After the monarchy of the Greeks, which began in Alexander the Great and after his death was diminished and divided into four kingdoms—namely, Asia, Egypt, Macedonia, and Syria—there follows the fourth monarchy of the world, which is believed to be the last. This is the monarchy of the Romans, according to Daniel’s visions of the statue whose legs were iron but whose feet were mixed with earth, and of the four beasts coming up from the sea, of which the last was a beast unlike the others, having iron teeth, crushing all things and trampling them beneath its feet.
According to the doctors this signifies the Roman Empire, which began under Julius Caesar, who lived before Christ’s nativity, and has remained until the present day, 1458. Hence it has endured longer than the others.
For although Constantine transferred the seat of the empire from the city of Rome to Constantinople in Greece, and it was afterward transferred from the Greeks to the Franks by the supreme pontiffs Adrian and Leo—the first of the Franks being Charlemagne—and was then transferred from the Franks to the Teutons, of whom Otto I was the first, and remains with them down to the present day, nevertheless its ruler has always been and is still called Emperor of the Romans.
Beginning, therefore, from the earlier kingdoms so that the commencement of this empire and its varying mode of government may be understood: as Vincent says in book 7, chapter 1 of the Historical Mirror, the kingdom of the Latins took its rise under Latius, their first king, who lived in the time of Aioth, judge of Israel. It endured until the eighth year of Darius Hystaspes, which was the eightieth year after the transmigration to Babylon—and we say after the return from captivity to Judea. Such a kingdom ran for 889 years.
It had six Latin kings, of whom the first was Latius; fourteen Alban kings, of whom the first was Ascanius; and seven Roman kings, of whom the first was Romulus. Romulus first founded the city of Rome and reigned there, and the city was named after him. This was at the time when King Ahaz reigned in Judah, or, according to others, his son Hezekiah.
The last of these seven Roman kings was Tarquin the Proud. After Brutus expelled him because of the adultery committed against Lucretia, the Romans governed their dominion through consuls. These were temporary: a consul assumed office for a year and administered the care of the commonwealth. This mode of government was maintained for 462 years, after which Julius Caesar usurped the empire for himself alone.
Some notable events performed by the Romans in the time of these consuls are briefly explained. In the first year was Brutus, who removed the tyranny of the kings. Then in the fortieth year the decemvirs were established. Camillus was consul in the 136th year; Quintilius dictator in the 148th; Papirius consul in the 186th; Maulius and Marchus Regulus in the 243rd; Publius Cornelius Scipio in the 292nd; Fabius Maximus dictator in the 298th; Lutius Aemilius Paulus and Terentius Varro in the 299th; Jovinus and Marcellus in the 303rd; Claudius Marcus Limius Salimator in the 305th; Scipio Africanus in the 361st; and Scipio Africanus the Younger in the 364th.
Afterward came Scipio Nasica, then Postulemus and Marcellus, and Marius and Gnaeus. Sulla lived in the 422nd year; Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pompey, and Crassus in the 457th. In the time of the Scipios occurred the Punic wars, that is, those against the Carthaginians; in the time of Marius, the Jugurthine War; and in the time of Cicero, the Catilinarian War. This is related by Master Thomas the Englishman in the exposition he made upon the first ten books of The City of God.
In the History of the Franks it is read that in the time of Aioth, the second of the judges of Israel, Troy was built by a certain man called Troius. After standing for 185 years, it was captured and destroyed by the Greeks in the time of Jabdo, judge of Israel, because of the adultery and abduction of Helen, wife of the Greek Menelaus, by Paris, son of Priam, king of the Trojans.
Then Aeneas, who had nevertheless betrayed that very city although he was Priam’s kinsman, departed from it and came with a great fleet into Italy. King Latinus gave him in marriage his only daughter, named Laninia. King Latinus had previously promised his daughter Laninia to Turnus, but he did not keep his promise because he gave her to Aeneas when he came from Troy into Italy.
The king of the Rutulians, together with Turnus, made war against Latinus. In the first encounter King Latinus was killed by Turnus, and so too was Pallas the giant, son of King Evander, who had come to aid Latinus and Aeneas. In the second battle Turnus was killed by Aeneas. In the third Aeneas was killed and translated into a god.
Aeneas founded a city that he called Lavinium, where he reigned three years. His son Ascanius reigned twenty-seven years. Afterward Ascanius built another city near Rome, which he called Alba, and left Lavinium to Lavinia, his mother—or, according to others, his stepmother. The kingdom of Lavinium was transferred to Alba, where Ascanius reigned. That kingdom of the Albans endured until the time of Tullus Hostilius, the third king of the Romans.
§ I. Romulus and Remus
Returning, therefore, to the first Roman king: this was Romulus, whose brother was Remus. Justin speaks as follows in book 44 concerning their birth and origin. Amulius was the last king of the Albans. He expelled from the kingdom his elder brother, named Numitor. To prevent offspring, he condemned Numitor’s daughter, called Rhea—or, according to others, Ilia—to perpetual virginity, dedicating her to the goddess Vesta. He did this so that no avenger of her father might be born from her.
But although she remained enclosed in the grove of Mars, she gave birth to twins. It was uncertain whether they were conceived through rape or by Mars. Although Justin speaks in this manner, he expresses the opinion of that time. For it is believed that they were conceived through rape, or at least through an incubus demon.
Amulius ordered these children to be exposed so that they would die, from which injury their mother died. According to others, however, as punishment for incest she was buried alive.
Vesta was said to be the goddess of the earth, as though standing firm, because the earth stands forever. She herself was also said to be goddess of fire because fire is found in the earth. Because nothing is born from fire, she was therefore called a virgin, a Vestal goddess, because a virgin does not give birth; and those dedicated to her were bound to preserve virginity.
This divine power was not fashioned into an image—that is, a statue—as were the other idols, because fire cannot be represented. Instead, a perpetual fire was preserved in her temple, which one of those virgins nourished by placing wood upon it. Because it was once extinguished, the virgin who guarded it was burned.
A she-wolf nourished the exposed children Romulus and Remus. But Faustulus, a shepherd of the royal herd, found them beside the bank of the Tiber and carried them to his wife Acca Larentia, as Helinand says. Because of the beauty and rapacity of her lustful body she was called a she-wolf by her neighbors; hence even down to our own memory the cells of prostitutes are called lupanaria.
When Romulus and Remus had grown up, they drove robbers away from plundering the livestock. Remus was captured by the robbers and brought before Numitor as himself a robber. When Numitor saw him, Faustulus suddenly arrived with Romulus. They formed a conspiracy, killed Amulius, and restored Numitor to the kingdom.
Romulus and Remus are called sons of Mars because they were warlike, or because they were conceived in the temple of Mars; nevertheless, they were not conceived by him but through rape.
As is contained in the Chronicles, in the time of Ahaz, king of Judah, Rome was founded upon Mount Aventine by the twins Romulus and Remus. In the third year from the founding of the city, Remus was killed with a shepherd’s mattock by Fabius, Romulus’s commander—according to some, by Romulus’s contrivance so that he alone might reign—and Romulus alone was raised to the kingdom.
Jerome says: “Rome could not have two kings at once and was dedicated with fratricide,” as is cited in Cause 7, Question 1, Among Bees.
At the same time, according to Augustine in The City of God, the Erythraean Sibyl is said to have flourished. The verses beginning, “As a sign of judgment, the earth will grow wet with sweat,” and so forth, which predicted many things about Christ, are said to be hers.
If this occurred in the time of Hezekiah, Rome was therefore founded in the 335th year of the Fourth Age and, according to Jerome’s computation, in the 3,223rd year from the beginning of the world. But according to the Seventy and Bede, whose computation is more commonly held, it was the 4,457th year. If, according to others, it was founded in the year of Ahaz, it was a little earlier, because Ahaz was Hezekiah’s father. According to Eusebius in the Chronicles, the aforesaid Romulus and Remus were born in the 405th year after the captivity or destruction of Troy.
After Romulus constructed the walls of the very large city, those who were with him were not sufficient to fill it. He built a temple called an asylum, promising impunity to everyone who fled to it. For this reason a very great multitude of robbers and fugitives gathered within the city, as Titus Livy writes in the first book On the Origin of the City.
Romulus saw that they had no wives and that the city could not long stand without them. He sent to the neighboring cities, asking that their daughters be given to his men as wives. But from its very beginning the city of Romulus was hateful. The neighbors feared this multitude of such men, namely robbers, while Romulus and his men were held in contempt because they were shepherds and poor.
The neighbors therefore answered Romulus and his companions that, just as they had opened an asylum for men wishing to flee to them, so they should open one for women as well, and in this way obtain wives, for the neighbors refused to give them their daughters.
Hearing this, Romulus concealed his mind as though the matter did not concern him. He decreed that circus games should be celebrated for the god Consus—that is, the god of counsels—and caused it to be proclaimed so that many of the neighbors would gather for the spectacle. While these games were underway, Romulus arranged that when women came from Sabina, a city near Rome, to watch the games, each man should seize as his wife whichever woman he wished. This was done.
Afterward Romulus and his men waged wars against the fathers of those girls, who wished to avenge the injury done to them and recover their daughters. Immediately after the abduction of their daughters, their parents went about the neighboring cities in soiled garments and with tears, inciting them by their complaints against the Romans because of the injury done to them. Although the greater part of the abducted women were Sabines, there were nevertheless others from other neighboring cities.
First, moved for this reason, the Ceninenses made a great attack upon Roman territory and laid it waste. But Romulus and his men defeated them while they were scattered through the fields, killed their leader, and captured their city. Afterward the Crustumini made war upon the Romans and were defeated.
Last of all, a more serious war was waged against the Romans by the Sabines, and in the first encounter they captured the citadel of the Capitol. When the daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, who commanded the Capitoline citadel, went out to draw water, Titus Tatius, prince of the Sabines, met her with his men and promised the girl gifts if she would admit them into the citadel. They entered while the Romans were unaware, killed the girl, and occupied the citadel.
On the following day they engaged the Romans. They routed Hostilius, commander of the Roman army, and the Roman army as far as the old gate of the palace. But Romulus and his men vowed to build a temple to Jove so that his army might cease fleeing and strengthen itself to resist. When the army of Romulus did so, it began through brave fighting to gain the upper hand against the Sabines.
Then the Sabine women who had been abducted, with disheveled hair and torn garments, threw themselves between the battle lines and the flying weapons. On one side they begged their parents and on the other their husbands not to stain themselves with the impious blood of fathers-in-law and sons-in-law. Thus they moved the minds of both sides. In the ensuing silence the leaders made treaties, formed one city from the two, conferred rule upon Rome, and wished the Sabines to be called Quirites on equal terms.
Titus Livy narrates the death of Romulus in this manner. While Romulus was reviewing his army at the marsh of Caprea, a great storm with thunder suddenly arose. Romulus, covered by the cloud itself, was taken from the sight of the assembly and was not seen afterward. For this reason the multitude said or believed that he had been translated into a god. Some, however, said that the senators then hated him and tore him to pieces.
A certain man named Julius Proculus confirmed the belief in his deification, declaring that Romulus had appeared to him on the road, already made a god, and given him many commands. Thus Romulus was regarded as a god by the Romans and called Quirinus from the spear he was accustomed to carry. For in the Sabine language quiris means the same as spear. They considered him the greatest god after Jove.
Behold what sort of gods the pagan Romans had: Jove, whom they called the highest god, was a most criminal man. He expelled his father Saturn from the kingdom so that he himself might reign in Crete; he was a violator of virgins, an adulterer, and a sodomite, as is said of Ganymede. Romulus was a fratricide, the prince of robbers, hostile to his neighbors, and the abductor of the Sabine women.
§ II. Numa Pompilius
After the death of Romulus, as Titus Livy says in book 1 On the Origin of the City, the senators, after the people conceded to them that they might choose Romulus’s successor, chose Numa Pompilius for their king. Although he was not from the Romans but from the Sabines, they chose him because of his great reputation for justice and religion.
When Numa, having been chosen in this way, saw that a kingdom could not stand without laws, and that he could not devote himself to giving laws unless peace existed in the city, he immediately made peace all around at the beginning of his reign. He possessed this peace throughout his whole rule, namely forty-three years, although Eutropius says forty-one years.
After peace was made, he established a temple to the god Janus. Its closure signified peace, as though peace remained enclosed among the Romans, while its opening signified war, so that all soldiers who went out to war might return from battle and be found unharmed within it.
Having done this, he devoted himself entirely to establishing laws and instituting and ordering sacred rites. He established certain gods to be worshiped in the city, transmitted the manner of worshiping them, and occupied the greater part of his life with ceremonies and sacred matters.
After Numa died, Tullus Hostilius, who succeeded him in the kingdom, immediately caused the temple of Janus to be opened. He waged wars and devoted himself entirely to martial affairs.
From Numa’s time until Octavian Augustus, under whom Christ was born, the temple of Janus was closed only once, namely after the First Punic War under the consul Manilius. In the time of Octavian, when the city rested from wars after Antonius had been defeated by him, it was closed again. Consequently, from the time of Numa until the time of Octavian the Romans had peace for only one year; nor had they peace before Numa, because Romulus continually waged wars.
Concerning Janus himself, for whom Numa made the temple, it should be known that he reigned on Mount Janiculum, which is now within the city in part and in the neighboring regions. This occurred when Saturn, expelled by his son Jove, came from Crete into those parts. Because Saturn taught people to cultivate vineyards and live civilly, Janus received him as a partner in the kingdom.
After Janus died and was deified according to their opinion, they attributed to him the power of closing and opening all things. Numa therefore established a temple for him that he wished to be closed and opened at different times, as has been said.
Isidore says concerning the laws instituted by him in Distinction 7, chapter Moses: “Numa Pompilius, who succeeded Romulus in the kingdom, first established laws for the Romans.” In Distinction 1 it is said: “The law of the Quirites is called the law of the Romans, because only the Quirites—that is, the Romans—use those laws.” There the Gloss says that “Romans” means all who are subject to Roman rule. Hence they are called imperial laws in another manner. How many kinds or names of those laws there are is declared throughout Distinction 2.
This same Numa added two months to the year, namely January and February, because previously the year had been divided into ten months.
Augustine speaks of Numa Pompilius in the penultimate chapter of book 7 of The City of God, citing Varro. When a certain plowman was working a field near the Janiculum, where Numa’s tomb stood, he dug up and found a chest underground. In it were seven books containing the institutions of the sacred rites composed by the said Numa Pompilius. Those institutions had been devised by him at the devil’s instigation. For Augustine says that Numa was driven to practice hydromancy, so that in water he might see images of the gods—or rather, deceptions of demons—from whom he might hear what he ought to establish and observe in sacred rites.
Varro says that this kind of divination was brought from Persia and records that Numa himself, and later the philosopher Pythagoras, used it. He also relates that by it, with human blood applied, even the dead are raised. When the said books were found and presented, the praetor Pompilius caused them to be burned publicly by authority of the Senate. Numa had wished to keep them hidden because he thought them harmful to people; the Senate caused them to be burned because their teaching appeared to draw people away from the religion and worship of the gods, as Valerius says.
§ III. Tullus Hostilius
The third king of the Romans was called Tullus Hostilius. He was devoted to military affairs, and so he caused the temple of Janus to be opened. Disdaining peace, he sought occasions for wars, beginning with Alba, which had been, as it were, the mother of Rome, because Romulus, the builder of Rome, was descended through his mother from those who reigned at Alba. These two cities, Alba and Rome, had been sufficiently friendly with one another down to this Tullus, the third king of the Romans.
He repeatedly provoked the Albans to war, the two cities now contending over which one ought to possess dominion, as Titus Livy relates in book 1. On one occasion, when the armies of both cities had been led out to fight, their commanders agreed upon the following course in order to avoid the slaughter of many: three brothers from the Roman army, strong in bodily power and vigorous in arms, called the Horatii, would fight three other brothers from the Alban army, called the Curiatii, who were no less valiant. Everyone else would remain at rest, and whichever side’s champions won would possess dominion.
When the three Horatii fought the same number of Curiatii, two of the Horatii were killed, while the third survived. None of the Curiatii was killed, but all three were gravely wounded. The Horatius who remained unwounded, realizing that he could not resist the three together, even though they were wounded, feigned flight so that the three, attempting to pursue him, would become separated from one another. Once they were apart, he turned upon his pursuers. He first engaged and killed the one who had drawn nearest him, then the next who arrived, and finally the third. Having killed them, he returned to his own men amid the Romans’ great rejoicing, and thus dominion was awarded to the Romans.
When this Horatius entered Rome in triumph with the spoils of the three Curiatii whom he had killed, his sister recognized the spoils of one of them, to whom she had already been betrothed but not yet given in marriage. Perceiving the death of her bridegroom, she wept out of affection for him. The said Horatius took this so badly that he killed her, exercising excessive cruelty in this act.
The Albans were displeased that Mettius, the commander of their army, had placed the victory in the conflict of three men, by which dominion had fallen to the Romans. In order to reconcile the Albans to himself and please them, Mettius, seeing that they were not sufficient to conquer the Romans openly, stirred up other neighboring peoples against Rome, namely the Fidenates and the Veientes, while reserving himself and his own men for treachery. For when Tullus, king of the Romans, took the Albans and Mettius their commander with him to fight those peoples, trusting that they would aid him, Mettius deserted Tullus at the clash of battle and went up with the Albans onto a nearby mountain. There he could watch the fortune of the combatants and join whichever side he saw prevailing.
When Tullus discovered this, he cried out to his army that they need not be at all alarmed by the Albans’ withdrawal, because they had withdrawn at his command in order to attack the enemy from the rear. Tullus and the Romans defeated the peoples who had come against him. After the victory he captured Mettius, commander of the Albans, and caused his body to be pulled apart in two directions. He utterly destroyed the walls and houses of the Alban city and compelled its citizens to move from there to Rome, to dwell on the Caelian Hill adjoining the city. Thus he enlarged Rome with the Albans, for according to Titus Livy the city of Alba had stood for four hundred years.
Titus Livy also relates that when a plague grew severe at Rome, Tullus fell into a long illness. Thereafter, abandoning his former ferocity toward war, he turned his mind to the sacred rites of the gods. While he was performing certain secret, solemn sacrifices to Jove, and doing so incorrectly, he and his household were struck and consumed by lightning.
§ IV. Ancus Marcius, Tarquin the Elder, Servius Tullius, and Tarquin the Proud
The fourth king of the Romans, as Titus Livy relates, was called Ancus Marcius. I have not yet read what he did, except that he founded the city of Ostia on the sea at the sixteenth milestone from Rome, as is said in the Martiniana Chronicle, and first caused a bridge to be made across the Tiber between Mount Aventine and the Janiculum. He lived in the time of Josiah, king of Judah, and reigned thirty-five years. From Ostia takes his name the cardinal bishop of Ostia who consecrates the pope. Ostia, however, is now entirely destroyed together with its port.
It should also be noted that Tarquin the Elder, a foreigner who came to Rome, found such favor with Ancus Marcius, the fourth king of the Romans, that at Ancus’s death he was made guardian of the king’s sons. After King Ancus Marcius died, when the Roman citizens assembled to provide themselves with a future king, Tarquin, who was guardian of Ancus’s sons, sent them hunting. In their absence he asked the Romans for the kingdom and obtained it.
Although Tarquin afterward performed many vigorous deeds in the kingdom, the sons of Ancus conspired against him because of the injury done to them when he obtained the kingdom and because he had appointed neither of them as his successor, but instead a certain slave, Tullius, to whom he had betrothed his daughter. They selected two shepherds accustomed to fighting with rustic iron tools to kill him. According to their agreement, the men quarreled with each other and appealed to the king. When they had been admitted and brought before him, and the king was listening intently to one of them making his complaint, the other raised an axe, struck the king on the head, and killed him. Thus Tarquin the Elder, fifth king of the Romans, ended his life.
