Book 1

pr.1. The Roman people, from King Romulus to Caesar Augustus, accomplished over seven hundred years so much in peace and in war that, if one were to compare the greatness of its empire with its age, he would suppose it older than it is.

pr.2. So widely did it carry its arms across the world that those who read its history learn the deeds not of a single people but of the human race. It was tossed about in so many labours and dangers that Valour and Fortune seem to have striven together to establish its dominion.

pr.3. Therefore, since the knowledge of this is, if anything is, worth the effort, yet because the very greatness of the subject obstructs itself and the variety of its events breaks the edge of attention, I shall do as those do who paint the regions of the earth: I shall embrace its whole likeness as though in a brief sketch, contributing something, I hope, to the admiration of the foremost of peoples, if I display the whole of its greatness at once and together. If, then, one considers the Roman people as though it were a single man and reviews its entire life—

pr.4. how it began, how it grew up, how it came as it were to a certain ripeness of youth, and how afterwards it grew old as it were—he will find four stages and steps in its progress.

pr.5. Its first age was under the kings, lasting nearly four hundred years, during which it struggled around the city itself with its neighbours. This will be its infancy.

pr.6. The next, from the consuls Brutus and Collatinus to the consuls Appius Claudius and Quintus Fulvius, extends over a hundred and fifty years, during which it subdued Italy. This was the time most fierce in men and arms, and therefore one might call it its adolescence.

pr.7. Then to Caesar Augustus there are a hundred and fifty years more, during which it brought peace to the whole world. This is now the youth of the empire itself, and as it were its sturdy maturity.

pr.8. From Caesar Augustus to our own age there are not much less than two hundred years, during which, through the inactivity of the Caesars, it grew old as it were and wasted away—except that under the emperor Trajan it stirred its muscles, and beyond all hope the old age of the empire, as though its youth were restored, flourished again.

1.1. The first founder both of the city and of the empire was Romulus, born of Mars and Rhea Silvia.

1.2. This the priestess confessed of herself when she was with child, nor did report long doubt it, when, cast out at the command of King Amulius into the running stream with his brother Remus, he could not be destroyed.

1.3. For the Tiber held back its waters, and a she-wolf, leaving her cubs, followed the wailing and gave her teat to the infants and played the part of mother. So Faustulus, a shepherd of the royal flock, finding them by a tree, carried them into his hut and reared them.

1.4. Alba was then the chief town of Latium, the work of Iulus; for he had scorned Lavinium, his father Aeneas's city. From these Amulius now reigned in the seventh generation, having driven out his brother Numitor, of whose daughter Romulus was born.

1.5. So at once, in the first flush of youth, he hurled his great-uncle from the citadel and restored his grandfather. He himself, a lover of the river and of the hills among which he had been reared, set about the walls of a new city.

1.6. They were twins; and to decide which should take the auspices and which should rule, they resolved to call in the gods. Remus took the Aventine hill, Romulus the Palatine. The first saw six vultures,

1.7. the latter afterwards, but twelve. So, victorious in augury, he raised his city, full of hope that it would be warlike; for this the birds, accustomed to blood and prey, promised.

1.8. For the protection of the new city a rampart seemed to suffice; and while Remus mocked its lowness by leaping over it, he was killed—whether by his brother's order is doubtful: at any rate he was the first victim, and he consecrated the fortification of the new city with his own blood. Romulus had made the image of a city rather than a city; inhabitants were lacking.

1.9. Close by there was a grove; this he made a sanctuary, and at once a wondrous multitude of men gathered: Latin and Tuscan shepherds, some even from across the sea, Phrygians who had come under Aeneas, Arcadians who had come under the leadership of Evander. Thus out of varied elements, as it were, he gathered one body, and the king himself made the Roman people.

1.10. It was a people of men all of one age. And so, marriages being sought from their neighbours and not granted, they were seized by force. For under pretence of equestrian games the maidens who had come to the spectacle became their prey; and this at once was the cause of wars. The Veientes were beaten and put to flight.

1.11. The town of the Caeninenses was captured and plundered. Moreover the king carried back with his own hands the spoils of honour taken from their king Acro and offered them to Jupiter Feretrius.

1.12. To the Sabines the gates were betrayed by the maiden Tarpeia. She had craftily asked as her reward what they wore on their left arms—whether shields or bracelets is doubtful; they, to keep their word and at the same time to avenge themselves, crushed her under their shields.

1.13. So, with the enemy admitted within the walls, there was a fierce battle in the very forum, so fierce that Romulus prayed Jupiter to stay the shameful flight of his men; hence the temple and the title Jupiter the Stayer.

1.14. At last the ravished women threw themselves, with torn hair, between the raging combatants. Thus peace was made with Tatius and a treaty struck; and there followed a thing wonderful to tell: the enemy left their own homes and migrated into the new city, sharing their ancestral wealth with their kinsmen by marriage as a dowry.

1.15. His strength being soon increased, this most wise king imposed upon the state the following order: the young men, divided into tribes, should keep watch in horse and arms against the sudden alarms of war, the counsel of the state should rest with the elders, who from their authority were called Fathers, and from their age were called the Senate.

1.16. When all this had been ordered, suddenly, while he was holding an assembly before the city near the marsh of Caprae, he was carried off from men's sight.

1.17. Some think he was torn to pieces by the senate on account of his rather harsh temper; but a storm that arose and an eclipse of the sun gave the appearance of his being taken up among the gods.

1.18. To this Julius Proculus soon gave credit, affirming that he had seen Romulus, in a form more august than he had had in life; and that he had commanded besides that they should receive him as a deity; that he was called Quirinus in heaven; and that it was the will of the gods that Rome should rule the nations.

2.1. To Romulus succeeded Numa Pompilius, whom, while he lived at Cures among the Sabines, they sought of their own accord on account of the man's famous piety.

2.2. He taught them the sacrifices and ceremonies and the whole worship of the immortal gods; he ordained the pontiffs, the augurs, the Salii, and the other priesthoods, and divided the year into twelve months and into lawful and unlawful days; he gave the sacred shields and the Palladium, certain secret pledges of empire, and the double-faced Janus, the token of peace and war, and above all he gave to the Vestal virgins the hearth of Vesta to be tended, so that, in the likeness of the heavenly stars, the flame, guardian of the empire, might keep watch:

2.3. all this as though by the prompting of the goddess Egeria, that the barbarians might the more readily accept it.

2.4. In the end he so reduced a fierce people that it governed by religion and justice the empire it had won by force and wrong.

3.1. Tullus Hostilius succeeded Numa Pompilius, to whom in honour of his valour the kingdom was given of free will. He founded the whole of military discipline and the art of warfare.

3.2. And so, having drilled his youth in a wonderful manner, he dared to challenge the Albans, a powerful people and long pre-eminent.

3.3. But since the two sides, being of equal strength, were wearing each other down in frequent battles, the war was reduced to a brief decision, and the destinies of both peoples were entrusted to the Horatii and Curiatii, triplet brothers on either side.

3.4. The contest was doubtful and splendid, and in its very issue marvellous. For when three on the one side had been wounded and two on the other slain, the one Horatius who survived, adding cunning to valour, in order to separate his enemies, feigned flight, and attacking them one by one, as each was able to follow, overcame them.

3.5. Thus—a glory rare in any other case—the victory was won by the hand of a single man, which he soon stained with a murder. He had seen his sister weeping over the spoils of her betrothed, who was indeed an enemy. This too untimely love of the maiden he avenged with the sword.

3.6. The laws cited his crime, but his valour carried off the parricide, and the deed was held lower than his glory. Nor was the Alban long faithful. For when, by treaty, men had been sent to his aid in the war against Fidenae, they stood midway between the two armies and waited upon fortune.

3.7. But the crafty king, when he saw his allies inclining to the enemy, raised the spirits of his men by pretending that he had so ordered it: hence hope to our men, fear to the enemy. So the treachery of the traitors came to nothing.

3.8. And so, the enemy defeated, he bound Mettius Fufetius, the breaker of the treaty, between two chariots and had him torn apart by swift horses; and Alba itself, though it was the mother city, yet because it was a rival, he razed, after first transferring all the wealth of the city and the people itself to Rome;

3.9. so that the kindred state seemed not to have perished but rather to have returned into its own body.

