CHAP. IX.

MILITARY TRIBUNES.

85

profane for any but a patrician to exercise. But they gained a step in advance when in the year 420 they effected the change by which the annual consuls might be replaced by a board of officers called military tribunes, six in number, and for these plebeians were declared to be eligible. It was, however, an incomplete suc cess. The functions of these tribunes, as their name imports, were mainly confined to the command of the legions; from the highest religious services they were still rigorously excluded. On many occasions the comitia preferred, from motives which cannot be discovered, to recur to the old form again, and yet further, even when military tribunes were appointed, they were still far more generally taken from the higher order than the lower. The arrangement, thus imperfectly carried out, lasted on the whole a period of about fifty years; and again the Roman people elected their annual consuls, and continued to do so uninterruptediy, under widely different forms of government, for many centuries.

Meanwhile, as before, the annals of the city present the accustomed succession of contests with the nations immediately about it, varied with internal dissensions. A second dictatorship of Cincinnatus, in the year 439, is signalized by the slaughter of Spurius Mælius by Servilius Ahala, the master of the horse. The crime of Mælius, according to the account, was an attempt to seize the government of the commonwealth and make himself king or tyrant. This odious charge was easily made, and, whether just or not, was sure to excite the jealousy of the Roman citizens of all classes. It was a good stroke of policy on the part of the patricians to alarm their opponents by misrepresenting the objects of the men who undertook to be their champions. Nevertheless the government still required a strong hand to wield it, and the three dictatorships of Mam. Æmilius followed in quick succession. Another dictator, Aulus Postumius, gained v.c. 323. a crowning victory over the Equi and Volsci at the 0.431. Mount Algidus, and vindicated the firmness of Roman discipline by ordering the execution of his own son, who had fought and conquered, but against his orders. The arms of the Romans began now to be turned in another direction.

Rome, it seems, had discovered a dangerous rival in the Etruscan city of Veii, a strong hill-fortress, about twelve miles beyond the Tiber. Against this adversary her forces were now mainly arrayed. The war with Veii lasted, with short intervals of time, for thirty years; and was at last decided in favor of Rome after a siege of ten years' duration. During this period the military policy of the republic underwent some important modifications. For the first time she determined, as in the case of the city of Fidenæ, to punish an obstinate and perhaps a revolted enemy by

a measure of ruthless extermination. The plan succeeded only too well, and was too often repeated in later times. The planting of military colonies, as at Ardea and Velitræ, was also a novelty. Hitherto the Romans, if we may credit our accounts, were wont to transplant conquered peoples to their own city; but now, and in innumerable cases afterwards, they transferred a number of , their own fellow-citizens to foreign sites, and established them upon the forfeited lands of the enemy. The practice was, for a usage of war, sufficiently legitimate, and it became undoubtedly a genuine source of strength to the conquering nation. But in this interval also for the first time was the practice introduced of giving military pay to the legions. The Roman in arms might become now a regular soldier. Hitherto every citizen capable of bearing arms was liable to the general conscription, and required to serve in the ranks according to his means or census. But this hard law was mitigated by the regular custom of confining the campaign to the spring or summer months. The conscript returned home to reap his fields, and in the winter enjoyed the fruits of his harvest. It was the necessity of maintaining a force constantly under arms through the year, in order to press the socalled siege of Veii, which constrained the magistrates of the commonwealth to furnish the troops required for the service with the pay of the state. This was the first step, but a decisive one, towards the establishment of a standing army and of a regular profession of arms. Without it the leaders of the legions could never have advanced the eagles far beyond the sight of the seven hills; but with it followed in inevitable sequence the elevation of the leaders themselves into candidates for sovereign power. The siege of Veii foreshadowed the fall of the republic.

The conquest of Veii was thus far the most splendid achievement of the Roman arms. It was celebrated in the earliest annals, and possibly in the popular songs of the nation, and there is a peculiar solemnity attending upon the accounts of it which have been delivered to us. The ten years' siege was likened in the popular imagination to that of Troy, and the gods were supposed to have evinced their interest in the one as in the other by prophecies and omens and providential interferences. The overflow of the Alban lake was esteemed a prodigy of deep significance; the priests required that its waters should be carried off by numerous channels, but not allowed to find their own way to the sea. If the Romans succeeded in penetrating into the city by a mine carried beneath the walls, tradition attached to this simple incident an array of supernatural circumstances. The mine, it seems, conducted them actually to the temple of Juno, the tutelary deity of the Veians. Amid the tumult of a general

CHAP. IX.

CONQUEST OF VEII.

87

assault Camillus himself leads the way through this subterranean gallery, and emerges within the sacred precincts. At that moment the Veian king was consulting the gods: the aruspex declared that he should be the victor who should first offer sacrifice on the altar before him. At the words the Roman springs forth and strikes the victim presented for slaughter. Veii falls at once into his hands; the people are massacred or sold as slaves, their riches plundered or confiscated. Never had the Romans gained such glory or such a booty. Camillus himself is terrified at his own too great felicity. He deprecates the wrath of the Avengers, and as he turns round to face the proper quarter of the heavens makes a false step and falls. "Enough," he exclaims; the gods are satisfied with this fall." He had vowed a temple to the Veian Juno on the Aventine, but no one dared to remove her image to its new abode. A troop of noble Romans, clothed in white, presented themselves before it, and demanded the consent of the goddess. The words "I consent" were plainly heard, and the statue itself moved along of its own accord. None of the three hundred triumphs of Rome was more justly celebrated than that in which the conqueror of Veii ascended to the Capitol in his gilded chariot drawn by four milk-white horses.