He was succeeded by Servius Tullius, the sixth king of the Romans. Servius made ditches around the city’s walls and was the first to institute the taking of a census from the people, a practice previously unknown. He gave his daughter in marriage to Tarquin, who became the seventh king after him and was called Tarquin the Proud.
As Titus Livy relates in book 1, this Tarquin, incited by the wickedness of his wife, the daughter of Servius Tullius, sought the kingdom. First he inveighed against King Tullius before the senators, and afterward did the same while addressing the people in the forum. Surrounded by a multitude of armed men, he installed himself in the royal palace and ordered a herald to summon the senators before King Tarquin. On hearing this, Tullius immediately hurried there and began rebuking Tarquin. Tarquin at once hurled him down the steps. Though gravely injured, Tullius tried to make his way home, but men sent by Tarquin killed him on the road. His own daughter Tullia, hastening to salute the new king, caused her carriage to be driven over her father’s body. Thus Tarquin the Proud usurped the kingdom of the Romans. He afterward subdued the Volsci and Gabini, peoples neighboring Rome.
Later he built a temple to Jove on the city’s hill. This hill was first called Saturn because Saturn had inhabited it, and was afterward called the Tarpeian Hill. While the temple’s foundation was being dug, a human head with its face intact was found underground. From this the hill was thereafter called the Capitoline Hill and the temple the Capitol. The work was so costly that, according to Titus Livy, the magnificence of the Romans in the time of Augustus, when they ruled the whole world, could scarcely produce anything equal to it.
Aulus Gellius relates in book 1 that an unknown old woman approached King Tarquin the Proud carrying nine books, which she said were divine oracles, and declared that she wished to sell them. Since in the king’s judgment she asked an excessive price, he laughed at her. She then made a fire in the king’s presence and burned three of the books, asking whether he would buy the six remaining books for the same price. He answered that the old woman was mad. She immediately burned three others and questioned the king about the three books that remained just as she had about the six. Seeing the woman’s constancy, he bought the three books for no less a price than she had asked for all of them. After the woman departed from the king, she was never found anywhere.
Those three books were placed in a shrine and called the Sibylline books. Fifteen men resorted to them as to an oracle whenever the immortal gods had to be consulted on behalf of the state. Thus says Aulus Gellius. Isidore speaks differently in the Etymologies: the Cumaean Sibyl, so called from Cumae, a city of Campania, brought nine books containing the decrees of the Romans not to Tarquin the Proud but to Tarquin the Elder, the fifth king of the Romans. If the event occurred as Aulus Gellius says, that woman appears to have been the devil in a woman’s form.
Tarquin the Proud, the seventh king, was expelled from the kingdom because of the adultery his son committed against Lucretia. Titus Livy gives her story at length in book 1. Lucretia’s husband, the most noble Roman Tarquin Collatinus, was at the siege of Ardea, a city of the Rutuli, and was dining with Sextus Tarquin, son of Tarquin the Proud, the last king, and with other royal youths. A conversation arose among them about their wives. Each began to praise his own and prefer her to the others.
Then Lucretia’s husband said: “There is no need of words, for the truth can be learned from deeds.” They mounted their horses to visit their wives unexpectedly and learn what each was doing. At the beginning of the night, those whose wives were at Rome came there. Entering their homes suddenly with their companions, they found their wives occupied with luxury and banquets. Proceeding afterward to Collatia, a town near Rome from which Lucretia’s husband was called Collatinus, they suddenly entered the house of Tarquin Collatinus and found Lucretia occupied with wool-working among her maidservants. The prize among the wives for honorable conduct therefore remained with Lucretia.
Sextus Tarquin, son of King Tarquin, was suddenly seized with love for her and considered how he might possess her. A few days later, without Collatinus’s knowledge, this son of King Tarquin came with one companion to Lucretia’s house. She received him honorably and after supper caused him to be conducted to bed. During the night, when everyone was asleep, he secretly came to Lucretia’s bed. Holding a sword in his hand, he awakened her and demanded by entreaties that she consent to him. He threatened that if she did not consent, he would kill her and place one of the slain servants beside her, and then publish abroad that he had killed her because of the adultery she had committed with the servant. Fearing infamy more than death, she yielded to him.
After Tarquin’s departure, Lucretia immediately sent for her husband Collatinus and for her father. When they came, she explained what had happened and killed herself with a sword she had hidden beneath her clothing, after exacting from her family a pledge to avenge the injury upon the said Tarquin. Augustine reproves Lucretia both for adultery and for homicide, as appears at length in book 1 of The City of God and in Cause 32, Question 5, Is It So?
Because of this crime of Tarquin, the royal title, or royal dignity, was taken away from the city. Thereupon Lucretia’s kinsmen and friends carried her body to Rome so as to incite the people still more against the king. At the time King Tarquin was outside the city with his army at the siege of Ardea. When he returned and wished to enter the city, they closed the gates to him and refused to admit him, both because of what had been done to Lucretia and because of his own pride and tyranny.
Afterward he long troubled the Romans in the hope of recovering the kingdom, aided by the army of Prosemies, king of Clusium. At last, despairing of accomplishing his purpose, he grew old at Tusculum and ended his life there. Then, as Tullius relates in On Friendship, he is said first to have recognized which friends had been faithful and which unfaithful, when he could repay neither group.
Thus the seven kings reigned for 243 years, according to Augustine, Eutropius, and Titus Livy. Throughout the whole period of the kings, Rome did not possess territory beyond fifteen or twenty miles, according to Eutropius.
§ V. The First Consuls
The first two consuls were then created: Brutus and Tarquin Collatinus, Lucretia’s husband. When Brutus discovered that his sons and other kinsmen were secretly discussing the restoration of the expelled King Tarquin to the city, he exposed the conspiracy and by sentence caused his sons and the other accomplices in the faction to be killed publicly.
Of this deed Virgil says: “Love of fatherland prevailed, and an immense desire for praise.”
As Titus Livy relates, these two sons of Brutus and two of his kinsmen—that is, his wife’s brothers—together with several other young men, had been accustomed during the reign of Tarquin the Proud to lead a luxurious and dissolute life with the sons of King Tarquin. After his expulsion they therefore took it badly that much of their former freedom to do evil had been taken away. They said that the laws were deaf and inexorable things, more salutary and favorable to the needy than to the powerful, and that if one exceeded due measure they allowed no relaxation or pardon.
They discussed these things with the men whom Tarquin had arranged to send to the city to reclaim his property, and the plan for King Tarquin’s return would have taken effect had they not been exposed by a servant who heard their discussions. Once the treason was revealed, Brutus caused his sons and kinsmen first to be beaten publicly with rods in his presence and by his sentence, and then to be beheaded, without showing any sign of grief. As Valerius says, he stripped himself of the father in order to display the consul.
This happened in the first year of his consulship, the 244th year from the founding of the city. Later, in the war that Tarquin stirred up against him, angered by this, Brutus fought bravely against Arruns, son of King Tarquin, and the two fell dead from wounds inflicted upon each other. Brutus was succeeded in the consulship by Spurius Lucretius, father of Lucretia, who had been violated by Tarquin’s son, but he died of disease within the year.
The royal name was so hateful to the Romans that, although the consul Collatinus had labored faithfully for the fatherland and had freed the city from royal tyranny, they most ungratefully drove him from the consulship and the city because he bore the name Tarquin.
The newly instituted dignity of the consulship extended for one whole year and no longer. As Eutropius says, the consular dignity or office was annual lest those holding power become more insolent through its long continuance. Two consuls were created so that if one wished to become wicked, the other, possessing equal power, might impede and restrain him. Yet they did not possess absolute power: they could restrain Roman citizens and place them in chains, but could not kill them without the people’s command; and an appeal could be made from them.
Later, when the dominion had increased, another dignity of greater power was instituted, called the dictatorship. It lasted for six months, could pass judgment of death, and allowed no appeal. It did not, however, continue regularly like the consulship, but was employed rarely and in great necessities. Thus says Titus Livy.
Brutus, Collatinus’s colleague in the consulship, was the cause of his expulsion from the city. As Titus Livy relates, Brutus summoned the plebeians to an assembly and recalled how they had sworn that they would leave no one in the city and suffer no one to reign there from whom danger to liberty could arise. He added that he did not believe the Roman people had recovered its customary liberty while a royal family and a royal name—namely Tarquin Collatinus—remained not only in the city but also in command, that is, in the consulship. By this means he brought it about that Tarquin Collatinus not only resigned the consulship within the year, but also left the city after gathering and carrying away his patrimony.
Here it should be noted that Sallust greatly commends the Roman commonwealth in the time of the earlier consuls, saying in the Catilinarian War that right and goodness prevailed among them less by laws than by nature. Yet Augustine, in book 2, chapter 17 and the chapters following of The City of God, shows by many examples that this is not true, because they observed neither natural right nor equity in the time of either the kings or the consuls, but committed many unjust deeds: against the Sabines in the abduction of their daughters, against Tarquin Collatinus, and against Marcus Chamillus in his expulsion from the city.
Titus Livy tells the history of Chamillus. Veii, a most powerful city nearly twenty miles from Rome, had been besieged by the Romans for ten years, and during the siege the Romans had very often fought the Veientes with an evil outcome. At last Marcus Chamillus was made consul and sent against them. He made a subterranean passage as far as the city’s citadel and sent soldiers through it. While the citizens were occupied with defending the walls then under assault and left the citadel empty, first the citadel itself and then the city were captured.
Afterward, because Chamillus had offended the plebeians in dividing the spoil, he was summoned to judgment before them. As Valerius relates in book 5, Luceus Apulcius, tribune of the plebs, accused him as a petulator, that is, a thief of the commonwealth, for the Veientine booty, and by harsh sentences he was sent into exile. This happened when he had been deprived of an excellent young son and ought rather to have been soothed with great consolations than burdened with disgrace. The tribunes of the plebs complained that fifteen thousand pieces of bronze were missing from the treasury, and his penalty was fixed at the same sum. Titus Livy says that, certain of his condemnation, he voluntarily went into exile at Ardea and was condemned in his absence to ten thousand pieces of bronze. Thus they showed the greatest ingratitude toward him.
Nevertheless, in the third year afterward, when the Capitol was besieged by the Gauls, the Romans were compelled by necessity to recall him to the city and create him dictator. The dignity of dictator was greater than the consulship, for it stood even over the consuls, though it was not continuous but used at certain times. Chamillus immediately arrived with an army while the Romans were counting out to the Gauls the money with which they had purchased their freedom. He not only raised the siege but defeated the Gauls and afterward almost completely destroyed them.
These things occurred in the 365th year from the founding of the city and the 122nd after the expulsion of the kings. In the same year Chamillus captured the city of the Volsci, who had waged war for seventy years, as well as the cities of the Aequi and the Sutrini. About the same time Quintus Cincinnatus accepted the surrender of the city of Penestre together with eight cities in fewer than twenty days.
§ VI. Porsenna and Mucius Scaevola
When Tarquin the Proud was expelled from the city’s kingdom, as Titus Livy testifies in book 2, he went to Porsenna, king of the city of Clusium, a most famous and powerful man, and asked his aid. Porsenna came to Rome with his powerful army and with the Etruscans and afflicted the Romans with a long and exceedingly severe siege.
Then Mucius Scaevola asked the Senate’s permission to enter Porsenna’s camp. Having obtained it, he reached Porsenna’s royal seat, where he killed a secretary sitting beside the king. Arrested and led before the king’s tribunal, he confessed that he was a Roman citizen and had come to kill the king; that he regarded killing and being killed as equal; and that it belonged to a Roman to suffer and to do all things.
When the king ordered him to be tortured in the flames so that more of the affair might be extracted from him, Mucius voluntarily extended his hand into the fire and held it there motionless until the king, stricken with horror, ordered him to be removed from it, saying: “Go away, you who have dared deeds more hostile against yourself than against me.”
Then Mucius, as though wishing to repay the king for his kindness, said: “What you could not extort by threats, now receive freely from me. Know that three hundred of us, the leading young men of Rome, have conspired to attack you in this manner. My lot was first; each of the others in turn will attempt the same when opportunity arises.” When the king heard this and considered the greatness of the danger if three hundred men who valued their lives as nothing continually plotted against his, he sent ambassadors to offer the Romans terms of peace of his own accord. Once peace was established, he withdrew from the siege.
Augustine, however, in book 4, chapter 2 and book 5, chapter 28 of The City of God, says with Valerius Maximus that Mucius put his hand into the fire because he had struck someone other than the man he intended. He had meant to strike King Porsenna but struck someone else, and therefore, angered at his hand for its error, he put it into the fire. According to Orosius, this Porsenna was king of Etruria, that is, Tuscany; hence the Etruscans are called Tuscans. He besieged Rome for three years and received much help from its neighbors in his attempt to recover the kingdom for Tarquin, but did not prevail.
§ VII. The Secession of the Plebs and the Twelve Tables
In the fifteenth year after Tarquin the Proud, last king of the Romans, had been expelled from the kingdom—or in the following, sixteenth year according to Titus Livy, book 2—the plebeians began to be harassed by their superiors. At first, those chosen for war served at their own expense. Since there were many wars, or rather they scarcely ever ceased from wars and plagues, they were compelled to borrow money from the powerful, with the result that they could afterward satisfy neither the principal nor the interest demanded for the loan. They were therefore overcome, imprisoned, and treated very badly.
For these reasons sedition arose between the senators and the plebeians, the plebs complaining of such harsh oppression by their superiors. The plebs withdrew three miles from the city and occupied the Sacred Mount, which some call the Aventine Hill within the city. At length the plebs was reconciled on condition that they have certain magistrates of their own who would protect them against the oppression and injuries of their superiors. These magistrates were called tribunes of the plebs.
Forty years after this dissension, in the 300th year from the founding of the city, another dissension arose between the consuls and the tribunes of the plebs. The consuls denied that the power of making laws belonged to the tribunes and plebs, saying that it belonged only to themselves and consequently that the laws enacted by the tribunes together with the plebs had no force. Nevertheless, the consuls, tribunes, and everyone else agreed that men should be sent into Greece to obtain laws, as Titus Livy says in book 3.
After the envoys had been sent to Athens for laws, two evils arose together at Rome: plague and famine among both human beings and beasts of burden. The city was consequently exhausted by funerals, and many distinguished men died that year: four tribunes of the plebs, the priest of Romulus, the priest who presided over the auguries, and several other great men.
Ten men were created, as Titus Livy and Orosius relate. These decemvirs were given for one year the power customarily given to the consuls. Although in the first year they conducted themselves well and modestly, in the following year one of them, Appius Claudius, forcibly continued in office when his colleagues resigned their magistracy, that is, that office. When his colleagues saw this, they resumed the magistracy they had resigned, greatly against the people’s will.
Appius Claudius added another evil deed. He burned with lust for the daughter of a certain plebeian soldier who was absent from the city with the army. So that he might possess her more easily, Appius persuaded one of his clients to claim her in a legal action as a slave, intending to prove that she was his maidservant, so that once awarded to the client she would come into Appius’s power. Appius himself was judge in the case and, in the father’s absence, adjudged the girl to his client as his slave.
Before the sentence could be executed, the girl’s father was summoned by his friend. Seeing that he could not resist the wickedness, he killed his daughter. At once a tumult arose in the city, the entire populace detesting Appius’s wickedness. The father went out to the army, which was not far away, and complained of the decemvir Appius. Because the army had always consisted for the most part of plebeians, it seceded from the senators and settled on the Aventine Hill, abandoning Algidus, the place where it had been fighting the Aequi, a people so called.
This dissension was settled and the army reconciled to the senators when the tribunician power that the decemvirs had obstructed was restored to the plebs, the decemvirs themselves were expelled from office, and every fault was remitted to the army and its soldiers.
In the year preceding the creation of the decemvirs, Roman envoys had been sent to the Athenians to bring back Solon’s laws. This Solon was one of the Seven Sages of the world. According to Valerius, Solon gave the Athenians such excellent laws that if they had been willing to use them perpetually, they would have possessed everlasting dominion. At last he was expelled from his homeland and spent his old age on Cyprus.
When the envoys brought back the ten tablets of Athenian laws mentioned above, ten men were created according to the number of the tablets. They were given consular power, and no appeal from them was permitted. They received the power to enact and amend laws. From the ten tablets of Athenian laws translated into Latin, they extracted some provisions and corrected others, filling ten tablets. They nevertheless added two new tablets in which they wrote new laws, for the Roman envoys had looked beyond the laws themselves into the customs of the Athenians and other Greeks and reported them. Thus there were twelve tablets of laws in all, called the Laws of the Twelve Tables, as appears at the beginning of the Digest. Isidore also discusses this in the Etymologies, and from him the Decretum, Distinction 7, Moses.
§ VIII. Famine and the Poisoning of the Matrons
In the 308th year from the founding of the city, a most severe famine afflicted the Romans. Many, having lost hope of food and wishing not to be tortured long by hunger, drowned themselves in the Tiber. For this reason Lutius Mimutius was created prefect of the grain supply, that is, the man who was to have chief care of provisions for the city. He afterward compelled those who had hidden grain to sell it, so that the city might at least have enough for one month.
At the same time there was a certain Lutius Emilius, a very wealthy man of equestrian rank. He purchased grain elsewhere with his own money, brought it into the city, and distributed it to the plebs. Enticed by so great a benefit, the plebs promised him the consulship. He said this was far too little for so great a benefit and that it would be insufficient unless they made him king.
These things reached the Senate, which immediately appointed the now eighty-year-old Lutius Quintus Cincinatus dictator. At that time a dictator’s power was like that later possessed by dictatorial emperors, except that it lasted for only half a year. Servilius Ahala was appointed his master of the horse. Lutius Emilius and the plebs were amazed at the sight.
Meanwhile the dictator sent the master of the horse to summon Lutius Emilius to trial. Aemilius withdrew into the crowd of his supporters. When an officer seized him, he was rescued and fled, crying out that the senators were oppressing him because he had come to the plebs’ aid in such necessity. But the master of the horse pursued him as he shouted and killed him. When a great tumult over this arose among the plebs, the dictator ordered them to come before him and pronounced in their presence that Aemilius had been killed justly, because when summoned to judgment he had scorned to come, even if he had been innocent.
In the 323rd year from the founding of the city, as Titus Livy and Orosius relate, while Claudius and Valerius were consuls and all the leading men of the city were dying from a similar disease, a certain maidservant disclosed the cause to Fabius Maximus after first being promised immunity. She said that the matrons were brewing poisons, and that if the consuls would follow her, they would apprehend them by manifest evidence.
They followed and found the matrons cooking wholesome medicines but keeping other substances concealed. These were carried into the forum, and twenty-two matrons were summoned. Two of them, one Cornelia and the other Sergia, asserted that the medicines were healthful. When they drank them at the judge’s command, they died immediately.
Their companions were arrested—a very large number of matrons who admitted that they did the same—and 220 of them were condemned. It was believed that they had acted more from derangement of mind than from wickedness. Orosius, however, says that 380 were condemned together. Valerius, who also reports this, says that an inquiry into poisoning had been unknown both to Roman laws and customs until that time.
§ IX
In the 365th year, the Veientes were defeated by the Romans.
About the same time the Senonian Gauls captured and burned the city, as Augustine touches upon in book 2, chapter 22 of The City of God, and as Titus Livy in book 5 and Eutropius also relate at length. The Senonian Gauls, led by Brennio and possessing a very numerous and exceedingly strong army, advanced upon Rome with all their forces. The consul Fabius met them but could not resist. After the Romans were defeated and killed beside the river called the Allia, eleven miles from the city, the Gauls entered the undefended city. They slaughtered the senators, who sat rigid in their seats like statues, burned them in the conflagration of their houses, and buried them beneath the collapse of the roofs. They shut up under siege in the citadel of the Capitol all the remaining youth, who are known to have numbered one thousand men.