4.1. Next Ancus Marcius, grandson of Pompilius through his daughter,

4.2. of a temper like his grandfather's. And so he both encircled the walls with a rampart, and joined the Tiber, which flowed between, to the city by a bridge, and planted a colony at Ostia, on the very border of sea and river; foreseeing, evidently, even then in his mind that the wealth and supplies of the whole world would be received there as into a kind of maritime lodging of the city.

5.1. Tarquinius Priscus afterwards, although of foreign and overseas origin, sought the kingdom of his own accord and received it on account of his industry and refinement; for, being a native of Corinth, he had mingled Greek genius with Italian arts.

5.2. He both enlarged the majesty of the senate by their number, and increased the knights by three centuries, in so far as Attius Naevius, a man supreme in augury, forbade the number to be increased.

5.3. The king, to make trial of him, asked whether what he himself had conceived in his mind

5.4. could be done. He, having made trial by augury, answered that it could. "Why," said the king, "I was thinking whether I could cut that whetstone with a razor;"

5.5. and the augur said, "You can, then," and he cut it. Thence augury became sacred to the Romans. And Tarquinius was no less prompt in war than in peace; for he subdued twelve peoples of Tuscany in frequent campaigns.

5.6. Thence the rods of office, the robes of state, the curule chairs, the rings, the trappings, the generals' cloaks, the bordered togas; thence the custom of riding in triumph in a golden chariot drawn by four horses, the embroidered togas and the palm-decked tunics; in short all the ornaments and insignia by which the dignity of empire is made conspicuous were taken over.

6.1. Servius Tullius next seized the helm of the city, nor did the obscurity of his birth, though born of a slave mother, hinder him. For Tanaquil, the wife of Tarquinius, had given his remarkable nature a liberal upbringing, and a flame seen about his head had promised that he would be illustrious.

6.2. Therefore, between the death of Tarquinius and the choice of his successor, set in the king's place by the queen's contrivance as though only for the time, he so managed with industry a throne won by guile that he seemed to have come to it by right.

6.3. By him the Roman people was brought into a census, distributed into classes, and divided into decuries and guilds; and with the king's supreme skill the state was so ordered that all distinctions of property, rank, age, occupation, and office were entered upon the rolls, and thus the greatest community was held together with the care of a smallest household.

7.1. The last of all the kings was Tarquinius, to whom the surname Superbus, the Proud, was given from his character.

7.2. He chose rather to snatch the ancestral throne, which was held by Servius, than to wait for it; and, having sent assassins against him, he wielded a power gained by crime no better than he had won it.

7.3. Nor did his wife Tullia fall short of his ways: she, that she might salute her husband as king, drove her startled horses over her father's bleeding body as she rode in her carriage.

7.4. But he himself, raging against the senate with murders, against the commons with floggings, and against all with that pride which to good men is more grievous than cruelty, when he had wearied his savagery at home, at last turned against his enemies.

7.5. So the strong towns of Latium were taken: Ardea, Ocriculum, Gabii, Suessa Pometia.

7.6. Then too he was cruel against his own. For he did not hesitate to flog his son, so that, pretending to desert to the enemy,

7.7. he might thus gain credit there. When, as he had wished, his son had been received at Gabii and asked through messengers what he wished done, the king, who happened to be striking off with a stick the heads of poppies that stood up tall, since by this he meant it to be understood that the leading men must be put to death, made no reply, as though in silence through pride. From the spoils of the captured cities he raised a temple.

7.8. When it was being consecrated, while the other gods gave way, a marvellous thing is said to have happened: Youth and the god Terminus stood their ground.

7.9. The seers were pleased at the obstinacy of these deities, since they promised that all would be firm and eternal. But this was more startling, that, as men were laying the foundations of the shrine, a human head was found in them, and none doubted that the portent foretold a most splendid seat of empire and capital of the world.

7.10. So long did the Roman people endure the pride of the king, while lust was absent; but this outrage on the part of his children it could not bear.

7.11. When one of them had offered violence to Lucretia, a most noble woman, the matron expiated her dishonour with the sword, and the kingship was taken from the kings.

8.1. This is the first age of the Roman people and as it were its infancy, which it had under seven kings, by a certain providence of the fates so varied in temper as the reason and the advantage of the state required.

8.2. For what was more ardent than Romulus? Such a man was needed, to seize a kingdom.

8.3. What more devout than Numa? So the situation demanded, that a fierce people might be softened by fear of the gods.

8.4. And again, how necessary was that master of warfare, Tullus, to warlike men, that he might sharpen their valour by method! And again, Ancus the builder, to extend the city by a colony, to join it by a bridge, to protect it with a wall!

8.5. And then, how much dignity, drawn from his very dress, did the ornaments and insignia of Tarquinius add to the foremost of peoples!

8.6. What did the census conducted by Servius effect, but that the Roman state should come to know itself? Finally even the harsh tyranny of that Proud one was not without profit—indeed it was of the greatest profit.

8.7. For thus it came about that the people, harried by wrongs, was kindled with a passion for liberty.

9.1. And so, under the leadership and at the prompting of Brutus and Collatinus, to whom the dying matron had entrusted the avenging of her wrong, the Roman people, stirred up as it were by some inspiration of the gods to vindicate the honour of liberty and chastity, suddenly cast off the king, plundered his goods, consecrated his land to its own Mars, and transferred the power to those same champions of its liberty—yet with the law and the name changed.

9.2. For it resolved that the office should be annual instead of perpetual, and twofold instead of single, lest the power should be corrupted by sole tenure or by duration; and it called them consuls instead of kings, that they might remember they were bound to consult for their fellow citizens.

9.3. And so great a joy in their new liberty had come upon them that, scarcely able to believe in the changed state of things, they dismissed from the city even one of the consuls, Lucretia's husband, merely on account of his royal name and family, his rods of office being taken from him.

9.4. And so Horatius Publicola, put in his place, strove with the greatest zeal to increase the majesty of a free people. For he both lowered the fasces before the assembly for it, and gave the right of appeal even against the consuls themselves, and, lest he should give offence by the appearance of a citadel, he lowered his own house, which stood high, to the level ground.

9.5. Brutus indeed steered toward the favour of the citizens even by the slaughter and parricide of his own household. For when he had learned that his own sons were engaged in plotting to recall the kings to the city, he dragged them into the forum and in the midst of the assembly beat them with rods and struck them with the axe, so that he plainly seemed, as a public father, to have adopted the people in place of his children.

9.6. Now free at last, the Roman people first took up arms against foreigners for the sake of liberty, then for its borders, then for its allies, then for glory and dominion, its neighbours provoking it ceaselessly on every side;

9.7. for it had not a clod of ancestral soil, but a hostile boundary at once, and, set midway between Latium and the Etruscans as though at a kind of crossroads, it ran out at every gate against an enemy;

9.8. until, as though by a kind of contagion, it advanced one by one against each people, and, seizing all that were nearest, brought the whole of Italy under itself.

10.1. The kings being driven from the city, it first took up arms for liberty. For Porsenna, king of the Etruscans, was at hand with vast forces and was bringing back the Tarquins by armed strength.

10.2. Yet, though he pressed them both with arms and with famine, and, having seized the Janiculum, lay upon them in the very jaws of the city, it withstood him, drove him back, and at last struck him with such admiration that, though the upper hand was his, he of his own accord struck a treaty of friendship with men all but conquered.

10.3. Then occurred those three prodigies and marvels of the Roman name—Horatius, Mucius, Cloelia—who, were they not in the annals, would today seem fables.

10.4. For Horatius Cocles, after he could not alone drive back the enemy pressing on from every side, the bridge being cut behind him, swam across the Tiber and did not let go his arms.

10.5. Mucius Scaevola attacked the king by stealth in his own camp, but when, his blow having gone astray upon one of the king's attendants, he was seized, he thrust his hand into the burning altar-fires and doubled the terror by his cunning.

10.6. "See, that you may know," he said, "what manner of man you have escaped: three hundred of us have sworn the same"; while meanwhile—monstrous to tell—he himself was undismayed,

10.7. but the king trembled, as though it were his own hand that burned. Such indeed were the men; but, lest either sex should fail of praise, behold the valour of maidens too. One of the hostages given to the king, Cloelia, having slipped past her guard, rode across her native river.

