loyally render it protection, help, and succour. The booty and everything gained in a joint war shall be shared equally. Private suits shall be decided within ten days, in the place where the cause of litigation arose.

The ferment of the elements which prevailed toward the close of the third century of the city, continued through the first half of the next century, and aggravated the miseries of the Peloponnesian war, which during that period was ruining Greece. At that time, says Thucydides, we experienced, what former ages knew only from tradition, earthquakes, spreading widely and of tremendous violence, terrible drouths, and famine in consequence, and the plague. Etna too during the same period threw out a stream of lava.

On these spasms of the earth Greek history gives us far more information: yet the Roman annals also speak of visitations which unquestionably belong to the same series. In the year 319 there were earthquakes, that recurred frequently, and threw down a number of buildings in the Roman territory: these must evidently have been connected with the eruption of Etna, and with the terrible shocks which ravaged the coast of Greece in Ol. 88. 3; even though we find from a comparison of dates that this year at the earliest only corresponds with the year of Rome 320. In the year 327 the wells and streams were dried up; the cattle and the fruits of the earth pined away for want of water: an equally terrible drouth prevailed six and thirty years after, and spread similar misery around.

It is a phenomenon to which the fasti of the republic afford no parallel, except at their very beginning in the honours enjoyed by the Valerii, that for seven consecutive years, from 269 to 275, one of the seats in the consulship was always filled by members of the same house: and that this cannot have been matter of chance is the more certain, inasmuch as the effect, so long as the lesser houses formed a separate body, must have been that either they or the greater houses, as an estate, were excluded. One cannot but see that this must have been connected with some revolution by which the oligarchy designed permanently to secure the superiority they had gained, and from which, though this hope was not fulfilled, they long derived an unjust advantage, but which ended in only laying a deeper foundation for the liberties of the plebeians.

The sentence against Cassius may perhaps have been carried into effect according to the forms of law by Q. Fabius and Ser. Cornelius, both of them members of the older houses, without any attempt being made to save him, although it was an injury at once to the larger half of the ruling estate, and to the whole of the commonalty.

During the second campaign against Veii a town called Artena was taken by the Romans. According to some of the annalists, it belonged to the Volscians; according to others, to the Veientines: Livy adopted the former notion: yet, were it not that we find mention of an engagement in the same year near Ferentinum, we could not hesitate on internal grounds to prefer the latter: it is natural that the whole force of the republic should have been pointed against Etruria; and so we might readily suppose that a town in that extensive country had been conquered by a division of the Roman army. Throughout the whole remainder of the Veientine war nothing is said about any hostilities against the Volscians and Æquians; excepting at Anxur, where the inhabitants, with the help of some of their country men who had got into the town, overpowered the Roman garrison in 353. The circumstances under which this was brought about, shew that Rome was at peace with the rest of the Volscian nation: a great part of the soldiers were absent on furlough, and Volscian merchants had been admitted without any precaution into the place. Two years afterward it was retaken: and it seems that the peace with the rest of the nation was still subsisting undisturbed: the Romans were most deeply concerned to maintain it; and the disheartened Ausonian tribes were enjoying their repose with faint hopes of favorable events that might avert the impending danger.

I Have traced the history of the wars which followed the restoration of the city, down to the interval of peace occasioned by the necessity of settling the new constitution of the commonwealth after the passing of the Licinian laws: the bulk of this volume will not allow me to carry down the internal history beyond the epoch at which those laws were first brought forward.

The ferment which produced them did not arise, like the commotions which led to the Publilian laws, and to the appointment of the decemvirs, from the pretensions of the higher class of the plebeians to more freedom and a due share of civil offices, but from the misery which the Gallic invasion left behind it. Revolutions which are brought on by general distress, in attempting to remedy it, usually destroy the foundations of a permanent free constitution, and, after horrible convulsions, have almost always ended in despotism: it is the noblest glory of the Roman people, a glory in which no other can vie with it, that twice in its history such an excitement gave rise to a higher and more durable state of legal freedom. That which elsewhere was a deathblow to liberty, was at Rome a cure for the internal disorders of the republic, and raised its constitution to that state, which, considering the perishableness of everything human, is perhaps, like a similar stage in our individual happiness, the most desirable of all: it stopt only one step short of that perfection, after which every further change is an inroad of corruption and decay, even though it may be long unacknowledged as such, nay regarded as an advance and an improvement.

I Have already intimated that by the constitution of 311 the censors were chosen by the curies: of course the centuries had to confirm the election. Hence in aftertimes the strange anomaly, that at the appointment of censors the latter assembly voted twice over: this cannot have been the case from the beginning; but when the election came to be taken away from the patricians, the previous practice of having it confirmed by the centuries might still be retained as an unimportant formality: to have transferred it by way of exchange to the curies would have been a hazardous measure, and directly adverse to the spirit of the age. Nor in like manner would the curies before the time of Servius Tullius have voted twice on the same king, if the assembly that elected him had from the first been, as it was after the time of Tarquinius Priscus, the same with that which confirmed the election; whereas the latter had originally been a much larger body than the former.

The regulation that the censors were to be appointed by the curies was the same which ever since the compact of had been in force with regard to the higher place in the consulship, applied to what was far the most important half of the consular power.