There they subjected and sold the unhappy remnant through hunger, plague, and despair. For the Romans bargained for the Gauls’ withdrawal at a price of one thousand pounds of gold—that is, the Gauls promised that they would depart from the siege—not because Rome was held in slight esteem among them, but because they had already so destroyed it that it could then be of no further strength, as Orosius says.
While they were besieging the Capitol, on a certain night the Gauls discovered a path by which the Capitol could be climbed, though with great difficulty, and began silently to ascend one after another. This escaped the watchmen, but Mallius Torquatus, awakened by the cry of a goose, ran to meet those climbing, threw them down, and killed many of them. Thus he saved the Capitol.
At last the siege was broken through Chamilus, whom, as said above, the Romans had unjustly delivered into exile and now recalled to Rome and created dictator; the army of the Gauls was reduced to nothing. Wishing to repay the goose because the Capitol had been saved by its cry, the Romans worshiped a goose as a god. As Pliny says in book 29, just as the geese earned honor by defending the Capitol while the dogs were silent, so every year the dogs undergo yearly punishments: fixed upon a fork with their shoulders, they hang—that is, pay the penalty.
After these things, when the Gauls came against the city on another occasion, one of their strongest men challenged a certain noble Roman to single combat. The Roman entered the duel, killed the Gaul, removed a golden collar from the dead man’s neck, and put it upon his own. Because of this his house and all his descendants from him were called Torquati.
About those times the Romans are said to have founded the cities of Ariminum in Romandiola and Beneventum in Samnium.
The city was also afflicted by a great plague, and in its midst the earth opened in a great chasm. From its abyss an excessive stench exhaled and infected many. When the Romans sought from their gods—that is, demons speaking through images or possessed people—a remedy for closing it, their soothsayers replied that if they wished Rome’s commonwealth to be everlasting, they must devote to the chasm that in which they were most powerful and most excellent, and by that very thing fill it. Curtius therefore interpreted this to mean that the Romans surpassed others in strength and arms. Fully armed and seated upon his horse, he threw himself headlong into the cavern. In his honor all the citizens cast grain upon him, as Valerius in book 5 and Titus Livy write. This happened in the 390th year from the founding of the city.
§ X. The Two Detii
In the 426th year, as Valerius in book 5, chapter 4 and Titus Livy in book 8 relate, there were two Detii, father and son, who were consuls of the Romans. Concerning the first, the father: while he was consul with Mallius Torquatus in the war against the Latins, a certain majestic figure appeared to Detius in a vision by night. It said that in that war the commander would fall on one side and the army on the other; and that the army whose commander devoted himself and the opposing army to death and the infernal gods would conquer.
When, therefore, in the battle that was afterward joined, the left wing over which Detius presided yielded to the enemy, Detius devoted himself and the enemy army to death and the infernal gods in these words: “Jupiter, Father Mars, Quirinus—that is, Romulus—and so forth: I pray and venerate you, and I seek and bear a favor—that is, I desire that you prosper strength and victory for the Roman people and afflict the enemies of the Quirites with terror, dread, and death. And just as I have declared in words and spoken, as it were, in the presence of witnesses, so for the commonwealth of the Quirites, for their laws and their army, I devote myself to the divine shades and to Earth.”
Having spoken these words, Detius mounted his horse and cast himself into the midst of the enemy. At that time he appeared to each army somewhat more majestic—that is, more excellent—than anyone is ordinarily seen by human beings. Immediately the terror that had invaded the Romans invaded the Latins. When Detius was killed, the army of the Latins fell. Thus says Valerius. It must be believed that this vision proceeded through the work of the demons, to whom he descended when he died.
Concerning the other Detius, Titus Livy relates in book 4 that when he waged war against the Tuscans, to whose aid the Gauls had come, and when he, now consul for the fourth time, saw the army he commanded yielding to the enemy, he recalled his father’s deed and similarly devoted himself to the infernal powers. When he was killed, the Roman army conquered. Yet, since he was a consul and commander of the army, he could, had he wished, have devoted another man from the Roman legion for the safety of his army; but he preferred to expose himself to death.
§ XI. The War with the Samnites
Concerning the Romans’ war with the Samnites, about the 412th year from the founding of the city, Eutropius says in book 2 that the Samnites dwell between Picenum, Campania, and Apulia, 130 miles from the city.
When war existed between the Romans and the Samnites and Marcus Curius was consul of the Romans, Samnite envoys came to him because he was extremely poor. Finding him sitting upon a bench beside the hearth and dining from a wooden bowl, they offered him a great weight of gold publicly sent to him and invited him with kindly words to accept it. Relaxing his face slightly in a smile, he said: “Tell the Samnites that Marcus Curius prefers to command rich men rather than himself become rich, and remember that I can neither be defeated in battle nor corrupted by money.” Likewise, when he had driven King Pirus from Italy, he touched nothing at all of the royal booty with which he had enriched the army and the city. And although the Senate had assigned seven iugera of land to the people but fifty to himself, he did not exceed the measure of the popular allotment, judging a citizen who was not content with what was given to everyone else to be of little fitness for the commonwealth. Thus says Valerius.
Titus Livy relates in book 9 that when war existed between the Samnites and Romans, Pontius, leader of the Samnites, held his army near the Caudine Forks, that is, at a certain place so called. Pontius sent ten soldiers dressed as shepherds to feed livestock in different places beside the road along which the Roman army was to pass. He commanded them, when the Romans came and asked where the Samnite army was, to answer with one accord that it had gone to besiege Luceria, a city allied with the Romans.
When the Romans arrived and heard this, they decided to go to Luceria to free it from siege. There were two roads: one beside the sea, but longer; the other beside the Caudine Forks, and shorter. They chose the latter so that they might aid their allies more quickly. That road is enclosed on both sides by mountains, possessing only one entrance and one exit through two passes, between which lies a certain plain. When they had passed through one defile and reached the plain, and wished to enter the other, they found the road made perilous by trees thrown crosswise upon it. They also saw armed guards on the mountain beside them. Thus they were enclosed so that they could neither retreat nor advance farther.
At last, driven by necessity, they sent envoys to the Samnites, saying there must be either a reasonable peace or war. The Samnites answered that the war was already finished, but peace was promised on these conditions: the Romans were to surrender all their arms and every other piece of equipment, each retaining only his clothing; then all were to pass under the yoke, first the consuls, afterward the other magistrates, and finally the rest of the multitude. The Romans accepted this peace under the greatest abasement, compelled by necessity, and so returned to the city in disgrace.
As Titus Livy says, when anyone was to be sent under the yoke, two spears or pieces of wood were raised and another was placed across them, as forks are made on which thieves are hanged. Those sent under the yoke passed through the middle of them as a sign of subjection. The Samnites also retained six hundred Roman soldiers as hostages.
Beyond the foregoing, Pontius, leader of the Samnites, answered the envoys whom the Roman consuls sent concerning peace that the territory of the Samnites already partly occupied by the Romans should be restored to them, the colonists whom the Romans had sent there should be withdrawn, and each people thereafter—the Roman and the Samnite—should be permitted to live by its own laws. Pontius said that he would enter a treaty of peace on these conditions.
The consuls answered that they could not enter this treaty without the people’s command, without the priests who presided over the agreements of a treaty, and without the fixed solemn ceremonial observed in making one. Nevertheless, the legates, quaestors, and tribunes of the soldiers pledged that peace would be made on those conditions.
When the consuls and army had returned to Rome, what had been promised displeased the people. After taking counsel among themselves, they deliberated how they might be released from the said agreement. At last one of the consuls, Spurius Postumius, advised that the consuls and all who had pledged themselves should be handed over to the Samnites by the fetials—that is, the priests who presided over the treaty of peace. When everyone approved his counsel, all the guarantors were sent back, bound by the fetials, and offered to Pontius in surrender.
Pontius vehemently denounced the Romans’ faithlessness. He said that Spurius Postumius had done what he ought with respect to himself, but the Roman people was not thereby released from its pledge, because it ought to return not only the guarantor but also the whole Roman army that he had dismissed. Let the army therefore be restored to the place where the pledge was made; he was ready to restore its weapons, and when that had been done they might repudiate the conditions of peace there if they wished. Otherwise, he said that he was unwilling to accept the guarantors in surrender. Although Pontius appeared to be asking reasonably, the Romans would not agree to do these things.
They immediately sent a stronger, picked army against the Samnites. This Roman army defeated and so crushed the Samnites that, as is said in the Martiniana, twenty-four thousand of them and their king together with the remaining multitude were killed; their city was captured and utterly overturned. Snow already covered everything and one could not live outside shelter. The consul therefore led his army out of Samnium. As he came to Rome a triumph was granted him by universal consent. He triumphed in the insignia of his magistracy, as was the custom in those times, with a magnificent triumph. Foot soldiers and horsemen distinguished by military gifts passed and were borne along. Many civic, vallary, and mural crowns were seen; the Samnite spoils, remarkable for their beauty and splendor, were viewed and compared with the earlier spoils by which the conspicuous public places were adorned.
Several noble captives, renowned for their own and their fathers’ deeds, were led along. Heavy bronze was carried through, amounting to two million, and thirty-three thousand of gold. It was said that this gold had been raised from the captives, while that which had been captured from the cities amounted to 330,000; all the bronze and silver was placed in the treasury.
That city was very wealthy and possessed arms of gold and silver. It lay between Campania and Apulia, as was said. Capua, a most noble and great city, is said to have been the chief city of its country, so that it seemed almost another Rome or Carthage.
Eutropius says in book 2 that if the Romans had kept toward the Samnites the good faith of the treaty that they wished their subjects to keep toward themselves, either the Romans would not have existed at all or they would have served beneath Samnite dominion. According to Eutropius, the Romans’ war against the Samnites endured forty-seven years, and the Romans had no enemy more cruel than the Samnites, who were finally destroyed as has been said.
Papirius, consul of the Romans, first fought these Samnites in the sixth year of King Ptolemy, who first reigned in Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great, and reduced them to servitude for fourteen years.
As Macrobius relates in the Saturnalia, when this Papirius was a boy, his father took him to the Senate for a council. After he returned home, his mother asked what had been discussed there. When the boy said that it was secret and could not be told, his mother threatened him with blows unless he spoke. To escape, he told an amusing lie: he said that the council had discussed whether it was more expedient for one man to have two wives or one wife two husbands. When she reported this to other women, a very great multitude assembled and went to the Senate, asking that it be established instead that one woman should have two husbands. The senators wondered at this, investigated where it had originated, and found that it had proceeded from a boy’s invention. They therefore decreed that boys should no longer be admitted to that council with their fathers, Papirius alone excepted.
When Papirius later went to war, the augurs told him that he would fare badly in battle. He despised them, engaged the enemy, and won the victory.
In the 463rd year from the founding of the city, as Orosius relates in book 3, while Dolobella and Domitius were consuls, the Lucanians, Bruttii, and Samnites made an alliance with the Etruscans and Senonian Gauls and prepared wars against the Romans. The Romans sent envoys to entreat the Gauls, but the Gauls killed them. For this reason the praetor Caecilius was sent against them with an army. On arriving among the Etruscans he was killed; seven tribunes of the plebs were killed in that war, many nobles were slaughtered, and twenty-eight thousand Romans were laid low, although in the end they were victorious.
§ XII. The Tarentine War and Pirus
In the 464th year from the founding of the city, as Orosius relates in book 4, the Tarentines saw a Roman fleet passing over the sea and attacked it as an enemy. Only five ships escaped by flight; they captured the other ships and dragged them into their port, killing all those who could be useful in war and selling the others.
The Romans sent envoys to Tarentum to complain of the injury, but they were repulsed and also received insults from the Tarentines. As Valerius says, one of them was sprinkled with urine. For these reasons an immense war arose.
The Romans considered the identity and strength of the enemies making noise all around them and at last, compelled by necessity, forced the proletarii to take up arms. To explain this word proletarii, it should be known that because the Romans were continually occupied with military affairs and consequently could attend neither to domestic matters nor to the procreation of offspring, they ordained that those who through poverty could not suffice for military service should remain in the city, devoting themselves to procreation. They perceived that a city could not long endure without the procreation of offspring.
Those who were the most insignificant and poorest among the Roman plebs and paid in the census no more than 1,500 pieces of bronze were called proletarii, says Aulus Gellius. In harsh times for the commonwealth, when there was a shortage of young men, these proletarii were enrolled for emergency military service, and arms were supplied to them at public expense. They were therefore called proletarii from the office of procreating offspring.
After a great Roman army was assembled, the consul Aemilius attacked the territory of the Tarentines with his forces, devastating everything by fire and sword. He also occupied many towns and cruelly avenged the injury received. Many of the Tarentines’ people aided them, but Pirus, king of the Epirotes, increased their power above all. Epirus is part of Greece, and the Tarentines were kinsmen of the Greeks, for the Lacedaemonians founded Tarentum.
Pirus therefore possessed the entire forces of Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia. He brought with him into Italy twenty elephants, which were unknown to the Romans. The first battle between the Romans and Pirus—to whom the whole war is ascribed although he was acting for the Tarentines—was fought at Eleacra, a city of Campania, against Laevinus, consul of the Romans.
There the entire day was consumed in fighting, with neither side fleeing, until the elephants were brought in. These were terrifying to the Romans, who had never seen that kind of animal before, and especially to their horses, which trembled at the sight of them. By their flight the Romans showed that they had been defeated.
Nevertheless, Pirus publicly acknowledged the savagery of the disaster he had received and his loss by fastening an inscription in the temple of Jove at Tarentum, on which he wrote: “These men—the Romans—who before this had been unconquered, O best Father of Olympus, I conquered in battle, and by the same men I was conquered.” When his men reproached him for saying that he was defeated when he had conquered, he answered: “If I win once more in the same manner, I shall return to Epirus without a single soldier.”
Nevertheless, 13,880 Roman foot soldiers fell in that battle and 310 were captured; 248 horsemen were killed and 800 captured.
After these things a second battle between the Romans and Pirus occurred on the borders of Apulia. Although the slaughter was great on each side, the Romans nevertheless conquered. For Pirus, pierced through the arm, was the first to withdraw from battle, while Fabricius, legate of the Romans, was wounded. Fire was applied beneath the elephants, between their hindquarters and soft parts. In their fury they carried about the engines placed upon them and became the destruction of their own men. Five thousand Romans were killed in this battle and twenty thousand from Pirus’s army.
In the third battle, as Eutropius relates in book 2, Pirus was put to flight. He returned to Greece and was killed at the city of Argos.
In the first war Pirus consulted Appolinem about the outcome of the war. The answer given him was: “I say to you, Pirus, that the Romans can conquer.” He understood this to mean that he could conquer the Romans, but it could also be understood that the Romans could conquer him, as happened. Augustine adduces this in book 3, chapter 17 of The City of God, showing the deceitfulness of the demon in his answers, which are doubtful or equivocal so that he may deceive, as occurred here.
§ XIII. Plagues and Pagan Rites
In the 455th year from the founding of the city, an exceedingly great plague invaded Rome and continued for three years, as Titus Livy relates in book 10. When the Sibylline books were consulted for a remedy, it was discovered that Aesculapius had to be brought from Epidaurus to Rome.
Aesculapius is called the god of medicine. He was a certain man who first invented the art of medicine and was therefore considered a god. Epidaurus is the city now called Duratium, where Aesculapius—that is, his statue—was worshiped.
Roman envoys were sent to obtain him. When they entered his temple, which stood five miles from Epidaurus, behold, a serpent that had sometimes, though rarely, been seen by the Epidaurians—but was never seen without some good coming to them, on account of which they worshiped that serpent in the likeness of Aesculapius—began to crawl with gentle motion through the most frequented parts of the city. It was seen for three days, bearing the eagerness of one seeking a more illustrious abode. Then it proceeded to the Roman ship and climbed aboard, where it entered the cabin of one of the envoys and rested there.
When in the course of sailing they reached Anicium, the serpent, which had remained everywhere aboard the ship, slipped onto land, entered a temple of Aesculapius that was nearby, and remained there for three days while food was given to it. It afterward returned to the ship and allowed itself to be carried to Rome. There it came out upon the bank of the Tiber and swam across to the island where its temple was dedicated to Aesculapius; and the plague ceased among the Romans.
This was a deception of the devil, so that they would worship him in that creature, as Augustine shows in book 3, chapters 12 and 17 of The City of God. There he shows that in the 481st year from the founding of the city Aesculapius himself was later unable to heal or deliver Rome when another plague came upon it. As Orosius relates, that plague extended beyond two years and depopulated the city. When the Sibylline books were consulted, the answer—namely, from demons speaking conjecturally through augurs—was that the plague had been imposed by heavenly wrath because many temples of the gods were occupied by private persons rather than by the gods or their ministers. All of this was the devil’s deception. That plague affected human beings and beasts of burden, and especially pregnant women with respect to the offspring existing and dying in their wombs.
Valerius also relates another marvelous work, though it is believed to have been the work of demons. As he says in book 2, chapter 1, when a raging plague was ravaging the city and the fields—that is, their fruits—a certain Valesius, a countryman but a rich one, had two sons and a daughter laboring with an illness beyond the physicians’ hope. He prayed to the gods familiar to him that they would turn the children’s danger upon his own head.
The answer came that the children would be saved if he immediately carried them down the river Tiber to Tarentum and there refreshed them with the hot water they desired, drawn from an altar of Father Dis—that is, Pluto, who is called the god of the infernal region—and Proserpina, whom the poets call goddess of that region. Understanding this to mean Tarentum, the great and famous city very far from Rome, he greatly feared to undertake so long a voyage. Nevertheless, in hope of his children’s health, he began the journey.
As he made for Ostia along the Tiber, the children became thirsty and he wished to relieve them with hot water, but he saw that no fire was at hand by which the water could be heated. From afar he perceived smoke appearing at a certain place, which, as he learned from the ship’s pilot, was called Tarentum. Leaving the ship and drawing water from the river, he hurried there, made a fire, heated the water, and gave it to the children to drink. After drinking it, they immediately fell asleep and were cured.
When they awoke, they said they had seen in their sleep a certain god wiping their bodies and commanding that, after an altar had been sought from Dis and Proserpina, from whom the water had been brought, black victims should be sacrificed there and couches for the gods and nocturnal games should be held. The children’s father, seeing no altar there, went to the city to buy a new one, instructing his people in the meantime to dig foundations for placing it. As they dug, twenty feet deep underground they found an altar inscribed to Proserpina and Father Dis. When Valesius received word of this from a messenger, he sacrificed victims and held games there, and caused games and divine banquets to be celebrated on three successive nights, because that was the number of his children who had been healed. Thus says Valerius.
Although these games had first been instituted in the first year after the expulsion of the kings and later abolished, they were renewed in the time of the First Punic War, in which an innumerable multitude was killed on each side.
It should also be noted that during the Roman war against the Latins, when Manilius Torquatus was consul with Decius Mus, Torquatus issued an edict that no one should fight outside the regular order. Torquatus’s son approached the enemy camp of the Latins with his fellow cavalrymen. Geminus Metius commanded the Tusculan horsemen, who were Latins. Seeing Torquatus’s son and knowing him to be a vigorous man, Metius began with insulting words to entice him into single combat. Moved partly by anger and partly by shame lest he appear to refuse the contest, Torquatus’s son engaged him, immediately killed him after throwing him from his horse, and returned to his father with the slain enemy’s spoils, relating what he had done.