66

U.C. 358.

The gods, however, had not been satisfied by the fall of Camillus. The people for whom he had done so much turned ungratefully against him. They charged him with detaining at tithe of the spoil as an offering vowed to Apollo, with B.0.396. a design for removing the population of Rome from its ancient seats to his new conquest. Menaced with a public prosecution he withdrew into exile; but as he passed through the gates he turned round and uttered a prayer, or rather a malediction, invoking the gods to bring his compatriots to speedy repentance. And so they did: the Roman legends have always an epigrammatic sting the same year the Gauls entered Rome.

CHAPTER X.

The Gaulish invasion of Italy.—Battle of the Allia and burning of Rome.Victory of Camillus: u.c. 364, B.C. 390.

THE long-protracted contest of the Romans with the Æqui and Volsci had been really a struggle in self-defence, but this the pride of the great conquerors refused in after-times to acknowledge, and they piqued themselves on the glory with which their victorious arms had been always accompanied. The contest with the Gauls which now followed they allowed to have concerned the national existence. The Gauls, indeed, were a mighty people. Under this general name might be comprehended the great mass of the Celtic race, not without much admixture of Iberian and even of Teutonic blood, which occupied the West of Europe from the Rhine to the Atlantic. From the dawn of history at least this people had been constantly pressed upon by the advancing hordes of Germany, and behind these of Sarmatia and Scythia; but the elasticity of the Gallic population had from time to time thrown off this pressure, and rebounded against it with an advance in the contrary direction. Nevertheless the progress of mankind from East to West has been seldom arrested. The opposite movement has been generally fitful and capricious, and subject to repeated reverses. From the sixth century before our era even to the present day the Gauls have made their spasmodic inroads upon countries to the eastward, but in the end they have been invari ably repulsed, and either thrown back within their former limits, or subjected upon the soil they have once occupied to the yoke of the dominant races over which they had for a moment prevailed.

According to our accounts it was in the year B.C. 521 that a vast emigration from the centre of Gaul arrived after rapid conquests upon the banks of the Esis in Italy. This little stream, flowing into the Adriatic a few miles above Ancona, and at some distance to the south of the Rubicon, was the ultimate point to which the Gallic settlements reached. The invaders had established themselves throughout the great valley of the Padus, and had turned the head of the Apennines in their progress southward. Thus far they had been successful in overwhelming the

СНАР. Х.

THE GAULS CAPTURE ROME.

89

remains of the Etruscan domination, which at an earlier period had occupied all the north of Italy to the Alps. At the moment at which we are now arrived these restless warriors, who fought for slaves and cattle and gold, rather than for lands to cultivate and cities to dwell ir, were pressing by a flank movement upon the Etruscans south and west of the Apennines, which at this point afforded them little shelter. Brennus led the Gauls against Clusium. The Romans, foreboding the danger, sent envoys to check their advance by negotiation. The Gauls would listen to no counsel, but pressed the attack, and the Roman officers, three distinguished men of the Fabian Gens, rashly abandoning their character as ambassadors, assisted the Etruscans in their defence. The Gauls appealed to the laws of war, and exclaimed against this treachery. Even at Rome the guilt of the Fabii was not unacknowledged. The fecials demanded that they should be given up. But against this sacrifice the pride of the Romans revolted. It was determined to defy the Gauls, who were already advancing, and an army was sent forward, which confronted them on the banks of the Allia. At this spot, eleven miles above Rome on the left bank of the Tiber, was fought the famous battle v.c. 364. in which the Romans were entirely routed, and a small 1.0.390. remnant of their legions driven headlong back to the city. To the advance of the Gauls no further resistance could be made. The defence even of the walls was abandoned. The fugitives crowded into the Capitol, carrying with them only such effects as they could seize in their tumultuary flight, and almost the next day the Gauls entered Rome. The defeat, the rout, the panic were all disgraceful; but the Romans consoled themselves in aftertimes by the proud story they invented that the senators seated in the Forum in their chairs of office received the invader with dignified composure, and for a moment overawed him. It was not till one of the Gauls, who impertinently stroked the white beard of the aged Papirius, was stricken to the ground with a blow of the senator's ivory-headed staff, that the barbarians gave loose to their savage nature and ruthlessly massacred the whole august assembly.

The city was now given up to pillage and fire, but the Capitol was still preserved. The Gauls, repulsed in their first furious assault, were devoid of the means of forming a regular siege. They set themselves down around it to reduce it by weariness or famine. But now the gods turned to the side of the devoted city. The Fabii had brought it to the brink of ruin, but one of the same house descended boldly from the citadel, crossed the ridge which connected it with the Quirinal, and there, in the very face of the enemy, performed the expiatory rites which the occasion was