It is not exactly true that the agrarian law of Cassius was the earliest that was so called: every law by which the commonwealth disposed of its public land bore that name; as for instance that by which the domain of the kings was parcelled out among the commonalty, and those by which colonies were planted. Even in the narrower sense, of a law whereby the state exercised its ownership in removing the old possessors from a part of its domain, and making over its right of property therein, such a law existed among those of Servius Tullius.

In the room of these significations very general currency has been given to the term agrarian law, in the sense of an enactment relating to the landed property of all the citizens, setting a limit to it, and assigning all beyond that limit to the destitute. The regulation of Cleomenes, the equal partition of land demanded by the frantic levellers in the French revolution, are termed agrarian laws: while in cases to which the word might suitably be applied, where the strict right of property has been unfeelingly enforced against tenants at will who cultivate a piece of ground transmitted to them from their forefathers, the word is never thought of; and the rapacious landlord, who turns a village into a solitude, regarding its fields as property which he may dispose of in whatever way he can make the most of it, if he has ever heard the name of the Gracchi, will condemn their agrarian law as an atrocity.

The colonies with which the Romans strengthened their empire were not of a kind peculiar to them: we read of Alban, Volscian, Sabellian colonies; which, and even the Etruscan ones, there can be no doubt were of exactly the same nature. If our accounts were somewhat more copious, all these would range under one general head as Italian colonies. To avoid the appearance of an arbitrary assumption, I will speak only of the Roman, and of the contrast between them and the Greek.

The latter were in general newly built towns; or if the colonists settled in cities already founded, the old population was mostly exterminated: in the surrounding territory it survived, but in bondage; from which condition it generally rose in course of time to that of a commonalty. They were planted at a distance from the parent state, usually by persons who emigrated to escape from commotions and civil feuds, and not under the direction of the government at home: or if a colony went forth in peace and with the blessing of the parent state, and the latter retained honorary privileges, still the colony from the beginning was free and independent, even when founded to serve as a safe mart for commerce. The totally opposite character of the Roman colonies is described in a definition, which is certainly very ancient, and only needs some explanation and addition.

Whenever the kings were in the field, their place at Rome was filled by the first senator, who, like them, decided cases concerning property and occupancy, and provided against sudden emergencies. Even those times of national glory cannot have been exempt from reverses; and when any danger threatened from within or without, the deputy was beyond all question authorized to raise men and to arm them, to convoke the senate, and to put measures to the vote before the curies: all this must have been included by Tacitus under his expression of providing against sudden emergencies. Of course whatever could be deferred was reserved for the king's return. In the accounts of the original nature and the changes of the constitution it was recorded that, when as yet the senate consisted only of a hundred men, one of the Ten First was chosen chief of the whole body by the king, and entrusted with the wardenship of the city: so that he not only belonged of necessity to the decury of the interrexes, but the custos urbis, as the deputy was called, was the first in that decury. Hence Sp. Lucretius, who filled that office, held the comitia for electing the first consuls as interrex.

The election of the magistrates, under whose hands what as yet was only a written law was to begin to become a living one, a law that was to gain strength with age, until it amalgamated with the nature of all who were born under it, no less than their language and manners, and then, unless it were continually moulded to suit the changes in the state of things, was to die away and lose its hold,—this election was perfectly free. After a revolution like this it very frequently happens that its strongest adversaries procure seats in the government, in order to subvert the constitution: and this must have been the design with which the leading patricians now exerted their whole influence over the centuries to obtain the election of L. Cincinnatus, C. Claudius, and T. Quinctius. What the aim of these men would be, nobody could doubt: one of them, we know, had wisht to cancel the charter of the Sacred Mount; the second took measures a few years after for effecting a counter revolution by a massacre; and the third tried to check the developement of the new constitution at the moment most favorable for it. He had formerly been one of those in whom the people placed confidence, but had changed his sentiments: Appius on the contrary, from the moment that the reform was irrevocably decided on, had loudly declared himself in its favour, and he past for the soul of the whole decemviral legislation.

It sounds exceedingly strange, that, at a season when the vanquisht party cannot possibly have ventured on usurping any power, the chief pontiff, a patrician, chosen by the curies, and the president of their assembly, should have been called to superintend the election of tribunes on the restoration of their office; more especially as this was not the course at its first institution. The circumstances of the two cases however were not the same: in the earlier one the tribes of the commonalty formed a separate body, and the two first tribunes of the people, who presided at the election of three additional ones, were already the decurion among the old regularly elected tribunes of the Servian constitution. But those among whom M. Oppius and Sex. Manilius occupied the same place, were chosen during the insurrection: for on the abolition of the plebs as a distinct order its local tribunes ceast to exist: and if the national tribes had phylarchs of their own, there must at the least have been a good many patricians among them. Moreover the original tribunes were confirmed by the curies: and this sanction, which had long since been abolisht, was now supplied once for all by the presence and assent of the head of the pontifical college, which no doubt even at this period was competent to give validity to a merely formal proceeding of the patrician order: and such a proceeding was requisite to repeal the law which had been passed by the curies under the auspices of the pontiffs abolishing the tribuneship: for the restoration of freedom brookt no delay.