The father at once assembled the multitude of the army and said to his son: “Since you have feared neither consular command nor your father’s majesty, but contrary to our edict have fought outside the regular order, and so far as lay in you have dissolved the military discipline through which the Roman state has stood until this day, you have driven me to this necessity: I must forget either the commonwealth or myself and my own. Let us suffer the penalty for our offense rather than make the commonwealth pay so great a loss for our transgressions. We shall be a sorrowful example, but a salutary one for the young.” He immediately caused his bound son to be killed at a stake and returned to Rome with the victory. Thus say Titus Livy, Valerius, and Augustine in book 1 of The City of God.
§ XIV. The First Punic War
Just as the origin of the war between the Romans and King Pirus was the city of Tarentum, which he had first wished to aid, so the city of Tarentum was also the origin of the First Punic War. When the Tarentines heard of Pirus’s death, they sought and obtained aid from the Carthaginians. Fighting against the Romans, they were defeated, although the Carthaginians had not yet been judged enemies by the Romans. Hence this does not belong to the First Punic War, but preceded it by nine years and was its occasion.
There were three Punic wars at different times between the Romans and Carthaginians. Carthage was a most powerful city in Africa, ruling all Africa and part of Spain, just as Rome was most powerful in Italy. Hence all Africans were called Carthaginians, and they were also called Poeni, Puni, Punici, and Africans. According to Eutropius, the First Punic War lasted twenty-two years, the second twenty-nine, and the third four.
In the First Punic War, which began in the twentieth year of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, Hannibal the Elder was ravaging the coast of Italy with a fleet equipped with seventy ships. Under the consuls Gnaeus Cornelius and Gaius Diullius, the Romans likewise caused a fleet to be built and equipped. The consul Diullius accomplished this quickly: within sixty days after the trees had been felled, a fleet of 130 ships stood launched at anchor.
The other consul, Cornelius, went to the island of Lipari with sixteen ships. Summoned by Hannibal, as though to a conference for peace, he was captured by Punic treachery and summoned in chains. When the consul Diullius heard this, he set out against Hannibal with thirty ships. A naval battle was joined. Hannibal lost the ship in which he was sailing but was taken off in a skiff and escaped. Thirty-one of his ships were captured and thirteen sunk; three thousand men are reported to have been killed and three thousand captured. Thus says Orosius.
In the ninth year of this First Punic War, Manilius Vulscho and Marcus Regulus were created consuls at Rome. According to Orosius, book 4, they were ordered to wage war in Africa with 430 ships and set out for Sicily, which was then under Carthaginian control.
After obtaining victory there, the consuls crossed farther into Africa. Three hundred fortresses and towns were captured there. The consul Manilius returned to Rome, bringing with him 27,000 captives and immense spoils.
Marcus Regulus received the Carthaginian war as his lot. After killing an enormous serpent that had injured many in his army—whose skin, carried to Rome, is said to have measured 120 feet—he fought fiercely against three Carthaginian commanders, namely two men named Hasdrubal and Auulcar. In that battle 17,000 Carthaginians were killed, 5,000 captured, and eight hundred elephants brought to Rome.
Broken and exhausted by various wars and disasters, the Carthaginians sought peace from Regulus. But when they heard the intolerable conditions of peace that he had dictated, they preferred to die armed rather than assent to such terms. They therefore obtained soldiers from different regions, formed a great army, summoned Zamcippus, king of the Lacedaemonians, together with his auxiliaries, and appointed him commander in the war. An immense disaster for the Romans followed: thirty thousand Romans were killed, and Marcus Regulus was captured and cast into chains.
As Eutropius relates in book 2, when the Romans heard of the slaughter of their army and Regulus’s capture, they created Paulus Aemilius and Servus Fulvius consuls. Having prepared a great fleet of three hundred ships, these went against the Africans. First they defeated the Africans in a naval battle, and the consul Aemilius sank 104 enemy ships and captured thirty.
The Africans were again defeated by the consul Metellus, who killed twenty thousand of the enemy and captured their elephants, so that Metellus brought the elephants to Rome with a great many captives. But when the Roman fleet was returning to Italy with very great booty, it was overturned in a shipwreck: 120 ships sank, and seventy barely escaped after jettisoning their cargoes.
Auulcar, commander of the Poeni, was sent with an army into Numidia and Mauretania. After he had treated everyone there cruelly and as enemies because they were said to have received Regulus, he condemned the survivors to pay one thousand talents of silver and twenty thousand oxen.
Hasdrubal, commander of the Poeni and ninth commander of the Carthaginians, had fought against Metellus and been defeated at Panormus. Twenty thousand Carthaginians were killed and twenty-six elephants, together with many others, were captured and brought to Rome. Hasdrubal himself fled with a few men to Lilybaeum and was condemned in his absence by the Poeni.
After these disasters, the Carthaginians sent Regulus, who had now been their captive for five years, to Rome so that he might obtain an exchange of prisoners. He came before the Senate and set forth the Africans’ request, namely an exchange or release of the captives of each side. The Senate was inclined from affection to make the proposed exchange, especially for the liberation of Regulus himself. But Regulus urged the Senate that neither peace with the Africans nor such an exchange should be made in any way, saying that their strength was now broken and they had no hope of escape, while he himself was not of such value that so many thousands of strong African captives should be released for him, an old man, and for a few Romans.
When the Romans heard Regulus’s argument in the Senate, they accepted his counsel. Although they offered to keep him at Rome, he would not agree, wishing to preserve the oath by which he had promised the Carthaginians that he would return to them if he did not obtain the proposed exchange. When he returned to Carthage and they heard what he had done, they killed him by a cruel death.
In the 507th year from the founding of the city, as Orosius relates, a sudden ruin of Rome itself came before the Romans’ triumph. While Quintus Lactantius and Aulus Maulius were consuls, the river Tiber, swollen by unaccustomed rains and overflowing beyond expectation both in duration and magnitude, cast down all the buildings of Rome situated on level ground. The varying inequalities of the places combined toward a single destruction: whatever the slower flood covered, it dissolved by soaking; whatever the course of the torrent encountered, it overthrew by its impact.
A destruction by fire more grievous still followed the very severe disaster of the waters. It is uncertain whence the fire arose. It wandered through many parts of the city, made a pitiable slaughter of both people and houses, and in a single conflagration consumed so great a work as many foreign victories could not have supplied. While everything around the forum was being devastated, the temple of Vesta was seized by the fire. The gods did not even aid themselves: a temporary fire overwhelmed that fire which was thought eternal. Hence the pontiff Metellus, while rescuing the gods that were about to burn, scarcely escaped with his arm half consumed; and the temple of the goddess Vesta was burned.
§ XV. The Second Punic War
In the twenty-third year of the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes, king of Egypt, and the 530th year from the founding of the city, the Second Punic War—that is, between the Romans and Carthaginians—began, according to Orosius. It was most grievous to both sides and caused very great destruction.
According to Orosius and Valerius Maximus, many prodigies in different regions preceded this war. Valerius says that at the beginnings and disturbances of the wars, an ox at Rome changed its lowing into human speech. Pieces of flesh also fell scattered like snow. Birds of prey carried off the greater number, while the remainder lay on the ground for several days, altered neither by a foul odor nor by an ugly appearance.
It is also reported that stones rained in Picenum; in Gaul a wolf took a sword from the sheath of a watchman; in Sicily two shields sweated blood, and reapers found bloody ears of grain; and at Caere waters flowed mixed with blood. Valerius adds that in the Second Punic War it was established that an ox belonging to Gnaeus Domitius said, “Beware, Rome.” Augustine supports this final prodigy concerning the speaking ox in book 3 of The City of God. Adding certain other things, he says: “I omit oxen that spoke; children not yet born crying certain words from their mothers’ wombs; flying serpents; and women and hens changed into men and the male sex.”
Hannibal, commander of the Carthaginians, unjustly began this Second Punic War by failing to preserve the agreements of peace made between the Romans and Carthaginians. This Hannibal was the Romans’ greatest enemy. As Titus Livy, Orosius, and Eutropius relate, when he was nine years old he swore to his father Auulcar at the altars that he would fight against the Romans as soon as he could.
As Valerius relates, wishing also to signify how greatly Rome and Carthage differed in mutual hatred, Hannibal planted his foot in the ground and raised some dust. He said that the war between them would end only when one had been reduced to dust. It should also be known that this Hannibal is different from the Hannibal who was defeated in the First Punic War while commander of the Carthaginians.
Titus Livy calls this Second Punic War the most memorable of all wars ever waged. Fortune varied so greatly in it that those who conquered came closer to danger. The two sides contended with hatreds greater even than their strength. The Romans were indignant that the Africans, although defeated in the First Punic War, should voluntarily carry arms against the Romans, who had been victorious. The Poeni were also indignant because it seemed to them that the Romans commanded them too proudly and greedily.
This war began under Publius Cornelius Scipio and was ended by his son, likewise called Scipio, who was named Africanus from the Africa he subdued. It lasted eighteen years according to Augustine in book 5 of The City of God, but sixteen according to Orosius and Titus Livy.
Since part of Spain was subject to the Carthaginians and no sea intervenes between Spain and Rome, Hannibal, in order to avoid the dangers of the sea, made his way from Africa toward Italy where the sea dividing Africa and Europe is narrowest; and on each of its shores he possessed ports subject to Carthage. Another reason was that he might obtain an occasion for attacking the Romans.
Coming into Spain, Hannibal attacked Saguntum. This was a very powerful city of Spain, situated on the frontier of the African dominion. It was not subject to that dominion but was an ally and friend of the Romans. Hannibal knew that he could thereby obtain an occasion for fighting the Romans, because if Saguntum were besieged or attacked, the Romans would come to aid or defend it. Therefore he moved war against Saguntum before moving it against the Romans, lest he appear openly to violate the peace faithfully made between Rome and Carthage after the First Punic War.
As Titus Livy also relates, Hannibal first fought against cities neighboring Saguntum that did not belong to the Romans’ alliance and confederation, seeking an occasion to attack Saguntum. When he had defeated the Saguntines and besieged them after they fled into their city, Roman envoys came to him so that he would withdraw from the siege. He mocked them, saying that because he was occupied with military affairs against his enemies, he could not hear them. The envoys therefore went on to Carthage and complained in vain that the treaty of peace had now been broken, then returned to Rome.
While they thus drew out the time, Saguntum was captured and destroyed, to the great shame of the Romans, who in such necessity did not aid their friends and allies as they should have done. Before the city was captured, the Saguntines were tormented by such hunger that they fed upon the corpses of their own people.
A certain soldier of Hannibal who was a friend of the Saguntines, wishing at least to save the citizens’ lives, promised them life and another place where they could build a city, provided that they surrender Saguntum with its gold and silver to Hannibal. They obtained time for deliberation, kindled an enormous pyre in the middle of the city, first cast the gold into it together with all their household goods, then slew their wives and children and unanimously threw themselves into the fire.
After the city had thus been taken by assault, Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees, which divide Spain from Gaul. Passing through the Gauls, he reached the Alps on the nineteenth day from the Pyrenees. Wherever he encountered resistance he opened a way for himself with sword and iron. In the Alps he overcame in battle the Gauls who resisted him and broke apart impassable rocks with fire and iron. After consuming four days in these things, on the fifth day he reached the plains of Italy, namely the Piedmontese regions. At that time his army contained one hundred thousand foot soldiers and twenty thousand horsemen.
Scipio, consul of the Romans, was the first to meet him with an army. When battle was joined near the Ticinus, which flows into the Po, Scipio was gravely wounded but escaped death when his son Scipio, still very young, rescued him. Nearly all the Roman army that the consul Scipio commanded was killed there.
Afterward the same consul fought Hannibal again at the river Trebia, which is near Piacenza, with a similar fortune. Sempronius, the other Roman consul, learned of his colleague’s misfortune and returned from Sicily. He engaged Hannibal at the same river, lost his army, and escaped almost alone. Hannibal was also wounded in this battle.
When Hannibal afterward crossed into Tuscany at the beginning of spring, he was caught on the summit of the Apennine mountain. Shut in and burdened by snow for two days, he was frozen there with his army. A great number of people, very many of his beasts of burden, and almost all the elephants died from the cold.
Advancing from there by a marshy road near the Sarnos, he lost the greater part of his allies and beasts of burden. Through the violence of the cold, his vigils, and his labors, he also lost the eye that had long been diseased. Nevertheless, escaping the marshes with difficulty, he approached the camp of the consul Flaminius and provoked him to battle at Transimenus, now called Lake Perusinus. There Hannibal’s craft surrounded and slaughtered the entire Roman army. The Roman consul himself was killed; fifteen thousand men are reported killed and six thousand captured. The ardor of the combatants in this battle was so great that the soldiers did not perceive a most severe earthquake, though it was so violent that it destroyed cities, moved mountains, cast down rocks, and drove rivers backward.
After these things followed the battle of Cannae, that is, near Cannae, a village of Apulia, where Hannibal fought the two consuls Aemilius Paulus and Terentius Varro. Forty-four thousand from the Roman army were killed, and a great part of Hannibal’s army was slain. Aemilius Paulus died in that battle. Nine former consuls and twenty praetors were killed; thirty senators were killed or captured; and three hundred noble men, forty thousand infantry soldiers, and 3,500 horsemen were lost. Varro, the other consul, fled to Venusia with fifty soldiers.
There is no doubt that this would have been the last day of the Roman state if Hannibal had advanced to attack the city immediately after his victory. In that battle the Romans were so afflicted that the Italian cities previously subject to them thereafter deserted the Romans and adhered to Hannibal, chief among them Capua. It should also be known that in addition to these engagements there were many other battles between Hannibal and the Romans. In some the Romans were superior, but in others the Carthaginians.
Likewise, while Hannibal fought in Italy, Hasdrubal fought in Spain against the Romans. He killed the two Scipios, brothers and commanders of the Romans sent against him into Spain, and inflicted many slaughters upon the Romans.
Concerning Hannibal’s victory over the Romans at Cannae, Orosius and Augustine in book 3 of The City of God say that Hannibal sent to Carthage three modii of gold rings taken from the Romans he had killed. From this the number of the other dead could be better understood, since not everyone but only the greater and more noble men used gold rings.
As Orosius says, after the aforesaid disaster the Romans despaired so greatly that the senators deliberated and thought they should enter into a plan for abandoning Italy and seeking other places to inhabit. This would then have been confirmed had not Cornelius Scipio, a tribune of the soldiers who was afterward called Scipio Africanus, terrified them with drawn sword and compelled them instead to swear by his words to defend the fatherland.
After this was done, the Romans dared breathe again in hope of life and created Decius Junius dictator. He held a levy of soldiers from the age of seventeen and formed an unseasoned and disorderly force consisting of four legions collected from everywhere. He then also compelled slaves of proven strength and willingness—either offered by their masters or, if necessary, purchased at public expense—to take the military oath under the title of liberty. Valerius says that there were twenty thousand slaves. The dictator Junius also enrolled in military service men liable for crimes or debts, promising them immunity; their number rose to six thousand.
When the treasury lacked money to provide for the army, on the counsel of the consul Valerius all the citizens—and first the senators—retained only a small portion for themselves and gave their property or money to support the treasury. A large sum was thereby collected.
After that Roman slaughter at Cannae, as has been said, in the tenth year of this Second Punic War, while Gracchus Fulvius and Sulpicius were consuls, Hannibal moved his army from Campania. Proceeding by the Latin Way, he encamped beside the river Amanis, three miles from the city, to the incredible terror of the whole community. While the matrons, crazed with fear, ran along the battlements and, leaning out over the walls, eagerly wished to fight, Hannibal approached the Colline Gate with lightly equipped cavalry. He then drew up his entire army in battle line.
The consuls did not refuse battle. When the battle lines of both sides stood exposed, such a torrent of rain mixed with hail suddenly poured from the clouds that the disordered ranks could scarcely retain their weapons and withdraw into their camps. When calm weather returned and the armies came back onto the field and into battle line, a still more violent storm poured down. It terrified them more greatly and forced them in fear to return to the interior of their camps.
Hannibal is then said to have declared: “When I could, I did not have the will”—namely, immediately after the victory at Cannae—“and when I wished, I did not have the power to capture Rome,” because the rain prevented him.
§ XVI. Scipio Africanus and the End of the Second Punic War
While Hannibal was roaming through Italy, Scipio Africanus the Elder transported an army into Africa. There he killed a very great multitude of Africans in different places and so terrified and oppressed the Carthaginians that necessity compelled them to recall Hannibal with his army from Italy for their defense. He left Italy weeping. Coming into Africa, he requested a conference with Scipio.
At their first meeting, the two most illustrious commanders received one another after standing a long time in mutual astonishment and admiration, and held negotiations for peace. But when the peace negotiations failed, battle was joined. Hannibal was defeated, and more than twenty thousand Carthaginians were killed. He then fled to Carthage and persuaded its Senate to seek peace, since no other hope now remained. Peace was granted through Scipio with the will of the Roman Senate and people. Nevertheless, more than five hundred ships were taken out onto the open sea and burned.
For a fuller explanation concerning this Scipio, it should be known that there were many very famous Scipios. Two of them were brothers: Publius Cornelius Scipio, consul of the Romans in the first year of the Second Punic War, and the other, Gnaeus Scipio, commander of the Romans in Spain against Mago, commander of the Poeni, whom he defeated and captured. These two brother Scipios were both afterward killed in Spain by Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother.
There were also two other Scipios, sons of the aforesaid Publius Cornelius. One was called Publius Scipio Africanus because he finally defeated Hannibal and conquered Africa. The other was called Lutius Scipio Asiaticus because he conquered Asia Minor and triumphed over it. The first of these two was called Africanus the Elder.
There was another Scipio, a grandson, who was called Africanus the Younger because in the Third Punic War he conquered in Africa and destroyed the Carthaginians. Besides these five there was Scipio Nasica, who according to Titus Livy was the son of the aforesaid Gnaeus Scipio. After the Romans’ victory in the Third Punic War, he advised that Carthage not be destroyed, for this reason: lest Roman vigor, always exercised by wars, be dissolved into idleness through security and leisure, as Augustine relates in book 1 of The City of God.
Catho the Censor gave the Senate the contrary counsel, namely that Carthage should be destroyed because of the suspicion of rebellion. This was done, though not immediately after his counsel. As Titus Livy says in book 44, the Senate held a middle course between the opinions of Catho and Scipio. It decreed that Carthage should stand, but only in such a condition that it would not be feared by the Romans. It therefore wished the Carthaginians to build for themselves another city ten miles from the sea. Because they refused to observe this, Carthage was attacked and entirely destroyed. Orosius, however, says that he never saw a just cause for that Third Punic War on the Romans’ side.
Returning to Scipio Africanus the Elder, the historians relate many praiseworthy things about him. Titus Livy says that from the time this Scipio passed out of boyhood, he conducted no public or private business on any day before going to the Capitol, that is, to the temple of Jove. He would enter the temple, sit there, and sometimes spend time in secret. He maintained this custom throughout his life, whether deliberately or by fearing [read: deliberately or rashly], created belief about himself. The widespread opinion was that he was of divine stock.
Aulus Gellius relates that the mother of Africanus had previously been barren, so that his father despaired of having children by her. Later, while she slept alone in her chamber and bed during her husband’s absence, an enormous serpent suddenly appeared lying beside her. When those who saw it became frightened and cried out, it slipped away and could not be found. Her husband Publius Scipio reported this very thing to the haruspices. After making sacrifice, they answered that children would be born from her. Soon afterward the woman conceived Scipio himself.
Before dawn Scipio was accustomed to come to the Capitol, order Jove’s sanctuary opened, and remain there alone for a long time, as though consulting with Jove about the commonwealth. The aeditui, that is, the temple keepers, also often swore that only when Scipio entered the Capitol did the dogs, which raged against others, neither bark at him nor ever rush upon him.