10.8. And the king indeed, terrified by so many and such great marvels of valour, bade them be safe and free. The Tarquins nevertheless fought on, until Brutus slew Arruns the king's son with his own hand and breathed out his life over him from a mutual wound—plainly as though he were pursuing the adulterer even to the underworld.

11.1. The Latins too championed the Tarquins out of rivalry and envy, that a people which lorded it abroad might at least be a slave at home. And so all Latium, under the leadership of Mamilius of Tusculum, took heart as though to avenge the king.

11.2. At the lake of Regillus the battle raged long with varying fortune, until Postumius the dictator himself hurled a standard among the enemy—a new and remarkable device—that it might be recovered from there.

11.3. Cossus the master of the horse ordered the bridles to be taken off—and this was new—so that the cavalry might charge more fiercely.

11.4. So fierce, in the end, was the battle that report has handed down that the gods were present at the spectacle. Two young men on white horses flew past like stars; that they were Castor and Pollux no one doubted. And so the general himself paid them homage, and, having bargained for victory, promised them temples and gave them—plainly as though it were pay for his fellow soldiers, the gods.

11.5. Thus far the war was for liberty; soon it was fought ceaselessly and without intermission with the same Latins over its borders.

11.6. Cora—who would believe it?—and Alsium were a terror; Satricum and Corniculum were provinces. Of Verulae and Bovillae one is ashamed, yet we triumphed.

11.7. Tibur, now a suburb, and Praeneste, now our summer pleasure, were sought after by vows proclaimed on the Capitol.

11.8. Faesulae was then what Carrhae has lately been, the grove of Aricia what the Hercynian forest is, Fregellae what Gesoriacum, the Tiber what the Euphrates.

11.9. To have conquered Corioli too—for shame—was so great a glory that Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus put the name of the captured town upon himself as though it were Numantia or Africa.

11.10. There survive even the spoils won from Antium, which Maenius, having captured the enemy's fleet, fastened up on the platform of the forum—if indeed that was a fleet, for there were but six beaked ships. But that number, in those beginnings, was a naval war.

11.11. The most stubborn of the Latins, however, were the Aequi and the Volsci, and they were our daily enemies, so to speak.

11.12. But these in particular Titus Quinctius subdued, that dictator from the plough, who by a glorious victory recovered the besieged and all but captured camp of the consul Manlius.

11.13. It chanced to be the season of sowing, when a lictor found this patrician leaning on his plough in the very midst of his work. Then, setting out to battle, he conquered the enemy, and, that nothing might fail of the likeness of his rustic labour, sent them under the yoke after the manner of cattle.

11.14. Thus, the campaign ended, the triumphant husbandman returned to his oxen again—heaven be witness—and with what speed!

11.15. The war was begun and finished within fifteen days, so that the dictator plainly seemed to have hurried back to the work he had left.

12.1. Constant and yearly enemies from Etruria were the Veientes, so much so that the single clan of the Fabii undertook to raise an extraordinary force against them and waged the war as a private one. The disaster is well and more than well known.

12.2. Three hundred were slain at the Cremera, a patrician army; and so the gate by which they had marched out to battle was branded with an accursed name.

12.3. But that disaster was expiated by mighty victories, after one by one their strongest towns were captured, though indeed with varying outcome.

12.4. The Falisci surrendered of their own accord, Fidenae was burned with its own fire, and the Veientes were utterly plundered and destroyed.

12.5. When the Falisci were under siege, the good faith of the general seemed marvellous, and not without reason, in that he sent back to them of his own accord, in bonds, the schoolmaster who had betrayed the city, together with the boys he had brought along.

12.6. For that holy and wise man knew that to be the true victory which is won with faith unbroken and honour unstained.

12.7. The men of Fidenae, since they were no match in steel, had come forth in a frenzied fashion, armed with torches and with parti-coloured fillets like serpents, to spread terror; but that ghastly aspect was an omen of their own overthrow.

12.8. How great a city Veii was, the ten-year siege shows. Then for the first time men wintered under hides, winter quarters were reckoned as paid service, and the soldier was bound of his own accord by an oath not to return until the city was taken.

12.9. The spoils taken from King Lars Tolumnius were carried back in triumph to Feretrius. In the end the destruction of the city was accomplished not by ladders nor by assault, but by a mine and subterranean stratagems.

12.10. So great, in fine, did the magnitude of the plunder appear that a tithe of it was sent to Pythian Apollo, and the whole Roman people was summoned to the sacking of the city.

12.11. Such then was Veii. Who now remembers that it ever existed? What remains of it? What trace? The credit of the annals is strained for us to believe that Veii ever was.

13.1. Here, whether through the envy of the gods or by fate, the most rapid course of the onrushing empire is for a little while checked by the inroad of the Senonian Gauls.

13.2. Whether that time was more disastrous to the Roman people by reason of its calamity,

13.3. or more glorious by reason of its proofs of valour, I do not know. So great, at any rate, was the force of the calamity that I suppose it was brought upon them by heaven as a trial, the immortal gods wishing to know whether Roman valour deserved the dominion of the world.

13.4. The Senonian Gauls, a people fierce by nature, rude in manners, and besides this by the very bulk of their bodies and the size of their arms, were so terrible in every kind that they plainly seemed born for the destruction of men and the overthrow of cities.

13.5. These, having long ago set out in a vast host from the farthest shores of the earth and from the Ocean that girds all things, when they had already laid waste the lands between, and had set their dwellings between the Alps and the Po, not even content with these, were roaming through Italy;

13.6. then they were besieging the city of Clusium. On behalf of allies and confederates the Roman intervened; envoys were sent according to custom. But what right has any force among barbarians? They behaved more fiercely, and thence arose the conflict.

13.7. So, when the Gauls turned from Clusium and were coming toward Rome, the consul Fabius met them with an army at the river Allia. Not lightly was there ever a fouler disaster; and so Rome condemned this day in her calendars.

13.8. The army being routed, they were already drawing near the walls of the city. There were no garrisons. Then indeed, as never on any other occasion, appeared that true Roman valour.

13.9. First of all the elders, men who had held the highest offices, gathered in the forum, and there, the pontiff devoting them, they consecrated themselves to the gods of the underworld;

13.10. and at once, each returning to his own house, just as they were in their robes of state and full attire, they seated themselves in their curule chairs, so that, when the enemy should come,

13.11. each might die in his own dignity. The pontiffs and flamens hid whatever was most sacred in the temples, part buried in the earth in jars, part placed on wagons and carried off with them to Veii.

13.12. At the same time the virgins of the priesthood of Vesta accompanied the fleeing sacred objects with bare feet. Yet one man of the commons, Albinius, is said to have taken up the fugitives, who, setting down his wife and children, received the virgins into his wagon. So far, even then, in the last extremity, did public religion stand higher than private affections. The youth, however, who, it is sufficiently agreed, were scarcely a thousand men, under the leadership of Manlius occupied the citadel of the Capitoline hill, calling upon Jupiter himself as though present, that, as they had run together to defend his temple, so he might guard their valour by his divine power.

13.14. Meanwhile the Gauls were at hand, and at first, fearing the open city lest some treachery lay beneath, but soon, when they saw the solitude, they invaded it with equal shouting and onset. They went up to the houses standing open everywhere. There, finding old men seated in their curule chairs in their bordered robes, they at first revered them like gods and guardian spirits; soon, when it was clear that they were men, and they would not deign to make any answer, they slaughtered them with frenzy as wanton, hurled torches upon the buildings, and levelled the whole city with fire and sword and their own hands.

13.15. For six months the barbarians—who would believe it?—hung about a single hill, trying everything not only by day but by night as well; yet Manlius, roused at night by the cackling of a goose as they crept up, hurled them from the top of the rock, and, to take away the enemy's hope, although in the depth of famine, nonetheless, for the show of confidence, threw loaves down from the citadel.

13.16. And on a certain fixed day he sent the pontiff Fabius from the citadel through the midst of the enemy's guards to perform the solemn sacrifice on the Quirinal hill. And he, passing unharmed through the midst of the enemy's weapons by the help of religion, returned and reported that the gods were propitious.

