B.C. 462.] LONG CONFLICT OF THE ORDERS. 239 as it may, five plebeian tribunes were elected by the assembly of the tribes in the following year (B.c. 470). Their names are preserved; and the absence of that of Lætorius from the list has been thought to imply that he died, as he had said, from the wounds he received in the Forum. Nor was Appius Claudius suffered to escape punishment. His army refused to fight, when he led them against the Volscians; and the stern consul inflicted on them that terrible penalty of decimation,* which has since passed into a proverbial expression. For this act of severity, and for his lawless conduct in his consulship, he was impeached by two of the new tribunes, and only avoided a certain condemnation by suicide. Another account, however, says that he died of sickness (B.O. 470). We know in fact that Rome suffered terribly about this time from the ravages of pestilence, which in one year carried off both the consuls, two of the four augurs, and the Curio Maximus (the head of the curiæ); and the only magistrates left were the plebeian ædiles, who carried on the government under the control of senatorial interreges (B.c. 463). All the accession of political power gained by the tribunes had been of little material help to the plebeians, who were again overwhelmed with distress and debt. Their most substantial relief was from the foundation of a colony at the important port of Antium, on the coast of Latium, which was taken from the Volscians (B.c. 468), and by the division of its lands among the colonists. At length the demands of the commons rose to a complete reform of the existing order of the commonwealth; and, in B.C. 462, the tribune, C. Terentillus, proposed a law for the restraining of the powers of the consuls, and for the appointment of ten commissioners, † chosen equally from both orders, to draw up a new code of laws. This proposal contained the first germ of the decemviral legislation, which was carried into effect as a compromise after a violent conflict for eight years (B.c. 462-454). The plebeians elected the same tribunes for five successive years. The younger patricians organized clubs for the perpetration of every kind of violence; and among these, Kæso Quinctius, the son of the celebrated Cincinnatus, brought upon himself an impeachment by the tribune, Aulus Vir That is, the choice of every tenth man, by lot or otherwise, for execution. The moral effect of this punishment may be said to be increased tenfold by the fear of every man that the choice may fall on him. Decemviri. It was the custom of the Romans to name colleges or committees, whether permanent or special, by the number of their members. The celebrated political triumvirates were an ironical applicationof this nomenclature. ginius (B.c. 461). Kæso fled into Etruria before the day of his trial. A conspiracy was formed for effecting his return; and in the following year a band of exiles and slaves, led by a Sabine, named Appius Herdonius, surprised the Capitol by night, and kept possession of it in arms, demanding the restoration of all political exiles. The consular power was, as usual, divided between an eager partisan of the patricians and a favourer of the people, an Appius Claudius and a Valerius Poplicola. The latter led the allied forces of the Latins and Hernicans to the assault of the Capitol. The consul was killed, but the post was carried, and the insurgents were put to the sword or afterwards executed. Kæso Quinctius, who is not expressly mentioned, seems to have fallen in the conflict. But the patricians proved their unyielding obstinacy by electing in the place of Valerius the father of the rebel Kæso, the stern L. Quinctius Cincinnatus, who was as conspicuous for his enmity to the commons as for the republican simplicity which has shed a lustre upon his name. The annalists ascribe to him a scheme for obtaining the revocation of all the popular measures by summoning the army, in virtue of their military oath, to meet him at the Lake Regillus, where the protection of the tribunes would have been of no force against the consular imperium. The worst scenes of civil conflict that disgraced the Greek republics were enacted at Rome, which seemed given over to internal war. There is even a tradition, though scarcely clear enough to be recorded as a fact, that nine eminent men of the popular party were burnt alive in the Circus Maximus; such being the punishment provided by an old law for the worst traitors. The state seems only to have been saved from anarchy by the moderating influence of the senate, and the pressure of foreign war. For the Equians and Volscians were again bearing hard upon Latium. The citadel of Tusculum, which had been surprised by the former, was indeed recovered, but Antium was retaken and held by the latter (B.c. 459). A brief truce with the Equians was followed by the war which is illustrated by the celebrated legend of Cincinnatus. In the year B.C. 458, the consul L. Minucius had suffered himself to be surrounded by the enemy in a defile of Mount Algidus.* Five knights escaped from the army, and brought the news of its danger to Rome. The consul, C. Nautius, summoned the senate, and it was resolved that L. Quinctius Cincin *This range, which lay between Præneste and the Alban hill, was a sort of advanced post of the Equians in their wars with Rome. B.C. 458.] STORY OF CINCINNATUS. 241 natus should be named dictator. Though sharing, as we have seen, the strongest prejudices of his order against the plebeians, Cincinnatus was one of a class of patricians which did not die out for many generations, who, amidst the growth of wealth and avarice, preserved the simple frugal life of the olden times, when each burgess had his modest share of the narrow territory of the city. "Hunc et incomptis Curium capillis Utilem bello tulit et Camillum Cum lare fundus." He lived on his little farm of four jugera beyond the Tiber, which he cultivated with his own hands.