After he gained victory in the Second Punic War, certain men accused him out of envy concerning a sum of money removed from the treasury. According to Valerius, when Scipio saw the malice of his accusers and was once charged concerning it, he answered: “I do not think wickedness has come to such a point that my innocence must be investigated. For although I subjected all Africa to your power, I brought back nothing from it that is called mine except my surname. The treasures of Asia made my brother greedy; but each of us is richer in envy than in money.”
Seeing the citizens’ ingratitude, he departed from the city in indignation. As Eutropius says in book 4, after living long in exile at Amiturninum, he died of disease. In the same year Hannibal, seeing that Prusias, king of Bithynia, to whom he had fled, was going to hand him over to the Romans, drank poison and died so that he would not be delivered to them alive. According to Valerius, Scipio caused this to be inscribed upon his tomb: “Ungrateful fatherland, you do not even possess my bones.” Although this Scipio is greatly commended by the gentiles in many respects, nevertheless, because he was an idolater, he did not escape the hell of the damned.
§ XVII. The Third Punic War
The third and last Punic War, as Orosius relates in book 4, was ended in the 602nd year from the founding of the city, while Lucius Censorius and Marcus Maulius were consuls. When the Senate decreed that Carthage must be destroyed, the consuls and Scipio, then a tribune of the soldiers, went into Africa and held camp near Utica. They summoned the Carthaginians and ordered them to surrender their arms. So great a mass of arms was immediately delivered that all Africa could easily have been armed with them.
After surrendering their arms, they were ordered to abandon the city and withdraw ten miles from the sea. At this they felt such sorrow and were turned to such despair that they chose either to defend the city or be buried with it. They therefore created two Hasdrubals as their commanders and set about making weapons, supplying the lack of bronze and iron with gold and silver.
The consuls determined to attack Carthage, whose walls extended for thirty miles. Although they destroyed some part of the wall, they were nevertheless defeated and repulsed by the Carthaginians. Scipio defended them as they fled, driving back within the walls the Carthaginians whom the consuls were pursuing. Nevertheless, the city was defended against the Romans for four years.
At the beginning, when he had undertaken the war, Mantinus, consul of the Romans, received an army from Pompilius at Numantia, a city of Spain belonging to the Carthaginian dominion. As Orosius says in book 5, Mantinus fought the Numantines so unsuccessfully that, compelled by utter despair, he made a most shameful treaty with them, although Pompilius had made another equally disgraceful treaty with the same people.
The Senate dissolved the treaty and handed Mantinus over to the Numantines. It ordered him to be exposed before their gate with his body naked and his hands bound behind his back. Remaining there in this condition until night, abandoned by his own people, he was not received by the enemy. Orosius says that this city alone, for fourteen years and with only four thousand allies, not only withstood forty thousand Romans but defeated them and afflicted them with shameful treaties.
Certain prodigies also befell the consul Mantinus when he was about to go to Spain, as Valerius says. When he boarded a ship from the Port of Hercules, a voice with no speaker was heard saying, “Mantinus, remain.” When he had entered the skiff, a serpent of extraordinary size was seen and suddenly disappeared. All these were works of demons.
Afterward, in the fourth year of this Carthaginian war, Publius Scipio undertook to destroy Carthage. By fighting continuously for six days and nights, he drove the Carthaginians in their final desperation to surrender, asking that they at least be permitted to live as slaves. As the Romans entered the city, some citizens voluntarily cast themselves into the fire and others threw themselves down from a height. The city was captured and burned. It burned continuously for seventeen days. Carthage was demolished, every movable stone being crushed into dust, seven hundred years after it had been founded.
§ XVIII. Other Wars and Dissensions
Between the Second and Third Punic Wars the Macedonian War arose. The first was against Philip, king of Macedonia—not Philip, father of Alexander the Great, who had died long before, but another Philip, who in the Second Punic War had promised aid to Hannibal against the Romans. When Philip was defeated and the First Macedonian War ended, there followed the Syrian War against Antiochus, king of Syria. After he was defeated, there followed the Mithridatic War, and then the Second Macedonian War against Perseus, son of the aforesaid King Philip of the Macedonians, after his father’s death.
When Perseus was defeated and captured, there followed the exceedingly terrible war against the Celtiberians in Spain. Fear of them so invaded the Romans that no soldier or legate dared go into Spain except Publius Scipio, called Africanus the Younger, who offered to go voluntarily. Coming into Spain, he inflicted a very great slaughter upon its peoples.
Besides the aforesaid five famous wars, before the Third Punic War the Romans also had other wars with different nations: the Equolian, Istrian, Gallo-Greek, Illyrian, and Third Macedonian wars; but they all occurred far from the city.
In those times they also had several dissensions among themselves within the city, as in the expulsion or exile of Scipio Africanus and of Scipio Asiaticus.
For, as Valerius relates in book 5 concerning Scipio Asiaticus, after Asia had been conquered, he was cast down by the Roman people and ordered to be taken to prison as though guilty of taking public money, that is, embezzlement. Such treatment certainly could not have been inflicted upon such great men in the city without great and numerous dissensions, since they were held in the highest esteem, as Augustine also touches upon in book 3, chapter 21 of The City of God.
§ XIX. The Two Gracchi
Meanwhile, while Scipio was waging the Third Punic War against the Numantines in Spain, seditions were being stirred among the Romans, as Orosius says. There were two brothers called the Gracchi. Each was a tribune, and each was killed in a popular tumult. Although Sallust praises both as champions of the plebs’ liberty, others reprove them as seditious men.
Concerning the first Gracchus, named Tiberius, Titus Livy in book 58 and Orosius in book 5 say that while he was tribune of the plebs, he determined to divide among the people the public land that, as it appeared to him, certain private persons, namely the nobles, possessed unjustly. He passed a law that no one should possess more than ten iugera of public land. He appointed himself, his brother Gaius Gracchus, and Appius Claudius as three men to divide the land. He also promulgated another law, namely that these three should judge which land was public and which private, so that he might open a way for himself to divide more widely.
When Otto, a tribune of the plebs, opposed him, Gracchus took away his tribunician authority. By these acts he incurred the Senate’s anger and raised the people to insolence.
At that time Attalus, son of Cumenis, died and by his testament ordered the Roman people to succeed him as heir to the dominion of Asia, of which he had been king. Gracchus, seeking the people’s favor, wished the money to be distributed to them.
When the day of the electoral assembly arrived, on which magistrates were customarily chosen, Gracchus intended to continue in office in the following year also, hoping to be elected tribune again. The inflamed nobility drove the people away with fragments of benches. First they knocked Gracchus to the ground with a fragment, then killed him with a club as he attempted to rise. Two hundred others were killed in that sedition, and their bodies were cast into the Tiber. Gracchus’s own corpse, having been exhumed, wasted away.
Valerius also says of him that, when he held the oppressed commonwealth by popular favor, he openly declared, with the Senate held in contempt, that everything ought to be done through the plebs. Valerius likewise says that when the second Scipio Africanus, who had married Gracchus’s sister, returned to Rome after defeating the Numantines, Gnaeus Carbo, tribune of the plebs and a most turbulent avenger of the recently suppressed sedition, asked Africanus after the aforesaid killing what he thought of the death of Tiberius Gracchus.
Carbo sought by the authority of this most weighty man to add great increase to the fire already begun, not doubting that because of so close a family connection Scipio would say something pitiable in memory of the dead man. But Scipio pronounced that Gracchus appeared to have been killed justly.
Before the second Gracchus, namely Gaius, became tribune, as Valerius relates in book 1, he was overcome by sleep and saw the image of his brother Tiberius Gracchus, who told him that by no means could he avoid dying by the same fate by which Tiberius himself had fallen. This proved true, for so it happened.
As Orosius says, once Gaius had been created tribune of the plebs through a tumult, he became a great destruction to the commonwealth. He repeatedly stirred the people into most bitter seditions by gifts and promises, especially through the agrarian law, that is, the distribution and division of lands. Numitius, who had succeeded his brother in the tribunate, had for the most part abolished the statutes and laws of Gracchus that had been the cause of his brother’s death. Indignant at this, Gaius gathered many allies and ascended the Capitol, where an assembly was being held.
There he raised a very great tumult, and a certain herald was killed by the Gracchans. Afterward he met resistance in battle. His whole multitude, after the outcome of the war had long remained uncertain, was scattered by archers sent by the consul Opimius. Gracchus was [read: fled]. And while his friends fought on his behalf and, lest he be captured alive, offered his neck to his slave. The dead Gracchus’s head was carried to the consul, while his body was taken to his mother Cornelia, who had been the daughter of Africanus the Elder. There was also another Tiberius Gracchus, a good citizen, who according to Valerius in book 1 was killed in a different manner.
For a fuller explanation of the foregoing, it should be known that when cities of the enemy were captured by the Romans and their citizens expelled or killed, or when they were deprived of their lands and possessions in another manner, Roman nobles often retained for themselves the lands of the captured cities. This appeared inequitable and unjust to the plebs, because such lands were acquired by the blood and labor of soldiers, who for the most part came from the plebs. The plebs therefore wished such lands to be divided and distributed among themselves, while the nobles did not. For this reason dissension very often arose between the senators and plebs, according to Titus Livy, book 2 On the Origin of the World [read: On the Origin of the City].
For this reason the aforesaid two Gracchi, while tribunes and champions of the plebs, took care to promulgate the agrarian law, that is, the law concerning the distribution of lands. Because of this they became hateful to the Senate and were killed.
Orosius relates in book 5 that, although Opimius was brave as consul in the war against the friends of the second Gracchus, he was cruel in the judicial inquiry. He killed more than three thousand men by punishments. Many of them, without their case even being stated—that is, without being heard in judgment—were killed although innocent. As Valerius relates, the consul Opimius also caused the head of Gaius Gracchus, purchased from one of Gracchus’s associates for its weight in gold, to be fixed upon a spear and carried through the city.
§ XX. Saturninus, Glaucia, and Drusus
After the killing of both Gracchi, as Orosius relates, another sedition arose in the city in the 645th year from its founding. Lutius Saturninus was the bitterest enemy of Quintus Metellus, an entirely eminent man. When Metellus was created censor, Saturninus dragged him from his house and, as he fled to the Capitol, besieged him there with an armed band. But Saturninus was cast down from there by the indignation of the Roman knights, and a very great slaughter occurred before the Capitol.
Afterward Saturninus and G. Glanea, by the treachery—that is, the counsel—of Gaius Mauri, then consul, killed Antonius, who was seeking the tribunate at the same time. In the following year Marius was created consul for the sixth time, G. Glanea praetor, and Saturninus tribune of the plebs. These three conspired against the aforesaid Metellus to send him into exile. A day was therefore appointed for him to defend himself before judges who belonged to the same conspiracy as his accusers. Through wickedness he was condemned to exile, to the sorrow of the whole city.
The same Saturninus, because the vigorous and upright Menius was to become consul, pursued and killed him as he fled when a sedition arose. When the Senate and people murmured over so many evils, the consul Marius settled the whole disturbance.
Saturninus then held an assembly in his house, where some called him king and others emperor. Indignant at this, Marius arranged for battle to be made against him. While Marius guarded the gates, Saturninus, driven back by Marius’s men, fled to the Capitol. Thus an unheard-of battle for the Capitol occurred. Saturninus cried openly that Marius had been the author of all his designs. When Saturninus fled into the senate house, the doors were broken and he was killed there. G. Glanea was dragged out of Claudius’s house and killed. Augustine touches upon this in book 3, chapter 26 of The City of God.
There was also Marcus Drusus, who initiated the Social War. As Valerius relates, he was a man of the greatest pride. Because Lucius Philippus, consul of the Romans, had interrupted him while he addressed the people, Drusus had one of his clients, not a public officer, seize the consul by the throat and drag him to prison with such violence that much blood flowed from his nostrils. On another occasion, when the Senate sent for him to come to the senate house, he asked why they did not come to him. They did so. This Marcus Drusus committed these acts fourteen years after the sedition of Saturninus.
§ XXI. The Servile Wars and the War against the Pirates
There was also a Roman war called the Servile War, and it was threefold. In the 779th year from the founding of the city, while Lucilius and Cassius were consuls, according to Valerius in book 5 and Orosius, sixty-four gladiators broke out of the school that Lentulus was holding at Capua. They immediately appointed three commanders over themselves: Spartacus of Thrace and two Gauls, Crisso and Divonianus. They occupied Mount Eusebius.
Breaking out from there, they attacked the camp of the praetor Clodius, who had besieged them on the mountain. They put him to flight and plundered everything. Divonianus, one of their commanders, was killed there in battle. The other two soon gathered immense forces: Crisso the Gaul had ten thousand men, while Spartaco Drace had thirty thousand.
They filled everything with slaughter, burning, plunder, and rape, so that some violated women killed themselves. The Roman consuls Zelius and Lentulus were sent against them with an army. Zelius crushed Crisso as he fought most fiercely, but Lentulus, defeated by Spartacus, fled. Afterward both consuls fought Spartacus together, suffered a grievous defeat, and fled. Spartacus later killed the proconsul Gaius Cassius in battle. Such terror invaded the city as had invaded it under Hannibal.
At last the Senate sent the consul Cassius with legions and a new reinforcement of soldiers against Spartacus. As soon as he joined battle with the fugitives, he killed six thousand and captured nine hundred. Before he afterward engaged Spartacus in battle, he defeated Spartacus’s auxiliaries, the Gauls and Germans, killing their commanders together with thirty thousand men. Finally, drawing up his battle line against Spartacus, he killed sixty thousand of his men and captured six thousand; Spartacus himself was killed. The others who fled were diligently sought out and killed by various commanders.
According to Eutropius, this war endured for three years amid Italy’s calamities and ended in Apulia. Orosius calls it the War of the Fugitives; Augustine, the Servile War.
There was another servile war that depopulated Macedonia. Orosius relates in book 5 that in the 774th year from the founding of the city, Appius Claudius received by lot the Macedonian war. The various peoples spread around the Rhodope Mountains—that is, those who lived about them—had fled to those places and were devastating Macedonia most cruelly. Appius went out from Macedonia to drive them away and exposed himself to immense masses of evils. Surrounded by enemies and also sick, he died.
Scribonius succeeded him. Avoiding the force of those peoples, he turned arms against them. They were afterward defeated by Lucullus. Those peoples were so cruel to their captives that when they needed cups, that is, drinking vessels, they seized human heads with bloody faces, still covered with hair and with the brain not yet properly extracted, and used them without horror as though they were real cups. Augustine calls this war servile in book 3, chapter 26 of The City of God, because those peoples had formerly been subject to the Romans and, because they were most unworthy, were regarded as slaves. This war occurred five or six years before the aforesaid war of the gladiators.
Orosius also relates in book 5 another servile war that arose in Sicily. He says that after the Gracchus mentioned above had been killed, the contagion of a servile war arose. In Sicily the consul Quiso Calfurnius attacked Mamertum, where he killed nine thousand fugitives; those whom he could capture he fixed upon a gibbet. The consul Rutilius, succeeding him, captured the most strongly fortified refuges of the fugitives at Taroninium and Benna, and there destroyed more than twenty thousand slaves. They ought to have been spared had they not insolently met the sword with the sword.
This contagion widely infected many provinces. At Mirturnis 450 were crucified, and afterward as many as seven thousand slaves were crushed by Quintus Metellus, Gnaeus Servilius, and Scipio. In the Athenian mines, the same servile uprising was dispersed by the praetor Heraclitus. The same thing happened at Delos.
Eutropius relates in book 6 concerning the war against the pirates that, while the Mithridatic War was still continuing, pirates infested all the seas. Thus, although the Romans were conquerors of the whole world, navigation alone was not safe. A war against them was therefore decreed to Agneo Pompeio, and he ended it with remarkable good fortune and speed within a few months.
§ XXII. Philip and Perseus of Macedonia
It should also be known that after the Second Punic War the Romans waged war against Philip, king of Macedonia—not the father of Alexander the Great, but another Philip, whose son was called Perseus. Philip was defeated and subjected, and afterward conducted himself faithfully toward the Romans. When he died, his son Perseus began to rebel and stir up the Second Macedonian War against the Romans. He too was defeated.
The consul Paulus Aemilius was sent against him. When Paulus had assumed the consulship, he returned home and found his little daughter weeping. He asked the cause of her tears, and she answered that she wept because Persa had died, meaning a certain little puppy of hers. Comforted by this as though by an omen of the victory he would obtain over King Perseus, Paulus went with an army, defeated him, and led him to Rome.
About the same time, though a little earlier, the Romans waged war against Antiochus, king of Syria. They also defeated him and imposed laws upon him as they wished.
Shortly afterward Attalus, son of Eumenes and king of Asia, died and by testament left the Roman people heir to his kingdom, so that by testament the kingdom of Asia Minor was added to the Romans. Attalus had a brother named Eumenes, a friend of the Romans, who had by a concubine a son named Aristomicus. When Attalus died, Aristomicus claimed the kingdom of Asia and Achaea for himself. He therefore gathered a great army and made war against the Romans. Defeated, captured, and brought to Rome, he was strangled there by order of the Senate.
As Augustine relates in book 3, chapter 11 of The City of God, Cumaean Apollo—that is, Apollo worshiped at Cumae, a city of Campania—foresaw his death and grieved and wept. Apollo’s weeping foretold Aristomicus’s evil, because the Cumaeans were colonists of the Greeks—that is, they had once been Greeks and had come from Greece to inhabit that place. When they came from Greece, they brought with them the statue of Apollo that they had been accustomed to worship there.
Because the statue wept, less skillful haruspices believed it foretold evil for the Romans and therefore wished to cast it into the sea, had not the Cumaean elders resisted. More skilled haruspices interpreted the opposite, as happened.
Valerius in book 11 and Titus Livy in book 8 say that Philip, king of Macedonia, once defeated, gave the Roman city confidence for a freer—that is, more relaxed—way of life, and that the origin of foreign luxury, that is, of new and exquisite pleasures, was found in the Asiatic army and Asia Minor and introduced at Rome.
§ XXIII. The Social War
Concerning another war called the Social War, which the Romans waged against the Lacini, who were not Roman citizens but allies: although they were subject to the Romans, the Romans called those under their dominion their allies.
Orosius relates in book 5 that in the 659th year from the founding of the city, while Sextus Julius Caesar and Lutio Marco were consuls, Drunus, tribune of the plebs, enticed all the Lacini with the hope of liberty. When he could not accomplish what he wished, he stirred them to arms. The Picentes, Nestini, Marci, Paeligni, Norsini, Samites, and Lucanians killed Gayum Servum, a praetor sent to them as legate by the Senate. They immediately closed the city and slaughtered all the Roman citizens.
A most grievous war followed, containing many battles against the Romans. Rutilus and Porcius were killed. Sometimes the Lacini conquered and sometimes the Romans, with many soldiers killed on both sides. The civil and social wars occurred at almost the same time, because the civil wars began before the Social War was finished. Eutropius says that the civil and social wars, which were also called the Italian Wars, continued for nine years.
According to Orosius, this war consumed 150,000 Romans: twenty-three men of consular rank, seven men of praetorian rank, forty former aediles, and nearly two hundred senators. Orosius adds that so many were killed that they can scarcely be numbered, because the peoples of all Italy were everywhere destroyed without discrimination.
Augustine relates in book 3, chapter 23 of The City of God that before Latium stirred the aforesaid Social War against Rome, all animals subject to human use—dogs, horses, asses, oxen, and every other kind of livestock under human dominion—suddenly became wild. Forgetting their domestic gentleness, they left their shelters, wandered freely, and opposed the approach not only of other people but even of their masters, not without death or danger to anyone who pressed them closely. Such signs therefore preceded the evil that followed.
§ XXIV. Terence
About the time of the Third Punic War, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle, Terence, writer of comedies, flourished. He was captured with other Carthaginians by the Romans. The following are his moral maxims:
“Compliance wins friends; truth breeds hatred.”
“If what you wish cannot be done, wish for what can be.”