13.17. At last, when the siege had now wearied the barbarians, and they were selling their withdrawal for a thousand pounds of gold, and that with insolence—for, as they piled an unfair weight, they added even a sword and proudly cried "Woe to the conquered!"—Camillus, suddenly attacking them from behind, so cut them down that he wiped out all the traces of the fires with a flood of Gallic blood.

13.18. It is right to give thanks to the immortal gods even for the name of so great a disaster. That fire hid the huts of the shepherds, and that flame concealed the poverty of Romulus. What else did that conflagration effect, but that a city destined for the dwelling of men and gods should seem not destroyed nor buried, but rather expiated and purified? And so, after the city had been championed by Manlius and restored by Camillus, it rose up against its neighbours even more fiercely and vehemently.

13.19. And first of all, not content with having driven that very Gallic race from its walls, when they were spreading their wrecks more widely through Italy, it pursued them under the leadership of Camillus so completely that today no trace of the Senones survives.

13.20. Once they were slaughtered at the Anio, when in single combat Manlius stripped from a barbarian, among the spoils, a golden torque, whence the Torquati. A second time in the Pomptine territory, when in a like battle Valerius, aided by a sacred bird sitting on his helmet, bore off the spoils; and thence the Corvini.

13.21. And yet, some years after, Dolabella destroyed all that remained of them in Etruria at the lake of Vadimo, that none might survive of that people who could boast of having burned the city of Rome.

14.1. Turning from the Gauls to the Latins under the consuls Manlius Torquatus and Decius Mus, the Romans found them always indeed hostile from rivalry of empire, but then especially out of contempt for the burned city, when they were demanding the rights of citizenship, a share of the empire and of the magistracies, and were daring to join battle near Capua.

14.2. At which time who will wonder that the enemy gave way? When one of the consuls slew his own son, though victorious, because he had fought against orders, and showed that there was more in command than in victory;

14.3. while the other, as though by the prompting of the gods, with his head veiled, devoted himself before the front line to the gods of the underworld, that, hurling himself among the thickest weapons of the enemy, he might open a new path to victory along the track of his own blood.

15.1. From the Latins he turned to attack the nation of the Sabines, who, unmindful of the kinship formed under Titus Tatius, had by a kind of contagion joined the Latins in the wars.

15.2. But under the consul Curius Dentatus the whole region, wherever the Nar, the Anio, and the springs of Velinus flow, as far as the Adriatic Sea, was laid waste with fire and sword.

15.3. By which victory so many men and so much land were brought into subjection that in which there was the greater amount the very conqueror could not reckon.

16.1. Then, moved by the prayers of Campania, the Romans attacked the Samnites, not on their own behalf,

16.2. but, the more honourably, on behalf of their allies. There was a treaty struck with both peoples, but with the Campanians a more sacred and earlier one, by the surrender of all that they had; and so the Roman waged the Samnite war as though for himself.

16.3. The most beautiful tract of all, not only of Italy but of the whole world, is the region of Campania. Nothing is softer than its sky: indeed it blooms with flowers twice a year. Nothing more fruitful than its soil:

16.4. for this reason it is called the battleground of Bacchus and Ceres. Nothing more hospitable than its sea: here are those famous harbours, Caieta, Misenum, Baiae warm with its springs,

16.5. the Lucrine and Avernus, certain restful retreats of the sea. Here are those vine-clad mountains, Gaurus, Falernus, Massicus, and most beautiful of all Vesuvius, the imitator of Aetna's fires.

16.6. Cities by the sea: Formiae, Cumae, Puteoli, Naples, Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Capua itself, the head of cities, once reckoned among the three greatest.

16.7. For this city, for these regions, the Roman people attacked the Samnites—a nation which, if you ask of wealth, was adorned with gold and silver arms and parti-coloured raiment even to ostentation; if of treachery, prowled mostly among forests and the snares of the mountains; if of frenzy and madness, was driven by sacred laws and human sacrifices to the destruction of the city; if of stubbornness, six times broke the treaty and was made bolder by its very disasters.

16.8. Yet these, in fifty years, through the Fabii and Papirii, fathers and their sons, it so subdued and tamed, it so demolished the very ruins of their cities, that today Samnium is sought for in Samnium itself, and the material for four-and-twenty triumphs hardly appears.

16.9. The most notable and famous disaster, however, at the hands of this people was suffered at the Caudine Forks under the consuls Veturius and Postumius.

16.10. The army being shut in by a trick within that pass, from which it could not escape, the enemy's general Pontius, amazed at so great an opportunity, consulted his father Herennius. And he, with the wisdom of age, advised either to let them all go or to kill them all;

16.11. but Pontius chose rather to strip them of their arms and send them under the yoke, so that they should neither be friends through his kindness nor, after the disgrace, the more enemies. And so the consuls at once magnificently, by a voluntary surrender, broke off the shameful terms; and the soldiery, demanding vengeance under the leadership of Papirius—horrible to tell—raged with drawn swords along the very road before the battle; and the enemy themselves bore witness that the eyes of all blazed in the encounter. Nor was an end made to the slaughter before they set the yoke back upon both the enemy and their captured general.

17.1. Thus far the Roman people had warred with single nations, soon it warred with them in a mass; yet even so it was a match for them all. The twelve peoples of the Etruscans, the Umbrians, untouched till that time, the most ancient people of Italy, and the remnant of the Samnites, suddenly conspired to the destruction of the Roman name.

17.2. There was vast terror at so many and so great peoples at once. Far and wide through Etruria the hostile

17.3. standards of four columns flitted about. The Ciminian forest meanwhile, lying in the midst, before that quite impassable like a Caledonian or Hercynian wood, was then such a terror that the senate warned the consul not to dare to enter so great a peril.

17.4. But none of these things terrified the leader from sending his brother ahead to reconnoitre the approaches. He, having spied out everything by night in shepherd's garb, reported the way safe.

17.5. So Fabius Maximus brought a most dangerous war to an end without danger. For, suddenly attacking them while disordered and scattered, and having seized the heights above, he thundered down by right upon those beneath.

17.6. For such was the appearance of that battle, as though weapons were being hurled from heaven and the clouds upon earthborn giants.

17.7. Nor yet was that victory bloodless. For one of the consuls, Decius, hard pressed in a hollow of the valley, after his country's manner offered his devoted head to the gods of the underworld, and accomplished the solemn consecration of his family as the price of victory.

18.1. There follows the Tarentine war, one indeed in title and name, but manifold in victory. For this involved, in one ruin as it were, the Campanians, the Apulians, the Lucanians, and the Tarentines, the head of the war—that is, the whole of Italy—and with all these Pyrrhus, the most famous king of Greece; so that at one and the same time the Romans both completed the conquest of Italy and made a beginning of triumphs overseas.

18.2. Tarentum, the work of the Lacedaemonians, once the head of Calabria and Apulia and all Lucania, renowned both for its greatness and its walls and harbour,

18.3. and wonderful too in situation. For, placed in the very jaws of the Adriatic Sea, it sends out its sails to all lands—Istria, Illyricum, Epirus, Achaia, Africa, Sicily. Overlooking the harbour, set so as to command a view of the sea, is the theatre, which indeed was the cause of all her calamities to that wretched city.

18.4. It chanced to be celebrating games, when they saw the Roman fleets rowing toward the shore, and, taking them for the enemy, they rushed out and fell upon them without distinction.

18.5. For who or whence were the Romans? Nor was that enough. There came without delay an embassy bearing complaint. This too they violated by an outrage foul and shameful to tell;

18.6. and hence the war. But the preparation was terrible, when so many peoples rose together for the Tarentines, and, more vehement than all, Pyrrhus, who, to champion a half-Greek state founded by Lacedaemonians, was coming with the whole forces of Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia, and with elephants unknown until that time, by sea and by land, with men, horses, arms, and with the added terror of beasts besides.

18.7. At Heraclea in Campania and the river Liris, under the consul Laevinus, was the first battle, which was so fierce that Obsidius, the prefect of the Ferentanian squadron, charging upon the king, threw him into confusion and forced him, casting away his insignia, to retire from the battle.