* When summoned to assume the consulship two years before, he had said to his wife, "I fear, Racilia, our little field must remain this year unsown; and now he was found by the deputies of the Senate digging in the field, with his toga laid aside on the ground. They bade him put on his dress to receive the message of the Senate in a fitting manner, and hailed him as Master of the People, to deliver the consul and his army from the ambush of the Equians. Having appointed for his master of the horse L. Tarquitius Flaccus, a citizen poor and frugal as himself, who had not the census of a knight, Cincinnatus summoned all the people to the Forum, and ordered the shops to be shut and all business to be suspended, till the consul and his army should be rescued. He summoned every man of military age to meet him in the Campus Martius before sunset, each provided with rations for five days, and twelve stakes. The old men prepared the food, while the soldiers cut the stakes where they pleased; and before midnight the dictator and his levy had reached Mount Algidus. Having reconnoitred the enemy's position, Cincinnatus ordered his soldiers to lay down their baggage, and to surround the hostile camp with a ditch and the palisade he had provided. They began their work with a shout that announced their presence to the consul and his army, who forthwith made an attack which occupied the Equians all the night, and allowed them no leisure to turn against the new enemy. So they found themselves in the *Four jugera is about 2 acres. The farm was probably in the suburb of Janiculum, as Rome had not yet recovered her territory beyond the Tiber. The cognomen of Cincinnatus is said to have been derived from his crisp curling locks (cincinni). Three or four stakes for the palisade of the camp formed a regular part of the load which a Roman soldier carried on the march; but these were designed for a special purpose. VOL. II.-16 morning hemmed in between two Roman armies, and had no resource but to surrender at discretion. Cincinnatus made them all pass beneath the yoke, as the symbol of subjection;* and led the Equian general Gracchus, and his chief officers, in triumph back to Rome, which he had left within twenty-four hours, followed by the consul's army, to whom he allowed no share of the spoil. The poetic beauty of the story is somewhat marred by its sequel. Cincinnatus did not lay down his office till he had avenged his son Kæso by the condemnation and banishment of the chief witness against him on a charge of perjury. But he made no further political use of his power; and he retired to his farm, after holding the dictatorship for only sixteen days. The connection of this family legend of the Quinctii with the real history of the Equian and Volscian wars is admirably described by Dr. Arnold:-"In such a warfare as that of the Romans with the Equians and Volscians, there are always sufficient alternations of success to furnish the annalists on either side with matter of triumph; and by exaggerating every victory, and omitting or slightly noticing every defeat, they form a picture such as national vanity most delights in. But we neither can, nor need we desire, to correct and supply the omissions of the details of the Roman historians: it is enough to say that, at the close of the third century of Rome, the warfare which the Romans had to maintain against the Opican nations was generally defensive; that the Equians and Volscians had advanced from the line of the Apennines, and established themselves on the Alban hills in the heart of Latium: that of the thirty Latin states, which had formed the league with Rome (in B.c. 493), thirteen were now either destroyed or were in the possession of the Opicans: that on the Alban hills themselves Tusculum alone remained independent; and that there was no other friendly city to obstruct the irruptions of the enemy into the territory of Rome. Accordingly, that territory was plundered year after year, and, whatever defeats the plunderers may at times have sustained, yet they were never deterred from renewing a contest which they found in the main profitable and glorious. So greatly had the power and dominion of Rome fallen since the overthrow of the monarchy." + So little was the victory of Cincinnatus decisive, that in the The yoke, formed of two spears set upright and one across, was an imitation of the instrument which served draught cattle for a collar, and which may still be seen where oxen are used for ploughing. + History of Rome, vol. i. pp. 208, 209. B.C. 454.] TRIUMVIRS SENT TO GREECE. 243 very next year we find the Equians joining with the Sabines to ravage the rich territory between the Tiber and the Anio. These wars, and the continuance of the pestilence at Rome, had the effect of still postponing the Terentilian law. Meanwhile, the popular party aimed at other objects. The number of the tribunes, already enlarged to five, was now doubled; a worse than doubtful benefit, as it increased the chance that one of so large a number might become the tool of the patricians (B.c. 457). A far greater gain was effected by the law of the tribune Icilius, assigning the Aventine as a residence for the Plebeians. The surface of the hill was parcelled out among them into building sites; and its steep sides made it capable of defence (B.c. 456). Lest this law should be obstructed in its passage, like the Terentilian, by the disorderly interruptions of the patricians and their clients, it was not proposed in the Comitia Tributa, but laid as a petition before the Senate by the tribune, who demanded to be heard in its behalf; and thus the tribunes gained indirectly what amounted to the privilege of initiating measures in the Senate. That body adopted the law as a compromise: it passed the assembly of the centuries; it was confirmed with solemn oaths in the presence of the Pontiffs, and was inscribed on a brass pillar in the temple of Diana on the Aventine. Still the Terentilian law was pressed on by the tribunes, who were re-elected for the fifth time, and as resolutely opposed by the patricians. At length, in the three-hundredth year of the city, an agreement was effected under the auspices of the consuls, who were both of the moderate party. A commission of three (triumviri) was sent to Greece, then in the height of her glory, in the interval between the Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars, to inquire into the Greek laws, especially those of Solon, and to report which of them seemed likely to be advantageous to the state (B.c. 454). It was during the year of their absence that the pestilence, under which Rome had long suffered more or less, broke out with the frightful violence already noticed, aggravated by a famine (B.C. 453). The city would seem to have lain at the mercy of her enemies, had they not suffered equally by the same plague, which may be regarded as a wave of that mysterious disease which desolated Athens twenty-three years later.* The exhaustion caused by it seems to have checked the attacks of the enemies of Rome for several years. In the following year, the pestilence abated; the commissioners returned from Greece; both parties agreed to appoint a Committee * See Vol. I., pp. 498-500. |