“When we are well, we all easily give sound advice to the sick.”
“He who goes on saying whatever he wishes also hears what he does not wish.”
“Why do you attend to the concerns of others that do not pertain to you? I am a human being, and therefore I consider nothing human foreign to me.”
“License makes us all worse.”
“Human nature is generally so constituted that it judges the affairs of others better than its own.”
“The highest law is often the highest wickedness.”
“No undertaking is so easy that it is not difficult if you do it unwillingly.”
“Is it not shameful for you to give counsel to others and be wise abroad, yet be unable to help yourself?”
“Nothing is more unjust than the rule of a person who thinks nothing right unless he himself has done it.”
“There is an old saying: all things are common even among enemies.”
“Old age brings everyone this single fault: we are more attentive to property than is sufficient.”
“To neglect money at the proper time is sometimes the greatest gain.”
“This is wisdom: not merely to see what is now before your feet, but also to foresee what is to come.”
“I command you to examine human lives as in a mirror and to take an example for yourself from others.”
“All whose affairs are less prosperous are somehow suspicious; they take everything as an insult and, chiefly because of their own weakness, always believe themselves neglected.”
“Nearly all women and children are fickle in judgment.”
“This, moreover, is wisdom: bend your mind wherever there is need, and do at once what perhaps must afterward be done.”
“While a person’s affairs are most prosperous, he ought to consider how he may bear adversity and misery, so that nothing may be new to his mind and whatever happens beyond expectation may be counted as gain.”
“As many men, so many opinions; each has his own custom.”
“There is nothing that cannot be corrupted by telling it badly.”
§ XXV. Judas Maccabeus and the Roman Alliance
About those times Judas Maccabeus sent envoys to the Senate seeking peace and friendship with the Romans, as is contained in 1 Maccabees 8, where the virtues of the Romans are narrated. It is said there that they are mighty in strength and agree to everything asked of them, and whoever approached them, they established friendships with them.
And how they had heard of their battles and the brave deeds they performed in Galatia; that they conquered those peoples and brought them under tribute; how much they accomplished in the region of Spain; and that they brought under their power the mines of gold and silver located there. They possessed the whole region through their counsel and patience, although those places were very far from them. They crushed the kings who came against them from the ends of the earth and defeated them in war.
They captured alive Antiochus the Great, king of Asia, after crushing him, ordaining that he and his successors should pay a great tribute and provide hostages. They gave the region of the Midori, the Lydians, and the Medes to King Eumenes. They destroyed and brought under their power the remaining kingdoms that had at any time resisted them, as well as the islands.
They preserved friendship with their friends and with those who trusted in them. They gained kingdoms both near and far, for whoever heard their name feared them. Those whom they wished to aid so that they might reign did reign; those whom they wished, they removed from their kingdom. Thus they were greatly exalted.
In all these things no one wore a diadem or was clothed in purple to be magnified by it. They made a senate house and daily consulted 320 men, always taking counsel concerning the multitude so that they might do what was worthy. Each year they committed their magistracy to one man to govern their whole land. All obeyed one, and there was neither envy nor jealousy among them.
Judas therefore chose Eupolemus, son of John, and Jason, son of Eleazar, and sent them to Rome to establish friendship and alliance with the Romans, so that they might remove from the Jews the yoke of the Greeks. The Romans established friendship and alliance with the Jews.
This was the written response they sent from Rome to Jerusalem on bronze tablets: “May it be well forever with the Romans and the nation of the Jews, by sea and land. May sword and enemy be far from them. If war first threatens the Romans, the nation of the Jews shall bring them aid wholeheartedly, as the time dictates; and they shall not supply the enemy with grain, arms, ships, and things of this sort. The Romans shall act likewise in return.”
§ XXVI. Ptolemy Physcon and Jugurtha
In the 476th year of the Fifth Age, and the 4,986th year of the world according to the longer computation, Ptolemy Physcon, the eighth king of the Egyptians, reigned. In the third year of this Ptolemy’s reign, King Jugurtha, fighting against the Romans, was captured according to Eusebius in the Chronicle.
As Orosius says, no battle was ever more tumultuous and terrible for a Roman soldier. The dust stirred up by the movement and noise of the horsemen running about and charging spread beneath the sky, took away the day, and brought on night. Such a storm of missiles fell that no part of the body was safe from a blow. Because of the darkness, everyone lacked sight to look ahead; because of the compression of the multitude, everyone lacked room to act for his own defense.
The Moorish and Numidian horseman did not labor to seek out a well-positioned enemy with a well-timed cast of his weapon. Rather, they cast their missiles at random, certain that their uncertain gifts would not be without effect. The Roman horsemen and foot soldiers, thus forced together, were massed into one body.
The enemy again surrounded them and tore not only the outer edges of the column but also reached its middle with weapons cast from afar. Thirst, the heat of the sun, the disorder of their own forces, and the uncertainty of death wore the disordered Romans down to the utmost despair. Suddenly the familiar aid of storms and rains that came to the Romans against the Africans was sent from heaven, bringing uncommanded deliverance.
A sudden rain supplied drink and refreshment to the thirsty and overheated Romans. For the Numidians, however, it made the shafts of the weapons they customarily hurled by hand without straps slippery and therefore useless. The shields they carried, made flexible and protective with stretched elephant hide, have this nature: they drink in falling rain like a sponge and thereby become unmanageable from the sudden weight. Because the shields could not be carried about, they could not provide defense.
Bocchus and Jugurtha, king of the Numidians, then fled. After these things 140,000 armed men were brought forward by those kings and are reported to have been cut down by the Romans to annihilation. Thereupon Bocchus abandoned hope of war and sought peace from the Romans. In order to obtain peace, he captured Jugurtha by treachery, loaded him with chains, and sent him through his legate Sulla to Marius. Jugurtha was driven before Marius’s chariot in his triumph with his two sons and was soon strangled in prison.
§ XXVII. The Mithridatic War
According to Orosius, the Mithridatic War against the Romans arose in the 662nd year from the founding of the city. Mithridates undertook this war after twenty-three years of his reign and, as Justin says, fought them with varying victory for forty-five years.
According to Justin, celestial portents predicted Mithridates’s future greatness. In the year he was born and again in the year he first received the kingdom, a comet shone on each occasion for eighty days, so that the whole sky seemed to blaze. In magnitude it occupied a fourth part of the sky and in brightness surpassed the sun’s splendor. It consumed the span of six hours in rising and setting.
As a boy Mithridates suffered the plots of his guardians. They placed him upon a wild horse and forced him to hurl missiles and ride, but their attempts failed because Mithridates controlled the horse beyond his age. They then assailed him with poison. Fearing this, he frequently drank antidotes and made himself so secure against plots by specially sought remedies that, even when he wished to do so, he could not die by poison as an old man.
Helinand says: “I remember reading in certain physical experiments that Mithridates, fearing lest his brother poison him, every day ate while fasting twenty leaves of rue with two walnuts, the same number of dried figs, and salt mixed with them.”
The aforesaid Justin adds that Mithridates, thereafter fearing that his enemies might accomplish by the sword what they could not by poison, feigned a passion for hunting. For seven years he used the shelter of neither city nor countryside but wandered through forests, spent nights in different mountainous regions, and allowed no one to know where he was. He became accustomed to driving wild beasts before him or pursuing them at a run, and even to contending with some by bodily strength. By these activities he both avoided plots and trained his body to endure every exertion.
When he came to the throne, he subdued the Scythians, Pontus, and Cappadocia. When he was silently deliberating about Asia with certain friends, he departed from his kingdom and, with no one aware, wandered through the whole region, learning the sites of all the cities and the country. He also crossed into Bithynia and, as though already lord of Asia, measured out every place advantageous for his victory.
After this he returned to his kingdom, when he was already believed to have died, and found a little child whom during his absence his sister and wife Laodice had borne. Believing him dead, she had cast herself into intercourse with his friends. As though she could cover the admitted crime with a greater wickedness, she prepared poison for him upon his arrival. Mithridates learned this from her maidservants and punished the crime upon its authors.
Finally Mithridates armed the whole East against the Romans. He sent envoys to seek aid from the Cimbri, Gallo-Greeks, Sarmatians, and Bastarnae, and ordered an army to come from Scythia. Equipped with an Asiatic army, he defeated Aquilius and Marcus Malcius. After these men and Nicomedes had been driven out, the cities received him with immense favor. He found much gold and silver and a great apparatus for war there, and granted the cities a five-year exemption.
Orosius relates in book 6 that Mithridates, king of Pontus and Armenia, wished to deprive Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, a part of Asia and a friend of the Roman people, of his kingdom. The Roman Senate warned him not to do this and declared that if he did, he would experience war brought upon him by the Romans. Greatly angered by this, Mithridates ravaged Bithynia and expelled Nicomedes from the kingdom.
When he afterward came to Ephesus, he commanded by a cruel edict that every Roman citizen found throughout Asia should be slaughtered on a single day. This was done. Words can in no way explain or comprehend the multitude of Roman citizens killed at that time, the grief of so many provinces, or the groaning both of those being killed and of their killers, when every person was compelled either to betray innocent guests and friends or himself incur danger under the penalty imposed upon those guests.
Archelaus, commander of Mithridates, was sent ahead into Achaea with 120,000 foot soldiers and horsemen. He obtained Athens and all Greece, partly by force and partly by surrender.
Sulla, to whom the Mithridatic War had fallen after his consulship, long besieged Archelaus and the Athenian port of Piraeus, fortified with a sevenfold wall, and devastated the Athenians. While Sulla was in Asia waging the Mithridatic War, he received through Lutius Tytius a message from Jove that he would overcome Mithridates, which occurred.
Afterward, when Sulla planned to return to the city and avenge his own and his followers’ injuries with civil blood, a certain soldier of the sixth legion brought him another message from the same Jove. The soldier said that Jove had earlier foretold Sulla’s victory over Mithridates and now promised to give him the power by which he would recover the commonwealth from his enemies, though not without much blood.
When Sulla came to Tarentum and sacrificed there, he saw upon the head of a calf’s liver the likeness of a golden crown. The haruspex Postumius then answered that a splendid victory was signified for him and commanded that he alone should eat those entrails.
A short time later, a slave of a certain Lucius Pontius cried out in prophecy: “I come as a messenger from Bellona. Victory is yours, Sulla.” He then added that the Capitol would burn.
After saying this, the slave immediately left the camp. On the following day he returned in a more agitated state and cried out that the Capitol had burned. It had in fact burned, and this seems to have occurred through a revelation from demons. Augustine also treats these matters in book 2, chapter 3 of The City of God.
Orosius also relates that Marius and Eumacus, commanders sent by Mithridates against Lucullus—who had conquered Armenia and Mesopotamia—quickly gathered a great army, engaged Publius Rutilius at Calcidonia, and killed him together with a very large part of his army.
Lucullus, however, enclosed Mithridates with a trench while the latter was besieging the people of Cyzicus, and compelled him to suffer what he himself was inflicting. To encourage the Cyzicenes, Lucullus sent them as messenger one of his soldiers who was a skilled swimmer. Suspended upon two inflated skins, holding a little rod between them, and paddling beneath the water with his feet, he crossed seven miles.
Mithridates, suffering from want, ordered part of his armed forces to return home. Lucullus intercepted and utterly destroyed them. More than fifteen thousand men are said to have been killed then. At that time Fannius, who had joined Mithridates, and Metrophanes, the royal praetor, were defeated at amamento and fled to Messina with two thousand horsemen.
Meanwhile, Orosius says, after Pompey had settled affairs in Armenia, Colchis, Cappadocia, and Syria, he advanced from Pontus into Parthia and on the fiftieth day reached Ecbatana, the capital of the Parthian kingdom.
While Mithridates was celebrating the rites of Ceres in the Bosporus, an earthquake arose so suddenly that it is said to have caused great destruction in the cities and countryside. At the same time Castor, a prefect of Mithridates who commanded at Phanagoria, killed the king’s friends, seized the citadel, and sent four of Mithridates’s sons to the Roman garrisons.
Mithridates, inflamed with anger, blazed into crime. He slaughtered many of his friends at that time, as well as his son Exypodrus and another son, Machares, in parricidal murder. His son Phamaces, terrified by his brothers’ example, won over the army sent to pursue him and soon led it against his father.
For a long time Mithridates pleaded with his son in vain from the top of a very high wall. When he saw that his son was inexorable, he is said to have cried out as he was about to die: “Because Phamaces commands me to die, I pray you, gods of my ancestors, if you exist, that he too may one day hear this same command from his own children.”
He immediately descended to his wives, concubines, and daughters and gave poison to them all. He drank it last of all himself, but because of the remedies with which he had fortified his vital organs against harmful potions, the poison could not kill him. He paced about in vain, hoping that bodily movement might at last drive the infused pestilence through his veins. He then summoned a certain Gaul who was already running about after the wall had been breached and offered him his throat.
Such was the end of Mithridates, a man said to have been the most superstitious of all. He died in the seventy-second year of his age, always keeping with him philosophers and men most skilled in every art.
Helinand gives another account concerning Tigranes. When Pompey made war against Tigranes and overcame him, Tigranes surrendered. He came to Pompey’s camp, sixteen miles from Ecbatana, and, after falling at Pompey’s knees, placed his diadem in Pompey’s hands. Pompey put it back upon him, judging it equally glorious to make kings and to conquer them. He treated Tigranes honorably, but punished him by taking away part of his kingdom and a very great sum of money. Phoenice and Sophene were taken from him, together with six thousand talents of silver that he was to give to the Roman people, because he had begun war against the Romans without cause.
§ XXVIII. The Roman Civil Wars
Augustine says in book 5, chapter 24 of The City of God that the beginning and cause of the Roman civil wars was the sedition raised in the city by the two tribunes called the Gracchi, of whom something was said above.
First came the civil war between Marius and Sulla, the leaders of the city’s two factions. Eutropius and Orosius in book 5 say that there were three men named Marius: Gaius Marius the father, Gaius Marius his son, and Marcus Marius.
Augustine and the aforesaid historians say of the elder Marius that through him the first civil war was begun and waged. He had not inherited from his ancestors the support that enabled him to be raised to such great dignities, for although he was not noble, he was consul seven times. When he reached military age he became a paid soldier and afterward a military tribune. As he rose, he held one magistracy after another. He then served in Africa under the consul Metellus in the Romans’ war against Jugurtha, king of the Numidians. At last he returned to Rome, became consul, and succeeded Metellus in the Jugurthine War.
Valerius also says of him in book 6 that he wrestled with fortune. Because he was judged inferior to the men of Arpinum in honors, he dared to seek the quaestorship at Rome; and from being so humble a Marius, an obscure Arpinate and a candidate at Rome, he emerged for Africa. He was made consul six times on account of his worth, and we do not read that he exercised great cruelty until he sought or obtained the seventh consulship. This became the occasion of the first civil war, in which he displayed excessive cruelty.
Thus, according to Orosius and Eutropius, in the 662nd year from the founding of the city, the aforesaid elder Gaius Marius, who had already been consul six times, sought a seventh consulship. At that time Sulla, who was consul, was to be sent against Mithridates, who had occupied Asia and Achaea. Marius wished both to become consul for the seventh time and to be sent against Mithridates himself. Provoked by this, Sulla came to the city with his army, fought Marius, and put him to flight. After Marius had fled, Sulla advanced into Greece against Mithridates.
Marius, fleeing and finding himself surrounded by the pressure of his pursuers, hid in the marshes of Miternenses. He was wretchedly and ignominiously dragged out, handed over as a shameful spectacle to his executioners, and thrust into prison. There he so terrified the man sent to kill him merely by his face that the man did not dare to do it.
Valerius says that a stout slave who was a Cimbrian by nation was sent to kill Marius in a private chamber at the public baths. Although Marius, while waging the Romans’ war against the Cimbri, had destroyed that nation; although Marius was old, unarmed, and covered in filth; and although the slave held a drawn sword in his hands, he did not dare attack him. Blinded by the famous man’s splendor, he cast away the sword and fled from the place astonished and trembling.
Marius then escaped his bonds and fled to Africa. There he stirred up his son, Gaius Marius the Younger, who was being kept in custody near Utica; joined the consul Cinna in a partnership of crimes; and resolved to return to Rome with him.
They divided their army into four parts, so that three legions were given to the elder Marius. Gnaeus Carbo took another part of the army. Valerius says that he was the source of the civil evils and their most blazing torch. A part was given to Sertorius, while the remainder of the army followed the consul Cinna.
Marius therefore took the port of Ostia by force and practiced every kind of lust, avarice, and cruelty. The consul Cinna with his legions and Marius with the fugitives then entered the city. They killed all the noblest members of the Senate and many men of consular rank. They also proscribed many, destroyed Sulla’s house, and forced his wife and children to flee.
Before Sulla returned, the elder Marius had the heads of murdered citizens brought to banquets, carried to the Capitol, and heaped upon the Rostra—that is, a certain place in the Forum so called—for public display. After he had forced his way into a seventh consulship while Cinna was consul for the third time, he was at last overtaken by a late death at the beginning of his consular authority. Cinna was then made consul for the fourth time and was afterward killed by his own army. Meanwhile, also before Sulla returned, Gaius Marius the Younger and Papirius Carbo were made consuls at Rome.
The elder Marius also caused the death of Octavius, who had been consul with Cinna. Cinna favored Marius’s party, which Octavius detested. Therefore Octavius, after Gnaeus Pompeius had joined him, fought Sertorius, who was a Marian. The Senate had summoned this Gnaeus Pompeius with the whole army he commanded to defend the commonwealth.
Night came and ended this unhappy battle, in which many soldiers on both sides were killed. On the following day, while the mingled bodies were being separated for burial, a Pompeian soldier—that is, one who had served in Pompeius’s army—recognized the body of the brother he had killed. Thus the victorious brother, more unhappy than his defeated brother, cursed his own fratricide and the civil wars. He immediately pierced his own breast, shedding tears and blood together, and threw himself upon his brother’s body.
Valerius says that when this man recognized the body of the brother he had killed, he spent a long time assailing the gods with reproaches for the gift of an impious victory. Octavius himself was eventually defeated with his army and killed when Cinna and Marius were admitted into the city, and his head was placed upon the Rostra.
The Rostra was the name of a place in the city where the Forum was, namely in the Campus Martius. It was so called from the golden beaks of the ships the Romans had captured, with which it was adorned and which were affixed there as signs of victories. The Senate house was nearby, where the tribunes of the plebs held addresses and deliberations with the people. Octavius’s head was therefore placed there, as in a very crowded location, so that it might be seen by many.
Valerius also says that the aforesaid Marius, with ignoble savagery, slaughtered the most noble body of Gaius Caesar, a man of consular and censorial rank, beside the tomb—that is, the burial place—of a certain most seditious and abject man. This was not, however, the great Caesar who later became emperor, but another man.
Another man named Fimbria, a notable supporter of Sulla, was also killed. Two men named Crassus, father and son, were killed by Fimbria, who belonged to Marius’s party and caused their dead bodies to be mangled. Florus, in his epitome of Titus Livy, relates that the son Crassus was killed by Fimbria’s cavalry. The father Crassus, lest he suffer anything unworthy of his courage, pierced himself with his sword.
Quintus Catulus, Valerius relates in book 9, had been given as fellow consul to Marius by the Senate when Marius defeated the Cimbri and Teutons. Later, because of the civil dissensions, Marius ordered him to die. Catulus immediately shut himself in a room in which lime had been heated by a great fire, and so killed himself.
At that time, Valerius reports, Lucius Cornelius Merula, a man of consular rank and flamen of Jove, cut his veins in Jove’s sanctuary so that he might not become a mockery in the most insolent writings. He thereby escaped condemnation to a shameful death, and the most ancient altars were soaked with a priest’s blood.