18.8. The day was lost, had not the elephants, turning the battle into a spectacle, run forward; whose great size, and besides their hideousness and their strange smell and the noise they made, so terrified the horses—since they imagined the beasts unknown to them larger than they were—that they spread flight and slaughter far and wide.

18.9. In Apulia next, at Asculum, under the consuls Curius and Fabricius, the fighting went better. For now the terror of the beasts had worn off, and Gaius Numicius, a hastate of the fourth legion, by cutting off the trunk of one of them, had shown that the beasts could be killed.

18.10. And so javelins were heaped upon them, and torches hurled into the towers covered whole columns of the enemy with blazing ruin; nor was there any other end to the disaster than when night parted them, and the king himself, last of the fugitives, wounded in the shoulder, was carried back upon his own arms by his attendants.

18.11. The last battle of Lucania was fought on what they call the Arusine plains, under the same leaders as before; but then the victory was complete. The outcome which valour would have given, chance gave.

18.12. For when the elephants had been brought forward again into the front line, the heavy stroke of a weapon driven into the head turned one of their young aside; and when it ran back, complaining with a shrill cry through the slaughter of its own, its mother recognised it,

18.13. and, as though to avenge it, sprang forward, then threw everything around her into confusion with her great bulk, as though it were all hostile. And so the same beasts which had won the first victory made the second equal, and gave up the third without dispute.

18.14. Nor indeed was the struggle with King Pyrrhus carried on only by arms and in the field, but also by counsel and at home. For after the first victory the crafty man, having perceived the valour of the Romans, at once despaired of arms and betook himself to stratagems.

18.15. For he burned the slain, treated his captives kindly, and restored them without ransom; and, sending envoys to the city, strove in every way to be received into friendship by a treaty made.

18.16. But in war and in peace, abroad and at home, Roman valour then approved itself in every part, nor did any victory more than the Tarentine display the fortitude of the Roman people, the wisdom of the senate,

18.17. the magnanimity of its leaders. What manner of men were those whom we have heard were crushed by the elephants in the first battle? The wounds of all were in the breast, some had died together with their enemies in their own death, the sword was in the hand of all, and the threats remained on their faces, and even in death their anger lived.

18.18. At which Pyrrhus so marvelled that he said: "Oh, how easy it were to win the dominion of the world, either with Roman soldiers given to me, or with myself as king of the Romans!" And what haste was theirs in renewing

18.19. their army! "When," said Pyrrhus, "I see myself plainly begotten of the seed of Hercules, for whom, as from the Lernaean snake, so many heads of slain enemies spring up again as though from his own blood." And what manner of senate was that,

18.20. when, after Appius Caecus had finished his speech, the envoys, driven from the city with their gifts, told their king, when he asked what they thought of the enemy's seat, that the city had seemed to them a temple, and that the senate had been granted to be an assembly of kings!

18.21. What manner of leaders, again, were these? Either in the camp, when Curius sent back the physician who offered the king's head for sale, and Fabricius rejected a share of the kingdom offered him by the king;

18.22. or in peace, when Curius preferred his earthen vessels to Samnite gold, and Fabricius, with the gravity of a censor, condemned as luxury the ten pounds of silver owned by Rufinus, a man of consular rank.

18.23. Who then would wonder that, with such characters and such valour in its soldiers, the Roman people was victorious, and that in the single Tarentine war, within four years, it subdued the greater part of Italy, the bravest nations, the wealthiest cities, and the most fruitful regions? Or what could so surpass belief,

18.24. as when the beginnings of the war are compared with its end? Victorious in the first battle, Pyrrhus, while all Campania trembled, ravaged the Liris and Fregellae, looked down from the citadel of Praeneste upon the city all but captured, and from the twentieth milestone filled the eyes of the panic-stricken state with smoke and dust.

18.25. The same man, afterwards twice stripped of his camp, twice wounded, and put to flight across sea and land into his own Greece, brought peace and rest, and so great a spoil from so many of the wealthiest nations that Rome could not contain her own victory.

18.26. For surely no fairer or more splendid triumph ever entered the city.

18.27. Before that day you would have seen nothing but the cattle of the Volsci, the flocks of the Sabines, the wagons of the Gauls, the broken arms of the Samnites; but then, if you looked at the captives, there were Molossians, Thessalians, Macedonians, the Bruttian, the Apulian, and the Lucanian; if at the procession, gold, purple, statues, paintings, and the luxuries of Tarentum.

18.28. But nothing did the Roman people behold with more pleasure than those beasts which they had so feared, with their towers upon them, which, not without a sense of their captivity, followed the conquerors' horses with bowed necks.

19.1. Soon all Italy enjoyed peace—for what would they dare after Tarentum?—except that it pleased the Romans to go on and pursue the allies of their enemies.

19.2. So the Picentes were subdued, and Asculum, the head of the nation, under the leadership of Sempronius, who, when the plain trembled in the midst of the battle, appeased the goddess Tellus with the promise of a temple.

20.1. The Sallentini were added to the Picentes, and Brundisium, the head of the region with its famous harbour, under the leadership of Marcus Atilius. In this contest the shepherds' goddess Pales of her own accord demanded a temple as the price of victory.

21.1. Last of the Italians to come into allegiance were the Volsinii, the wealthiest of the Etruscans, imploring help against those who had once been their own slaves, who had turned against their masters the liberty given them by their masters, and, having transferred the government to themselves, were lording it over them. But these too paid the penalty under the leadership of Fabius Gurges.

22.1. This is the second age of the Roman people, and as it were its adolescence, in which it most flourished and blazed and seethed with a kind of flower of valour. And so there was still in it a certain wildness left from its shepherd days, something untamed still breathed in it.

22.2. Hence it was that the army stoned its general Postumius when he denied them the booty he had promised; that under Appius Claudius it refused to conquer the enemy when it might have done so; that, under the leadership of Volero, when most of the men refused service,

22.3. the rods of the consul were broken. Hence it punished its most illustrious chiefs with exile because they opposed its will: Coriolanus, who bade them till their fields—nor would he less fiercely have avenged the wrong with arms, had not his mother Veturia disarmed her son with her tears as he was already advancing his standards—and Camillus himself, because he seemed to have divided the Veientine booty unfairly between the commons and the army.

22.4. But the latter, the better man, grew old at Veii in the captured city, and soon avenged her, suppliant, against the Gallic enemy.

22.5. With the senate too it strove more bitterly than was fair and right, so much so that, abandoning its dwellings, it threatened its own country with desertion and ruin.

23.1. The first discord arose from the unbridled greed of the money-lenders. When these raged in a slavish fashion even upon the backs of their debtors, the commons withdrew in arms to the Sacred Mount, and were with difficulty recalled, and not until they had obtained tribunes, by the authority of Menenius Agrippa, an eloquent and wise man.

23.2. There survives a sufficiently effective fable of that ancient speech for restoring concord, in which he said that once the human limbs had fallen out, because, while all performed their work, the belly alone acted idle; and then, dying through that separation, they returned to favour, when they perceived that it was by the belly's labour that they were watered by the food turned into blood.

24.1. The second discord, in the midst of the city, the lust of the decemvirate kindled. Ten leading men, chosen by the people's command, had drawn up laws brought from Greece, and all justice had been ordered in the Twelve Tables; yet they kept the rods of office handed to them with a kind of royal frenzy.

24.2. Above the rest Appius was carried away to such insolence that he marked out a freeborn maiden for outrage, forgetful both of Lucretia and of the kings and of the very law which he himself had composed.

24.3. And so, when Virginius the father saw his daughter, condemned by a sham judgement, being dragged into slavery, he hesitated not at all, but slew her with his own hand in the midst of the forum, and, bringing up the standards of his fellow soldiers, he dragged down that whole tyranny, beset by arms, from the Aventine hill into prison and chains.

25.1. The third sedition was stirred up by the dignity of marriage, that the plebeians might be joined with the patricians; which uprising blazed out on the Janiculan hill under the leadership of Canuleius, tribune of the commons. The fourth was the desire for office, that magistrates too might be created from the commons.

25.2. Fabius Ambustus, the father of two daughters, had given one to Sulpicius, a man of patrician blood,

25.3. and the plebeian Stolo had taken the other to himself. When she, on a certain occasion, was startled at the unfamiliar sound of the lictor's rods, unknown to her household gods, and was mocked somewhat too insolently by her sister, she could not bear the affront.