Florus says: “That seventh purple of Marius”—that is, his consulship—“produced all these deaths of senators between the Kalends and the Ides of January. What would have happened if he had completed the year of his consulship?” For according to Titus Livy he died on the Ides of January.
It should also be known that, as Orosius relates in books 5 and 6, a certain Fimbria belonged to Marius’s party and was the boldest of all men, an accomplice in the Marians’ crimes. At Nicomedia he killed the consul Flaccus, to whom he had been sent as legate. He then became angry with the Ilians—that is, the Trojans, who inhabited rebuilt Ilium, namely Troy, after its first destruction by the Greeks—because in their zeal for Sulla’s party they had closed their gates against Fimbria and repelled him. He utterly destroyed Ilium, the parent of Rome, with fire and slaughter. Sulla nevertheless rebuilt it afterward. Finally, besieged by Sulla’s army and driven by despair, Fimbria killed himself.
It should also be noted that this Marian Fimbria labored to have Mucius Scaevola killed at the funeral of the elder Marius. Valerius says in book 9 that no praise worthy of Scaevola could be returned for the holiness of his character. Fimbria inflicted a grave wound upon him, from which Scaevola nevertheless afterward recovered.
When Fimbria learned this, he said that he wished to prosecute Scaevola. Asked what accusation he meant to make against him, he answered that he wished to charge him with having received the weapon too sparingly into his body. This Scaevola was at last killed by the other man. For Florus relates in his epitome of Titus Livy that the praetor dasamadypsis, after convening the Senate at the will of the consul Gaius Marius, slaughtered all the nobility then in the city. Among them was Quintus Mucius Scaevola, the chief pontiff, who was killed while fleeing in the vestibule of the temple of Vesta, namely the goddess.
Orosius likewise relates in books 5 and 6 that the praetor dasamadypsis, with the consul Marius as instigator, summoned Quintus Scaevola, Domitius, Publius Autestius, and Carbo into the Senate house as though for consultation, and cruelly killed them. Their bodies were dragged with hooks and cast into the Tiber. Augustine touches upon these events in book 3, chapter 28 of The City of God.
Here it should be known that there were two notable citizens called Carbo. One was a consul and one of the principal men of the Marian party. The other was a senator on Sulla’s side, and his death is the one treated here. Yet the other too was afterward killed by the Sullans.
§ XXIX. Sulla, Marius’s Adversary: His Character and Cruelty
Orosius in book 5 and Valerius in book 9 say: “No one can with sufficient truth either praise or condemn Lucius Sulla, because when he sought victories he resembled the Scipios, but when he exercised victory he represented Hannibal.” He ennobled the commonwealth he had defended with outstanding authority, but cruelly flooded the whole city and every part of Italy with streams of civil blood. Indeed, he ordered the severed heads of wretched men, all but retaining countenance and breath, to be brought into his sight, so that he might consume with his eyes what it was impious to consume with his mouth.
When the Senate asked him to return to the city to judge and save the fatherland from the tyranny of Marius described above, Sulla conducted himself worse than Marius and killed more citizens. Lucan marks this in book 2 when he says: “And while he cuts away limbs already too rotten, he exceeds the measure of medicine,” and so forth.
Although Sulla seemed to have a just cause for war against Marius, namely to free the city from his tyranny, he nevertheless behaved with excessive cruelty, pouring out too much blood and entangling the innocent with the guilty.
He returned from Asia, where he had fought bravely against Mithridates and defeated him. Eutropius says that in the first engagement Sulla so defeated Archelaus, Mithridates’s commander in Asia, who had 120,000 men, that scarcely ten of so great a multitude survived with Archelaus; Sulla himself lost only eleven men. In a second engagement he fought the same commander, who had seventy thousand chosen troops, and killed fifteen thousand of the enemy together with Archelaus’s son. In a third engagement he annihilated all Archelaus’s forces, while Archelaus himself hid naked in the marshes for three days. Mithridates afterward sought peace, which Sulla granted him on certain conditions.
When Sulla was preparing to return to the city and avenge the injuries inflicted upon him by the Marian party, a messenger from Jove was sent to him, namely a certain soldier of the sixth legion. The man said that he was Jove’s messenger, and Sulla asked in what form Jove had appeared to him. When he described it, Sulla recognized that Jove had appeared in the same form to another messenger sent to him before.
Likewise, when Sulla was returning from Greece and passed through Tarentum toward Rome, a haruspex saw a crown in the entrails of animals that Sulla had sacrificed to discover the outcome of the war, and interpreted it as a sign of his future victory.
In ancient times various crowns were given according to the character of the victories. The triumphal crowns sent to commanders in honor of a triumph, however, were of gold. At first they were made from laurel; afterward they were made from gold. All these things, however, occurred through the mockery or deception of demons.
Frontinus says in book 1 that when Sulla had an army fully prepared to fight, victory was foretold to him by the gods, and so he offered incense. Finally, before descending into battle and in sight of the army, he prayed to a small image that he had taken from the temple of Apollo at Delphi. He asked it to hasten the victory it had promised him.
Sulla therefore returned to the city and fought against Marius the Younger, son of the Marius who had already died. Fifteen thousand men of Marius’s party were killed, while Sulla lost four hundred of his own. Sulla then brought his standard to the Colline Gate and killed eighty thousand men. After entering the city, he killed three thousand unarmed men contrary to the pledge he had given.
When Sulla struck the guilty and innocent alike with great cruelty, Quintus Catulus said to him openly: “With whom shall we live at last, if we kill armed men in war and defenseless men in peace?”
Sulla then ordered Marcus Marius to be dragged from a goatherd’s hut and bound. He had him led across the Tiber and butchered after his eyes had been gouged out and his limbs mutilated, cut, or broken. Seeing this, Marius the Younger despaired and offered his neck to his slave, who killed him.
Again fighting against the Marian party at the Colline Gate, Sulla faced seventy thousand men. Twelve thousand of them surrendered to him, and in his insatiable anger he destroyed the rest.
The other consul, Carbo, fled from Ariminum to Sicily and was killed there by Gnaeus Pompey. Orosius, however, says in book 5 that Pompey, who was a Sullan, drew the aforesaid Carbo back to Sicily when Carbo wished to flee from Corsica to Egypt, and there killed him with his other companions.
Valerius also relates in book 9 that Sulla cruelly flooded the whole city and every part of Italy with civil blood. Four legions of the opposing party had followed his pledged word—that is, they trusted in the immunity he had promised them. In vain they implored mercy at a public villa in the Campus Martius, for he ordered them killed, and their bodies, mangled by the sword, were cast into the Tiber.
Five thousand men of Praeneste were summoned outside the municipal walls with the hope of safety. After throwing away their weapons, they prostrated themselves on the ground. Sulla had them killed and caused their bodies to be scattered through the fields. Hence Lucan says in book 2: “Fortune saw all her Praenestine colonists received at once upon the sword.” Orosius relates that the reason for this was that Marius the Younger had held out against Sulla in the city of Praeneste and that the city had favored his party.
Sulla entered 4,600 persons upon public tablets, to be slaughtered under his dreadful edict of proscription, so that the memory of this deed might be preserved.
Orosius relates in book 5 concerning tablets of this kind that after Quintus Catulus rebuked Sulla for the excessive killing, Sulla ordered Lucio Farcidio to prepare the infamous tablet of proscription. The first proscription was of eighty men, among whom were four who had been consuls or were worthy of the consulship: Carbo, Marius, Gaius Marius, Urbanus, and Scipio. Sertonius, who was then feared above all, was also among them.
Another proscription of five hundred men was then posted. Valerius, who knew himself guilty of nothing, read it; when he saw his own name among those listed and wished to flee with a price set upon his head, he was killed. Nor did these tablets seem to set an end to the killing. Sulla’s slaves slaughtered some whom he had not proscribed, while they killed others first and proscribed them afterward.
The writers therefore differ concerning the number of the proscribed. Augustine, together with Florus, gives two thousand in book 13, chapter 28 of The City of God. Valerius gives 4,700, but Orosius gives only 580. These figures are not entirely contradictory, because they can be understood as referring to different tablets. Those were said to be proscribed who had been sentenced as enemies of the commonwealth and whom citizens were permitted to kill.
According to Florus in book 3, a certain Marian named Baebius was also torn apart without a sword by the hands of the Sullans. Perhaps this happened because another man of the same name, a Sullan Baebius, had been treated in this way by the Marians. The Sullans therefore tore this Marian Baebius apart in the same manner, as if in vengeance for the other.
Two cities in Spain were also destroyed by the Sullans because they had favored the Marians and, together with the aforesaid Marians, had offered strong resistance for a long time, even after the war against Sertonius had ended. Pompey overthrew one of them, called Eximia; Africanus took the other, called Calaburna, after a long siege and destroyed it by fire. Florus also relates that Sulla ordered the ancient city of Sulmo condemned and destroyed after its citizens had been killed.
Valerius relates in book 9 concerning Sulla’s death that, while obeying the vice of anger, he at last poured out his own life with much blood because of the Puteolans—that is, while indignant against them. The money promised by the decurions for restoring the Capitol was being paid too slowly. In the excessive agitation of his mind and the immoderate violence of his voice, his breast vomited forth his breath mixed with blood. It is therefore uncertain whether Sulla or Sulla’s anger was extinguished first.
The Civil Wars of Sertonius and Catiline
Sertonius was a Marian, whereas Catiline was a Sullan.
After Sulla proscribed Sertonius, Orosius relates in book 5, Sertonius—being a man powerful in cunning and boldness—fled Sulla and came from Africa into Spain. There he stirred the most warlike peoples to arms. Two commanders, Metellus and Domitius, were sent against him. Hirtuleius, a commander of Sertonius, overwhelmed Domitius and his army. Metellus, wearied by many battles, also wore down the enemy until he joined Pompey’s camp.
Pompey gathered an army and most bloodily plundered the city of Lauro. Pompey had thirty thousand foot soldiers and eight thousand horsemen. Sertonius then engaged Pompey and killed ten thousand of his foot soldiers, although Sertonius himself lost the same number.
Many battles were fought between them. Memmius, Pompey’s quaestor and brother-in-law, was killed. The brothers Herculis and Herculei were killed, and Yppenna, who had joined Sertonius, was crushed. Finally, in the tenth year after the war began, Sertonius was killed through the treachery of his own men and brought the war to an end. Afterward the cities that had favored Sertonius surrendered; two resisted and were destroyed. Augustine touches upon these matters in book 13, chapter 30 of The City of God, and also upon Lepidus and Catulus.
Orosius says of the latter in book 5 that after Sulla died, Lepidus, an advocate and defender of the Marian party, rose against Catulus, a Sullan commander, and rekindled the ashes of civil war. Then twice in battle an ally was exhorted, and very many Romans were killed. The city of the Albans was besieged and tormented by famine. Scipio, son of Lepidus, was then captured and killed there. Brutus was killed near Rhegium while Pompey pursued him. Thus this civil war vanished with the same speed with which it had flared up.
§ XXX. Catiline
Catiline was a Sullan and had been nurtured by Sulla. Sallust wrote a book about him called the Catilinarian.
Cicero and Sallust say that Catiline was distinguished above all by his wicked lust. Driven by love for Aurelia Oristilla, he saw a single impediment preventing their marriage: his own son, the only son he had and already of adult age. He removed him with poison.
Cicero says of him in the invectives: “What evil or crime can be imagined or conceived that he did not conceive? What poisoner in all Italy, what gladiator, what robber, what hired killer, what parricide, what woman, what ruined person can be found who admits that he lived on the most intimate terms with Catiline?”
The aforesaid Lucius Sergius Catiline was therefore a man of the noblest family but of the worst disposition. Sallust says that his character was exceedingly vicious and that, oppressed by debt, he led a wretched life. So great a desire to rule the commonwealth invaded him that he considered nothing forbidden, provided only that he might attain his purpose.
He therefore formed a conspiracy of many men, whom he had promised to enrich by slaughter and plunder. He had a very strong army with which he had planned to kill the two consuls Lutius Coccum and Lucius Torquatus and seize the consulship.
Thus, in the 789th year from the founding of the city, he conspired with certain most illustrious and daring men to destroy the fatherland. While Marcus Tullius Cicero the orator and Gnaeus Antonius were consuls, Cicero exposed Catiline’s conspiracy and expelled him from the city. His associates were apprehended and strangled in the fortress. Catiline was defeated in battle by the other consul, Antonius, and was killed with his men, as is said, on the plain of Pistoria.
Sallust says: “When the battle was finished, you could then perceive how much boldness and how much force of spirit had been in Catiline’s army. Among them there was no freeborn man who either fled or could be captured alive.” Catiline himself was found far from his own men among the corpses of the enemy, still breathing a little and retaining in his face the ferocity of spirit he had possessed while alive. Augustine touches upon these matters in book 2, chapter 23 and book 3, chapter 30 of The City of God.
Cicero likewise says of Catiline: “He possessed many signs of the greatest virtues, not expressed but merely sketched. He associated with wicked men, yet pretended to be devoted to the best men. I think there was never such a monster on earth, compounded of inclinations and desires so contrary, diverse, and mutually opposed. Who was sometimes more delightful among distinguished men? Who was more closely joined to the shameful? Who was sometimes a better citizen? Who was a worse enemy of the city? Who was more polluted in pleasures? Who more patient in labors? Who more bitter in rapacity? Who more lavish in giving?”
“This too was remarkable in him: he could turn and govern his nature for the occasion, twisting and bending it this way and that. With the austere he lived severely; with the easygoing, pleasantly; with the old, gravely; with the young, courteously; with criminals, boldly; with the luxurious, luxuriously.”
“O great power of truth, which easily defends itself by itself against the abilities, cunning, and cleverness of all, and against all fabricated snares.” Thus Cicero.
§ XXXI. The Wars More Than Civil Between Pompey and Caesar
Pompey belonged to Sulla’s party, but Julius Caesar to Marius’s. Lucan says of them at the beginning of his book: “Wars more than civil over the Emathian plains, and right granted to crime,” and so forth.
By “the Emathian plains” he means the plains of Thessaly, where most of the fighting occurred and much blood was poured out. Hence “Emathia” is interpreted as “blood.” He calls the wars “more than civil” because they were fought not only between citizens but also between relatives by marriage. Julius Caesar was the father-in-law and Pompey his son-in-law. After Caesar’s daughter Julia, whom Pompey had married, died, they waged many wars against one another. Lucan adds that “right was granted to crime” because the law of civic fellowship and marriage affinity was turned into crime.
Pompey was called “the Great” because of the greatness of his valor. He had waged war in the East against twenty-two kings, all of whom he defeated and subjected to the Romans. He also obtained victory while waging wars against Sertonius, and earlier, after long wars that Mithridates, king of Asia, brought upon the Romans, Pompey defeated him as well.
Augustine also says of Pompey in book 18, chapter 45 of The City of God: after the deeds of the Maccabees, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, sons of Alexander and Alexandra, fought one another for the kingdom. This Alexander had been king and high priest among the Jewish people, as had his father Aristobulus, who was the first after the Babylonian captivity to assume a diadem and be both king and high priest.
Hyrcanus sought the aid of the Romans against his brother. Pompey, the most renowned prince of the Roman people, entered Judea with an army and captured the city of Jerusalem. He opened the temple not with the devotion of a suppliant but by the right of a victor. He approached the Holy of Holies, where no one but the high priest was permitted to enter, not as a venerator but as a profaner.
He confirmed Hyrcanus in the high priesthood, imposed Antipater as guardian over the subjected nation—such guardians were then called procurators—and led Aristobulus away with him in chains. From that day the Jews began to be tributaries of the Romans.
Crassus afterward also plundered the temple. A few years later the Jews deserved to have the foreign-born Herod as king, under whom Christ was born. Thus Augustine.
Faustus Cornelius, son of Sulla, was the first who dared to enter the temple, as Vincent relates in book 6. The Romans who rushed in after him profaned the temple itself or, as is read elsewhere, stabled horses in its porticoes.
For this reason, Peter Comestor in particular says that from that time onward Pompey never fought without being defeated, although until then he had been most fortunate. Pompey admired the temple’s location and adornment and its religion. Nevertheless, he took nothing from it and commanded its custodians to cleanse the temple of filth.
§ XXXII. Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar was the most energetic of all mortals of his time. The Senate had decreed that he should wage war against the Gauls. When that war was finished, after he had subjected all Gaul and was returning victorious to Rome, he asked before approaching the city that a second consulship be given to him. He had already been consul once and sought to become consul a second time, indicating in his request that this must certainly be granted to him.
Marcellus, who was then consul, Pompey, and Latho opposed him. Caesar was ordered to dismiss the armies he possessed and return to the city. By the consul’s authority certain legions were entrusted to Pompey, as though he would command a future war against Julius Caesar if Caesar wished to take up arms.
Julius ranged through various regions, even as far as Spain, and gathered a very large and powerful army. The consuls, the whole Senate, and all the nobility fled to Greece. Gathering near Epirus, they resolved to make war upon Julius there if he came into Greece.
Caesar came, engaged Pompey, and was defeated and put to flight. He nevertheless escaped because, when night arrived, Pompey was unwilling to pursue him for fear of an ambush. Caesar then said that Pompey did not know how to conquer and that Caesar could have been defeated only on that day.
They afterward fought in Thessaly. Never before had Roman forces so numerous, or commanded by better leaders, assembled together; they could easily have subjected the whole world. At last, after a long battle of doubtful fortune, Pompey’s entire army fled. Pompey himself was also put to flight and went to Alexandria in Egypt, hoping to receive aid from Ptolemy, king of Egypt. Ptolemy instead sent Pompey’s severed head and his ring to Caesar.
Afterward Pompey’s son, daughter, and descendants were killed. Many battles and great slaughters of men followed in various regions as Caesar pursued those who had belonged to Pompey’s party. This war continuously held the whole world for four years. These things have been extracted from Orosius and Eutropius.
§ XXXIII. Latho
When Latho learned that Pompey, whose party he favored, had been defeated by Caesar and beheaded by the king of Egypt, he gathered the remnants of Pompey’s army and fled into Africa after placing his people aboard a thousand ships.
He led them about through sandy and serpent-filled places. Many of his men were exhausted by hunger, thirst, and heat, and many others were destroyed by serpents. He and all who followed him suffered such misery that most of them repented of having been from Julius Caesar, as Lucan says.
At last, when Latho saw Caesar prospering in everything and Pompey’s party yielding everywhere, he killed himself at Utica rather than submit to Caesar in any way, although he knew that Caesar was of extraordinary clemency. Florus says that after dismissing his son and companions from his embrace, after Plato’s book that teaches the immortality of the soul had been read at night by lamplight, Latho rested a little. Then, about the first watch, he drew his sword, uncovered his breast with his hand, and struck it once and again.
After this, physicians dared to violate the man with their remedies. He allowed them to do so, but when they departed he tore the wounds open again. As the force of his blood followed, he left his dying hands fixed in the wound.
Although Florus, Valerius, and some others praise this deed as though Latho had acted energetically and virtuously, Augustine in book 19 and other saints do not judge such a death to have been virtuous or glorious. They ascribe it not to fortitude but to impatience.
Augustine also proves this in book 1, chapter 23 of The City of God from the fact that Latho persuaded his own dearest son to submit to Caesar and to hope for everything from Caesar’s kindness. If it was evil to submit to Caesar, why did he persuade the son whom he loved most to submit to him? If it was not evil, why did Latho commit the greatest crime—killing himself—so as not to be subject to Caesar?
Valerius relates in book 5 that when Caesar heard of Latho’s death, he said both that he envied Latho’s glory and that Latho had begrudged his own glory to his father. Caesar nevertheless preserved Latho’s patrimony intact for his children.
It should be known that many men were called Latho. Thus there was in the city a certain house or kinship group of the Lathos, just as there were houses of the Scipios, Fabricii, Fabii, and many similar families.
According to Valerius, the first to ennoble the house of the Lathos was the Latho called Censorius. According to Hugh, censorius means the same as “judge of morals,” and this Latho was therefore called Censorius because he was a judge of morals. That house was distinguished by the upright men who proceeded from it.
Gellius says that the family of the Lathos produced not one but several grandsons of Marcus Latho Censorius, born from different fathers. That Latho, who was both orator and censor, had two sons by different mothers and of widely differing ages. When one was already a young man and his mother had died, Latho himself, though very old, married the virgin daughter of his client Solini. From her Marcus Latho Solomanus was born.
From Latho’s elder son—who was designated praetor, died while his father still lived, and left distinguished books on military discipline—was born Marcus Latho, a forceful orator who left many written speeches. He went to Africa as consul and died there. He too had an elder son named Latho, though not the one who died at Utica, but the one who, after being aedile and praetor, went to Narbonese Gaul and died there.
From the censor’s other son, the younger son called Solomanus, were born Lucius Latho and Marcus Latho the praetor, who killed himself at Utica during the civil war. When Cicero wrote about this man’s life and praises, he called him the great-grandson of Latho Censorius. Thus Gellius.
Among the Lathos, two were more distinguished: Latho Censorius, who was the first of those named, and Latho of Utica, the last of those named. The latter was called Uticensis from Utica, the city of Africa where he killed himself.
It should also be noted that, besides this Latho of Utica, there was another Latho, a Stoic philosopher, who according to Eusebius killed himself in the forty-first year of Augustus’s rule from weariness with a double quartan fever, hoping to find a better life after this one.
Some believe that he was the Latho who composed the book that children learn in grammar schools. But, as Valesius says upon book 1 of The City of God, this cannot be so, because that book mentions Lucan in the verse: “If you wish to know the Roman and Punic wars, seek Lucan,” and so forth. The poet Lucan lived about the time of Augustus.
§ XXXIV. Julius Caesar: His Character, Battles, and Death
According to Suetonius in his book on the seven Caesars, Julius Caesar is said to have been tall, fair in complexion, well formed in his limbs, with a somewhat full face and black and lively eyes. His health was good, except that he was accustomed suddenly to faint or even to be terrified in his sleep.
He bore the disfigurement of baldness very badly, having often found it subject to the mockery of his detractors. He therefore used to comb his thinning hair forward from the crown of his head. Not even his enemies denied that he drank wine very sparingly.
He was so indifferent about food that when a host once served rancid oil in place of fresh and the others rejected it, Caesar alone took an even more generous portion, lest he appear to accuse his host of either rusticity or avarice.
He possessed marvelous eloquence, through which he either equaled or surpassed the glory of the most excellent speakers. He left commentaries on his own deeds. Cicero says of them: “He wrote commentaries that are indeed greatly to be approved. They are bare, direct, and graceful, with every ornament of speech stripped away as though it were clothing.”
He was most skilled in arms and horsemanship and endured labor beyond belief. While the column was marching he would sometimes ride but more often go ahead on foot, bareheaded whether there was sun or rain. He covered the longest journeys with incredible speed. If rivers delayed him, he crossed by swimming or by supporting himself upon inflated skins, so that he very often arrived before the messengers sent to announce him.
In a doubtful battle he would send the horses away, first of all his own, so that by removing the aid of flight he might impose upon everyone a greater necessity to remain.
He rode a remarkable horse whose feet were almost human and whose hooves were split like toes. The horse permitted no other rider, and Caesar was the first to mount it.
He often restored a wavering battle line by himself, standing in the way of those who fled, holding individual men back, and even seizing them by the throat and turning them toward the enemy.
During the assault upon the bridge at Alexandria, when a sudden enemy attack forced him into a small boat and many men threw themselves into it with him, he leapt into the sea. He escaped by swimming two hundred paces to the nearest ship, holding up his left hand so that the documents he carried would not become wet and dragging his general’s cloak in his teeth so that the enemy would not obtain it as a trophy.
He behaved with the greatest restraint toward both his subordinates and his equals. Hence Suetonius says of him: “He neither observed every offense nor punished it in proportion. He was the sharpest investigator and punisher of deserters and the seditious, but restrained himself in other cases.”
After a great battle and victory he never permitted everyone unrestricted license to behave wantonly. In public address he did not call his soldiers merely “soldiers,” but by the more flattering name “fellow soldiers.” He kept them so well equipped that he adorned their weapons with polished silver and gold, both for appearance and so that they would fight more tenaciously from fear of losing them.
He always treated his friends with such favor and indulgence that when Gaius Oppius, accompanying him on a journey through the woods, was suddenly overtaken by illness, Caesar yielded to him the only lodging that existed there and himself slept upon the ground in the open air.
He never adopted enmities so grave that he would not gladly lay them aside when an opportunity to forget them arose. In exacting vengeance too, he was by nature most gentle.
He fought many battles against different peoples, especially against the Germans and Gauls, whom he defeated. Julius Celsus says of the Gauls’ character: “Just as the spirit of all Gauls is eager and ready to undertake wars, so it is soft and offers very little resistance in enduring calamities. They often form plans concerning the greatest affairs of which they must immediately repent, since they are slaves to no settled customs and most people give deceptive answers according to their wishes. The Gauls’ plans are therefore sudden and abrupt, for nearly all of them pursue revolution and are quickly and readily stirred to war.”
Helinand says that the warlike nation of the Belgae—that is, of the Gauls and Britons—blazed up against Caesar. Among them, the Bellovagi, superior to the others in number and courage, had sixty thousand picked armed men. The Suessiones from twelve towns had fifty thousand, and the Numeri the same number; the Atrebates and Ambiani had ten thousand. The Morini had thirty-five thousand, the Merapi nine thousand, and the Caleti ten thousand. The Veliocasses and Viromandui had ten thousand, and the Adnatici eighteen thousand. The Adueles, Burenes, Caeroesi, and Ceromani, who by a single name were called Germans, had forty thousand. In total they are said to have been 282,000 picked armed men, nearly all of whom were destroyed to annihilation.
Afterward, near Ottodorum, when Caesar had resolved to depart for Italy, more than thirty thousand barbarians are reported to have been cut down by the legion Galba commanded, which Caesar had sent among the Bangros and Seduni. Thirty-eight thousand Aquitanians and Cantabrians are reported to have been cut down. Caesar is next said to have killed forty thousand Germans.
Julius Celsus says that when Caesar determined to cross the river Rhine, he thought it neither safe enough to cross in ships nor consistent with his own dignity or that of the Roman people. Although the river’s breadth and swiftness presented the greatest difficulty in building a bridge, he nevertheless judged that the army should not be brought across in any other way. Thus in a short time he caused a bridge of marvelous design and very strong construction to be built. Caesar led his army across it and hastened into the territory of the Sicambrorum.
From there he departed for Britain. Orosius says that Caesar’s cavalry was defeated by the Britons in the first engagement. In the second battle, with great danger to his own men, he defeated the Britons and turned them to flight. Thereafter the very strong city of the Ternovatum, under the leadership of Mandrogeo, surrendered to Caesar after giving forty hostages, and the other cities followed its example.
Orosius relates these and many other things concerning Caesar’s Gallic War. Julius Celsus also wrote fully about it in five books devoted to the subject, where he gave these notable sayings: “Experience is the teacher of all things. We gladly believe what we wish, and we hope that others themselves feel what we feel. It is natural for all people to be incited by the love of liberty and to hate the conditions of servitude.”
The same writer says: “Anger and rashness are especially innate in the Gallic people, so that they regard a slight report as a proven fact. The Gauls are open men and not at all deceitful, accustomed to fight by courage and not by guile.”
Eutropius says of Caesar in book 6 that he was a man more brilliant than any who had ever lived. With his standards gathered—that is, with his battle lines deployed and arranged—he fought fifty times.
Caesar was of such goodness that he conquered by clemency, even more than by arms, those whom he had subjected with weapons.
After settling the civil wars throughout the world, he returned to Rome and began to act with greater insolence and contrary to the custom of Roman liberty. He bestowed according to his own will honors that had formerly been conferred by the people, did not rise when the Senate came to him, and did certain royal and almost tyrannical things.
Brutus and Cassius therefore instigated a conspiracy against him, of which 260 Roman senators and knights were aware. Caesar died in the Senate house, pierced by twenty-four wounds.
Suetonius says that when Caesar perceived drawn daggers attacking him from every side, he wrapped his toga around his head and at the same time drew its fold down to his feet with his left hand, so that he might fall more honorably with the lower part of his body also covered. He was thus pierced by twenty-three wounds, uttering only a wordless groan at the first blow.
He was killed in the fifty-sixth year of his age, after ruling for five years. The Roman people, stirred by grief, wished to burn the Capitol together with the authors of the crime. His body was burned before the Rostra.
The people erected in the Forum a solid statue of an enormous stone, nearly twenty feet high, above which he was buried and which was called the Julia. The chronicles say that when he was killed, letters warning him of the conspiracy were found in his hand; if he had read them, he would certainly have taken precautions.
Augustine says in book 3, chapter 30 of The City of God that the conspiracy wished to kill him as one who sought kingship. In truth, after the kings had been expelled, he was the first to govern the Roman commonwealth as though he were king and emperor. This was very hateful to the Romans as something opposed to their ancient liberty, because before this the Senate and people performed everything by themselves or through others under their authority.
Suetonius says that almost none of Caesar’s assassins survived him by more than three years or died a natural death. All were condemned. Each perished by a different misfortune, some by shipwreck and some in battle. Several killed themselves with the same dagger with which they had violated Caesar.
Many portents preceded Caesar’s death. Suetonius says that a few months before it, when colonists brought into a colony were breaking open very ancient tombs in order to extend their country houses—and pursued the work more eagerly because they kept finding vessels of ancient workmanship—a bronze tablet was found in a monument in which Capys, founder of Capua, was said to have been buried. It bore Greek letters and words with this meaning: “Whenever the bones of Capys are uncovered, a descendant of Julius shall be killed by the hands of his kindred and soon avenged by great disasters throughout Italy.”
On the day before the Ides of March, birds of various kinds pursued a little wren carrying a laurel twig into the Curia of Pompey from a nearby grove, and tore it apart there.
On the night before the day of the killing, Caesar dreamed that he sometimes flew above the clouds and joined his right hand with Jove’s. His wife Calpurnia imagined that the roof of the house collapsed and that her husband was stabbed in her lap. Suddenly the doors of the bedroom opened of their own accord.
The Comestor says that one hundred days before Caesar’s death a thunderbolt fell beside his statue in the Forum and knocked the capital letter C from his name inscribed above it. On the night before the day of his death, the windows of his bedchamber opened with so great a noise that he leapt up, thinking the house was about to fall. Thus Caesar’s ambition ended together with his glory.
§ XXXV. The Origin of Florence
Lest I seem entirely forgetful of the origin of our city, namely Florence, I shall touch briefly upon it by repeating what that most eloquent man Leonardo of Arezzo writes about it in polished language at the beginning of his History of Florence.
The Romans founded the city of Florence, having been brought to Faesulae by Lucius Sulla. These men were Sullan soldiers, to whom part of the territory of Faesulae had been allotted for the outstanding service they performed with the others in the civil war. Faesulae, together with its ancient inhabitants, was handed over to them as a place of settlement. The Romans called these transfers of citizens and assignments of land “colonies,” because estates for cultivation and homes for habitation were given to them.
For an understanding of the matter, the occasion for bringing new colonists into these places must be explained. Not many years before Sulla’s dictatorship, almost all the peoples of Italy defected from the Romans at the same time. They were moved by indignation because, although they served alongside the Romans in every campaign and endured labors and dangers to enlarge the empire, they were increasingly excluded from its rewards.
They therefore complained among themselves more and more often. At last envoys were sent concerning the common matter and demanded that honors and magistracies be granted to them as though they were members of the citizen body. Marcus Drusus, tribune of the plebs, took up this cause, and for some time it was prolonged in doubtful hope. But when their demands were at last rejected, they openly rebelled as though against ungrateful men and waged the war called the Social War because it was waged by the allies.
When the Roman people at length prevailed in that war, they pursued the provinces that had taken the lead in rebellion and afflicted them with many disasters. They raged especially against the Picentes and Tuscans. Asculum, the most flourishing city of the Picentes, was ravaged by the Romans as though it were an enemy city, and in Tuscany Clusium was razed to the ground. In addition to the damage and slaughter of war, great calamities were inflicted upon the people of Arretium and Faesulae. The goods of many were confiscated, many people were driven into exile, and the cities were left almost empty of inhabitants.
This was the occasion, and as it were an invitation, for Sulla afterward, as dictator, to assign these places above all to his soldiers. In this manner Lucius Sulla brought soldiers into Faesulae and divided the fields among them man by man.
Most of them judged the mountain city, difficult of access and especially unnecessary amid the security of Roman rule, to be of little use to them. Leaving the mountain, they began to construct buildings and dwell upon the nearby plain below it, along the banks of the rivers Arno and Munionis.
Because the new city lay between two streams, they first called it Fluentia, and its inhabitants were called Fluctini. That name seems to have belonged to the city for some time, until, as its fortunes increased and the city grew to a greater size—or because it flourished with marvelous success—they called it Florentia instead of Fluentia.
Cicero and Sallust, two of the foremost authors of the Latin language, mention these colonists. Cicero affirms that they had been excellent Roman citizens and most courageous men, but, enriched by unexpected and sudden wealth through the civil war and Sulla, they did not know how to observe moderation in their expenses. While they built as though they were blessed and used great households, great banquets, lavish expenditures, and costly furnishings too extravagantly, they fell so deeply into debt that if they wished to free themselves, Sulla would have to be raised again for them from the dead.
Indeed, from the magnificent things that the father of Latin eloquence writes about their buildings, I infer that splendid foundations were laid for this city from its very cradle. Remains of ancient works survive even today, amid the admirable magnificence of the city in our own time. These include the aqueduct through which water gathered at the seventh milestone was conducted into the city, and an enormous theater for public games, which was then placed outside the walls but is now enclosed within the city itself and occupied by private buildings.
There is also the temple in which the baptistery now stands, an ancient and truly outstanding work that paganism consecrated to Mars. I should believe that private buildings also corresponded to this public magnificence, although less evidence of the private structures remains. As we said, the unrivaled remains of the public works bear witness to it.
While the colonists were occupied with these buildings and with the other splendor of life that Cicero recalls, neither looking ahead to the future nor sparing what they had gained, their money soon failed, as happens. At the same time their single hope of further largesse vanished: Lucius Sulla had departed not only from the dictatorship but also from life.
Partly driven by need and partly by their accustomed rewards, they therefore hoped that some new disturbance would arise. They were military men habituated to civil war and knew no way to remain at peace. Once more they pondered new dictatorships and new rewards of war. Debt too supplied another spur, one that is accustomed to give even timid men courage to disturb the peace.
By chance, at that time Lucius Chatellina undertook a revolution at Rome and entered into a great conspiracy against the commonwealth. It included many men of the equestrian order, many of the senatorial order, and some of patrician birth. Suspicion also touched Gaius Caesar, the man who afterward became dictator. At that time he was believed to desire revolution not only because he was a private citizen but also because he was burdened with debt.
Chatellina first attempted to accomplish many things at Rome. When these attempts succeeded poorly, he left part of the conspirators within the city to carry out what he had prescribed, while he determined to depart with the others and stir up war outside it.
At first he had planned to occupy Penestre in a nocturnal attack and establish the seat of war there. But when he perceived that city to be more diligently guarded, he changed his plan and chose Faesulae instead of Penestre. Departing from Rome and coming to these very places, he enveloped the whole region in war and arms.
This was the first danger and almost the final crisis of the city while it was still young and newly founded. Yet it escaped in such a manner that I would indeed say the event proved advantageous. Lentulus, Cetheus, and the other leaders of the conspiracy whom Chatellina had left at Rome tried to admit more people into partnership in the crime. Betrayed by the ambassadors of the Allobroges and convicted in the Senate, they were at last subjected to the ultimate punishment and perished.
When Chatellina heard this, because his hope was now broken and his undertaking seemed destined to fall uselessly, he tried to flee into Gaul. Surrounded by Roman armies and compelled to risk the fortune of battle, he was killed with his men in the territory of Pistoria.
In Etruria, from the earliest Roman wars down to these times, many cities and large towns that had formerly possessed authority had perished. Caere, Tarquinii, Populonia, and Luna had once been great cities situated along the shore of the Lower Sea. In the inland region there was Vehi, which I wrote above was besieged by the Romans for ten years. Rusellae, Capena, and Falerii likewise failed altogether. Clusium and Faesulae were little removed from destruction.
Some have handed down that Florence was destroyed by Attila, king of the Huns, while others say by Totila, and that it was restored a long time afterward by Charlemagne. It is, however, more than sufficiently established for us that Attila, king of the Huns, never entered Etruria and never advanced beyond the inicium river, which flows from Lake Benacus into the Po.
We show, however, that Totila, king of the Goths, raged against the Etruscan cities that had defected from the Goths after Belisarius’s victory. I am thus led to believe that, through confusion of names, some people mistakenly took Attila for Totila.
Besides Florence’s recent defection, an old grief is thought to have inflamed Totila’s mind to destroy the city: so many thousands of Goths had long before fallen near it with their commander Radagaso. By stirring up the memory of this event in his mind, Totila wished to remove Florence, which while it stood existed in Etruria like a trophy set up over his people.
If these things are so, this city must have lain overthrown for more than two hundred years between Totila and Charlemagne. In this matter one will reasonably wonder: if the city was left empty of people for so long a time, in what places were its citizens preserved in the meantime?
It is utterly vain to believe that Charlemagne brought new inhabitants from Rome, especially when Rome was entangled in so many calamities and already so afflicted by many disasters that it needed a supply of inhabitants itself rather than being able to give them to other places. Indeed, it is recorded that at approximately those same times, when inhabitants were lacking because Rome was empty, settlers were placed from Sardinia at Hostiam, a city so necessary to the Romans.
I therefore believe that Totila inflicted great disasters, that a very great slaughter of the citizens occurred, and that the walls were overthrown. But I do not believe that the city was utterly destroyed or that it was entirely without inhabitants during the intervening time.
For I see that noble and principal temple of Mars and certain other buildings more ancient than Totila’s age still standing. When I observe that they were left intact, I am unwilling to believe that the entire city was destroyed or that those buildings stood for so long without inhabitants.
I therefore believe instead that the walls were restored by Charlemagne; that the nobility, which had been scattered when the city’s defenses were broken and had fortified castles upon their estates, was recalled within the city; and that the city itself, variously disordered, was restored to the form of a city—repaired rather than founded again.
We showed above which cities had perished throughout Etruria. Among those that emerged from so many tempests and survived to the end, Pisa, Florence, Perugia, and Siena stood out most prominently.
The Pisans, powerful in their fleet, long ruled the sea. They did this more easily because Pisa alone remained among the maritime Tuscan cities, Tarquinii, Luna, and Populonia having already been taken away. The Florentines prevailed on land through industry and skill. The Perugians, increasing through the fertility of their soil and the advantageous nature of their location, possessed great power. The splendor of Siena’s civic affairs and the excellence of its families ennobled it far and wide and supplied the material for its power.
Rusellae and Populonia, cities formerly neighboring those that survived, were nearest to them. The people of Arretium surpassed almost everyone in the goodness of their fields and the extent of their territory; but, situated between the Florentines and Perugians, the power of two very strong cities obstructed them.
Cortona indeed remained for a long time under the power of the people of Arretium and even lost the name of a city, until not long before our own age it deserved to recover its former rank. Next after these came the people of Lucca, Volterra, Pistoia, Orvieto, and Viterbo. These cities, worthy of remembrance, survived after long tempests. Thus Leonardo.