25.4. And so her husband, having obtained the tribunate, wrung from the senate, however unwilling, a share in the offices and magistracies.

25.5. But in these very seditions you would not undeservedly look up to the foremost of peoples. For it championed now liberty, now chastity, now the dignity of birth, now the honours and insignia of office, and amid all these it was the keener guardian of none than of liberty,

25.6. and could be corrupted by no bribe to surrender it, although, as in a great people and one daily growing greater, harmful citizens sometimes arose.

25.7. Spurius, suspected of bribery, and Cassius, suspected by his agrarian law of aiming at kingly power, it punished with instant death. And of Spurius indeed his own father exacted the penalty; the other, by the command of Quinctius the dictator, Servilius Ahala, master of the horse, stabbed in the midst of the forum.

25.8. Manlius, again, the saviour of the Capitol, because, having freed many of the debtors, he was lifting himself up too high and too lawlessly, it hurled from that very citadel which he had defended.

25.9. Such at home and abroad, such in peace and war, was the Roman people in that strait of its adolescence, that is, the second age of its empire, in which it subdued by arms the whole of Italy between the Alps and the strait.

1.1. Italy now tamed and subdued, the Roman people, in about its five-hundredth year, having grown up in good faith, then—if there is any strength, if any youth—then truly robust and young, began to be a match for the whole world.

1.2. And so—wonderful and incredible to tell—it that had struggled at home for nearly five hundred years, so hard had it been to give Italy a head, in these two hundred years that followed traversed Africa, Europe, Asia, in short the whole world, as victor in war.

2.1. So then the Roman people, victor over Italy, when it had come as far as the strait, like a fire which, having ravaged the woods in its path with its burning, is broken off by an intervening river,

2.2. halted for a little while. Soon, when it saw the richest plunder close at hand as it were torn off and wrenched away from its own Italy, it was so kindled with desire of it that, since it could be joined neither by a mole nor by bridges, it seemed that it must be joined by arms and war and recalled to its own continent by war.

2.3. And lo, the fates of their own accord opening the way for them, the occasion too was not lacking, when Messana, a confederate state of Sicily, complained of the violence of the Carthaginians. Now the Carthaginian, like the Roman, was reaching for Sicily, and at the same time, with equal vows and forces, each was aspiring to the dominion of the world.

2.4. So then, under pretence indeed of aiding allies, but in fact tempted by booty, although the novelty of the enterprise alarmed them, yet—so great is the confidence that lies in valour—that raw people, that pastoral and truly land-bound people, showed that it makes no difference to valour whether one fights on horses or in ships, on land or sea.

2.5. Under the consul Appius Claudius it first entered the strait, ill-famed for fabulous monsters and violent with its current; but it was so far from being terrified that it embraced that very violence of the rushing tide as a gift, and at once and without delay so swiftly conquered Hiero of Syracuse that he himself confessed he had seen himself beaten before he saw the enemy.

2.7. Under the consuls Duilius and Cornelius the Romans dared even to fight at sea. Then indeed the very speed of the prepared fleet was an omen of victory. For within sixty days of the timber being felled, a fleet of a hundred and sixty ships rode at anchor, so that they seemed not made by art, but trees turned and changed into ships by a kind of gift of the gods.

2.8. And the form of the battle was marvellous, when those heavy and slow ships of ours grappled with the swift and flying ships of the enemy. Far from them were the arts of seamanship, the wheeling of the oars and the mocking of the beaks by flight.

2.9. For grappling-irons were thrown out, and strong engines, much derided by the enemy before the contest; and the enemy were forced to fight as though on solid ground. So, victorious off the Liparae, with the enemy's fleet sunk or put to flight, the Roman celebrated that first naval triumph.

2.10. And how great was the joy of it, when Duilius the general, not content with a single day's triumph, ordered for the whole of his life that, whenever he returned from dinner, torches should light the way before him and flutes play, as though he triumphed every day!

2.11. Compared with so great a victory it was a slight loss that the other consul, Cornelius Asina, was intercepted, who, lured out by a pretended parley and so overpowered, was a proof of Punic treachery.

2.12. Under the dictator Calatinus he wrested almost all the garrisons of the Carthaginians from Agrigentum, Drepanum, Panormus, Eryx, and Lilybaeum.

2.13. There was a moment of panic near the pass of Camerina, but by the remarkable valour of Calpurnius Flamma, tribune of the soldiers, we escaped. For with a chosen band of three hundred he seized a hill held by the enemy and delayed them, while the whole army got away.

2.14. And so by a most glorious end he equalled the fame of Thermopylae and Leonidas; and our man was the more illustrious in this, that he survived so great an enterprise, though he wrote nothing with his blood.

2.15. Under the consul Lucius Cornelius Scipio, when Sicily was now a suburban province of the Roman people, the war spreading wider, he crossed over to Sardinia and to Corsica that lies next to it.

2.16. Here by the destruction of the city of Olbia, there of Aleria, he terrified the inhabitants, and so cleared the Carthaginians from every land and sea that now nothing was left for victory but Africa itself.

2.17. Under the leadership of Marcus Atilius Regulus the war was now sailing into Africa. Nor had there been wanting men who failed at the very name and terror of the Punic sea, the tribune Nautius increasing their fear besides; against whom, when he would not obey, the general, drawing the axe, by the fear of death gave them courage to sail.

2.18. Then thereafter they made haste with winds and oars, and so great was the terror of the enemy's coming to the Carthaginians that Carthage was all but taken with its gates almost open.

2.19. The prelude of the war was the city of Clipea; for it runs out first from the Punic shore like a citadel and watchtower. And both this and more than three hundred strongholds besides were laid waste.

2.20. Nor was the fighting with men only, but with monsters too, when, as though born to avenge Africa, a serpent of marvellous size harassed the camp pitched by the Bagradas.

2.21. But Regulus, victor over all, when he had carried the terror of his name far and wide, and had either slain or held in chains a great force of the youth and the leaders themselves, and had sent ahead to the city a fleet laden with vast plunder and heavy with triumph, was now pressing Carthage itself, the head of the war, with a siege and clinging to its very gates.

2.22. Here for a little while fortune turned, only that there might be more proofs of Roman valour, whose greatness is generally approved by calamities.

2.23. For when the enemy had turned to outside help, and Lacedaemon had sent them Xanthippus as their leader, we were conquered by a man most skilled in warfare—a foul disaster and unknown to Roman experience—and a most valiant general came alive into the hands of the enemy. But he indeed was a match for so great a calamity; for he was broken neither by the Punic prison nor by the embassy he undertook.

2.24. For he gave counsel contrary to what the enemy had charged him, that no peace should be made, that no exchange of captives should be accepted.

2.25. But neither by that voluntary return to his enemies, nor by the final punishment, whether of prison or of the cross, was his majesty disfigured; nay, by all these things made the more admirable, what was he but a victor over his conquerors, and, since Carthage had not yielded, a triumpher even over fortune? But the Roman people was far keener and more intent on the avenging of Regulus than it had been on victory.

2.27. So under the consul Metellus, when the Carthaginians breathed higher and the war had returned into Sicily, he so cut the enemy down at Panormus that they thought no more of attacking that island.

2.28. A proof of the vast victory was the capture of about a hundred elephants—so too a great plunder, even had he taken that herd not in war but in the hunt.

2.29. Under the consul Appius Claudius he was overcome not by the enemy but by the gods themselves, whose auspices he had despised; for his fleet was at once sunk in the very place where he had ordered the sacred chickens to be thrown overboard, because they forbade him to fight.

2.30. Under the consul Marcus Fabius Buteo he cut down the enemy's fleet in the African sea, off Aegimurus, as it was of its own accord sailing toward Italy.

2.31. How great a triumph, alas, then perished in the storm, when the fleet, laden with rich plunder and driven by contrary winds, filled with its own wreckage Africa and the Syrtes and the shores of all the islands lying between! A great disaster, but not without some dignity in the foremost of peoples, that a victory intercepted by the storm and a triumph should have perished by shipwreck.

2.32. And yet, when the Punic plunder floated about all the headlands and islands, the Roman people triumphed even so.

2.33. Under the consul Lutatius Catulus an end was at last set to the war near the islands called the Aegates, nor was there ever a greater battle at sea.

2.34. For there was at hand a fleet heavy with supplies, with an army, with bulwarks, with arms, and in it, as it were, all Carthage; which very thing was its undoing.

2.35. The Roman fleet, ready, light, unencumbered, and in a manner like a camp, was driven by its oars as though by reins, in the likeness of a cavalry battle, and the beaks, mobile for strokes this way and that, wore the look of living things.

2.36. And so in a moment of time the enemy's ships, shattered, covered with their own wreckage the whole sea between Sicily and Sardinia.

2.37. So great, in fine, was that victory that there was no question of demolishing the enemy's walls. It seemed superfluous to rage against the citadel and the walls, when Carthage had already been destroyed at sea.

3.1. The Punic war being ended, there followed a brief rest indeed, as though to recover breath; and as a token of peace and of the laying down of arms in good faith, then for the first time since Numa was the gate of Janus closed; but it stood open again at once and without delay.

3.2. For now the Ligurians, now the Insubrian Gauls, and the Illyrians too, were provoking us—nations set beneath the Alps, that is, in the very jaws of Italy, urged on by some god ceaselessly, lest their arms should feel rust and decay.

3.3. In short, both these daily and as it were domestic enemies trained the recruits among the soldiers, and with each nation, no otherwise than as with a whetstone, the Roman people sharpened the steel of its valour.

3.4. With the Ligurians, clinging to the lowest ridges of the Alps between the rivers Var and Magra and entangled in their forest thickets, it was somewhat more labour to find them than to conquer them. Safe in their places and in flight, a hardy and swift race, they made plundering raids from opportunity rather than wars.

3.5. And so, when the Saluvii, the Deciates, the Oxubii, the Euburiates, and the Ingauni had long and much eluded them, at last Fulvius hemmed in their hiding-places with fire, Baebius brought them down into the plain, and Postumius so disarmed them that he scarcely left them the iron with which to till the earth.

4.1. The Insubrian Gauls, and these dwellers near the Alps, had the spirits of beasts and bodies more than human; but it was discovered by trial—for, just as their first onset is greater than that of men, so their second is less than that of women—the Alpine bodies, bred under a moist sky, have something like their own snows:

4.2. as soon as they have grown warm in battle, they straightway run with sweat and are unstrung at a slight exertion as though by the sun.

4.3. These, often on other occasions and under the leadership of Britomarus, had sworn that they would not lay aside their belts until they had climbed the Capitol. So it came to pass; for Aemilius, having conquered them, ungirded them on the Capitol.

4.4. Soon, under the leadership of Ariovistus, they vowed a torque to their own Mars from the plunder of our soldiers. Jupiter intercepted the vow; for Flaminius raised to Jupiter a golden trophy from their torques.

4.5. Under King Viridomarus they had promised Roman arms to Vulcan. The vows fell out otherwise; for, the king being slain, Marcellus, the third after father Romulus, hung up the spoils of honour to Jupiter Feretrius.

5.1. The Illyrians, or Liburnians, dwell beneath the farthest roots of the Alps between the rivers Arsia and Titius, spread very far along the whole shore of the Adriatic Sea.

5.2. These, in the reign of the woman Teuta, not content with raids, added crime to their licence.

5.3. For our envoys, who were dealing rightly with them concerning their offences, they struck down not even with the sword but, like victims, with the axe, and they burned the captains of our ships with fire; and—the more shameful—it was a woman who gave the order.

5.4. And so, under the leadership of Gnaeus Fulvius Centimalus, they were widely subdued. The axes drawn against the necks of their chiefs made offering at the hands of the envoys.

6.1. After the first Punic war there was scarcely four years' rest: behold a second war, less indeed in duration—for it has not more than eighteen years—but so much the more terrible in the atrocity of its disasters that, if one compares the losses of the two peoples, the people that conquered looks more like the conquered.

6.2. It galled that noble people that the sea had been taken from it, its islands snatched away, that it gave tribute which it had been wont to impose. Hence Hannibal, while still a boy, had sworn vengeance to his father at the altar, nor did he delay.

6.3. So Saguntum was chosen as the cause of the war, an ancient and wealthy city of Spain, and a great but mournful monument of fidelity toward the Romans, which, though taken into liberty under a common treaty, Hannibal, seeking pretexts for fresh disturbances, overthrew both by his own hands and by theirs, that he might open Italy to himself by breaking the treaty.

6.5. The Romans hold treaties in the highest reverence; and so, at the news of the siege of the allied city, mindful of the treaty struck with the Carthaginians as well, they did not run at once to arms, while they preferred first to complain in the lawful manner.

6.6. The Saguntines meanwhile, now worn out for nine months by famine, by engines, by the sword, their fidelity turned at last to frenzy, raised a monstrous pyre in the forum, then from above destroyed themselves and their own people with all their wealth by sword and fire.

6.7. The author of so great a disaster, Hannibal, was demanded for surrender. When the Carthaginians shuffled, the head of the embassy said: "What delay is there? In this fold I carry war and peace; which do you choose?" When they cried out "War," he said, "Then take war." And, shaking out the fold of his toga in the midst of the senate-house, not without horror, as though he plainly bore war in his lap, he poured it forth.

6.8. The end of the war was like its beginning. For, as though the last curses of the Saguntines in that public self-destruction and burning had charged that these obsequies be paid to themselves, so amends were made to their shades by the devastation of Italy, the captivity of Africa, and the destruction of the leaders and kings who waged that war.

6.9. And so, when once that grievous and mournful violence and tempest of the Punic war had stirred itself in Spain, and the bolt long since destined against the Romans had been forged in the fire of Saguntum, at once, snatched up by a kind of rush, it broke through the midst of the Alps and descended into Italy from those snows of fabulous height as though sent from heaven.

6.10. And the whirlwind of its first onset thundered down at once with a mighty crash between the Po and the Ticinus. There, under the leadership of Scipio, the army was routed; the general himself, wounded, would have fallen into the enemy's hands, had not his son, scarce more than a boy in his bordered toga, snatched his protected father from death itself.

6.11. This will be the Scipio who grows up for the destruction of Africa, destined to take his name from its misfortunes.

6.12. To the Ticinus the Trebia succeeds. Here the second storm of the Punic war raged under the consul Sempronius. Then the most crafty enemy, having got a cold and snowy day, when they had first warmed themselves with fires and oil—horrible to tell—men coming from the noonday and the sun, conquered us by our own winter.

6.13. Lake Thrasymene, the third bolt of Hannibal, with Flaminius as general. A new art of Punic deceit; for cavalry, hidden by a mist of the lake and by the marshy thickets, suddenly fell upon the rear of those fighting.

6.14. Nor can we complain of the gods. The disaster impending over the rash general they had foretold by swarms settling on the standards, by eagles unwilling to advance, and by a great trembling of the earth that followed when the line had joined battle; unless the running to and fro of horsemen and men and the more violent shaking of arms produced that terror of the ground.

6.15. The fourth and almost the last wound of the empire was Cannae, an obscure place of Apulia to the conquered; but by the magnitude of the disaster it emerged, and by the slaughter of sixty thousand won a renown. There, for the destruction of the ill-fated army, the leader, the earth, the heavens, the day, the whole order of nature consented.

6.16. For Hannibal, not content with feigned deserters, who soon cut down the rear of those fighting, the crafty general besides, having observed in the open plains the nature of the place—that the sun there is fiercest, the dust greatest, and the wind always from the east as though by appointment—so drew up his line that, with the Romans turned against all these things, he himself, keeping a favourable sky, fought with wind, dust, and sun.

6.17. And so two mighty armies were cut down to the enemy's surfeit, until Hannibal said to his soldiers, "Spare the steel." Of the leaders one fled, the other was slain; it is doubtful which with the greater spirit: Paulus was ashamed, Varro did not despair.

6.18. Proofs of the disaster: the Aufidus for some while bloody, a bridge made of corpses at the leader's order across the torrent Vergellus, two pecks of rings sent to Carthage, and the rank of the knights reckoned by measure.

6.19. There will be no doubt afterwards that Rome would have seen her last day, and that within five days Hannibal might have feasted on the Capitol, if—as they report that Maharbal, son of Bomilcar, that Carthaginian, said—Hannibal had known how to use a victory as well as he knew how to win one.

6.20. But then indeed, as is commonly said, either the destiny of the city that was to rule, or his own evil mind, and gods averted from Carthage, carried him in a different direction.

6.21. When he might have used his victory, he chose rather to enjoy it, and, leaving Rome, marched on to Campania and Tarentum; where soon the ardour both of himself and of his army languished, so that it was truly said that Capua was Hannibal's Cannae.

6.22. For him whom the Alps could not vanquish nor arms tame—who would believe it?—the Campanian sun and Baiae warm with its springs subdued.

6.23. Meanwhile the Romans were allowed to take breath and as it were to rise from the dead. Arms there were none: they were taken down from the temples. Youth was lacking: slaves were freed for the military oath.

6.24. The treasury was in want: the senate of its own accord brought its wealth into the common store, nor did they leave themselves any gold save what was in their bullae and single rings. The knights followed the example, and the tribes imitated the knights.

6.25. In short, the tablets scarcely sufficed, the hands of the clerks scarcely sufficed, under the consuls Laevinus and Marcellus,

6.26. when the wealth of private men was being brought into the public store. And what besides? In choosing magistrates, what wisdom there was in the centuries, when the younger men sought counsel from the elder about creating the consuls! For against an enemy so often victorious, so cunning, they had to fight not by valour only but by their own good counsels too.

6.27. The first hope of the returning, and, so to speak, reviving empire was Fabius, who devised a new way of victory over Hannibal—not to fight. Hence that surname new and salutary to the state, the Delayer; hence that saying of the people, that he was called the shield of the empire.

6.28. And so, through the whole of Samnium, through the Falernian and Gauran passes, he so wore Hannibal down that, since he could not be broken by valour, he was crumbled by delay.

6.29. Then, under the leadership of Claudius Marcellus, he dared even to join battle: he came to close quarters and struck him in his own Campania, and shut him out from the siege of the city of Nola.

6.30. He dared, too, under the leadership of Sempronius Gracchus, to pursue him through Lucania and press upon the rear of his retreat, although then—for shame!—he fought with an army of slaves; for so far had so many misfortunes driven him. But, being given their freedom, they made themselves Romans out of slaves by their valour.

6.31. O the terrible confidence in so many adversities! O the singular courage and spirit of the Roman people! In a plight so straitened and afflicted that it ought to have doubted of its own Italy, it dared nevertheless to look in opposite directions,

6.32. and, while the enemy was at its very throat ranging through Campania and Apulia and making an Africa out of the middle of Italy, at the same time both withstood him here and sent its arms, divided over the whole world, into Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain.

6.33. Sicily was entrusted to Marcellus. Nor did it long resist; for the whole island was overcome in a single city. That great and till then unconquered head, Syracuse, although defended by the genius of Archimedes, at last gave way.

6.34. Far from helping it were its triple wall and as many citadels, that famous harbour of marble and the celebrated spring of Arethusa; save that they availed so far, that the beauty of the conquered city was spared.

6.35. Sardinia Gracchus seized. But nothing did the wildness of its tribes and the savagery of the Insani—for so they are called—mountains avail it. War was made upon the cities and upon Caralis, the city of cities, that a stubborn race, contemptuous of death, might be tamed at least by longing for its native soil.

6.36. The Scipios, Gnaeus and Publius, sent into Spain, had wrested almost the whole of it from the Carthaginians, but, overwhelmed by the snares of Punic treachery, had lost it again, though in great battles they had cut down the Punic strength. But Punic snares had overwhelmed the one as he was measuring out his camp by the sword, the other, when he had scarcely escaped into a tower, surrounded by torches.

6.37. So, to avenge his father and uncle, Scipio was sent with an army, for whom the fates had now decreed a great name from Africa,

6.38. and that warlike Spain, renowned for men and arms, that nursery of the enemy's army, that trainer of the little Hannibal—incredible to tell—the whole of it, from the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules and the Ocean, he recovered,

6.39. one knows not whether more swiftly or more happily. How swiftly, four years attest; how easily, even a single city proves. For it was taken on the very day on which it was besieged, and it was an omen of the African victory that the Spanish Carthage was so easily conquered.

6.40. It is certain, however, that toward the subduing of the province nothing availed more than the singular purity of the general, who restored to the barbarians the captive boys and girls of remarkable beauty, not suffering them to be brought even into his sight, lest he should seem to have impaired anything of their maiden chastity even by his eyes.

6.41. These things the Roman people did in different parts of the world; nor even so could it dislodge Hannibal, clinging to the vitals of Italy. Most places had gone over to the enemy, and the most relentless leader was using even Italian strength against the Romans.

6.42. Yet now we had shaken him out of most towns and regions, now Tarentum had returned to us, now Capua too, the seat, home, and second country of Hannibal, was held; the loss of which gave the Punic leader such grief that thence with all his forces he turned upon Rome.

6.43. O people worthy of the dominion of the world, worthy of the favour and admiration of all men and gods! Driven to the utmost fear, it did not abandon what it had begun, and, anxious for its own city, yet did not let Capua go; but, leaving part of the army under the consul Appius, and part following Flaccus to the city, it fought at once both absent and present.

6.44. Why then do we wonder that, when Hannibal was moving his camp from the third milestone, the gods themselves—the gods, I say, nor shall I be ashamed to confess it—again withstood him? For at his every movement so great a force of rain was poured out,

6.45. so great a violence of winds arose, that the enemy seemed driven away by heaven, not from the sky, but from the very walls of the city and from the Capitol.

6.46. He fled and gave way and withdrew into the farthest recess of Italy, having left the city all but unworshipped.

6.47. A small thing to tell, but effective enough to prove the magnanimity of the Roman people: that in those very days in which it was besieged, the land which Hannibal had occupied with his camp was for sale at Rome, and, put up at auction, found a buyer.

6.48. Hannibal in turn wished to imitate this confidence and put up the bankers' shops of the city for sale; but no purchaser was found—that you may know that even omens attended the fates.

6.49. Nothing had been accomplished by so great valour, by so great favour even of the gods, if Hasdrubal, Hannibal's brother, was coming from Spain with a new army, new forces, a new weight of war.

6.50. It would have been all over beyond doubt, had that man joined himself to his brother. But him too, even then when he had come down from the Alps and was pitching his camp at the Metaurus, Claudius Nero, with Livius Salinator, crushed.

6.51. Nero had driven Hannibal into the farthest corner of Italy; Livius had turned his standards into the opposite part, that is, into the very jaws of Italy where it begins.

6.52. By what counsel, with what speed, the consuls joined their camps, with so great a space—that is, the whole length of Italy—lying between, and overwhelmed the unsuspecting enemy in a pitched battle, nor did Hannibal perceive that it was done, it is hard to tell.

6.53. Certain it is that Hannibal, when he learned the matter and saw his brother's head thrown before his camp, said: "I recognise the misfortune of Carthage." This was that man's first confession, not without a kind of foreboding of the doom that hung over him.

6.54. It was now certain that Hannibal could be conquered, even by his own confession; but the Roman people, full of confidence from so many successes, set great store by finishing off its bitterest enemy in his own Africa.

6.55. So, under the leadership of Scipio, it turned its whole weight against Africa itself and began to imitate Hannibal and to avenge upon Africa the disasters of its own Italy.

6.56. What forces of Hasdrubal, good gods, did he rout, what cavalry of Syphax the Numidian king! What and how great camps of both did he destroy in a single night with torches thrown in! In short, now not from the third milestone, but he was shaking the very gates of Carthage with his siege.

6.57. So it came to pass that he wrested away Hannibal, who clung and brooded over Italy.

6.58. There was no greater day under Roman rule than that, when the two greatest leaders of all leaders both before and since, the one victor of Italy, the other of Spain, drew up their lines at close quarters. But there was a parley between them about the terms of peace, and they stood long fixed in mutual admiration.

6.59. When they did not agree on peace, the trumpets sounded.

6.60. It is agreed by the confession of both that no line could be drawn up better, nor could the fighting be fiercer; this Scipio declared of Hannibal's army, Hannibal of Scipio's.

6.61. But nevertheless Hannibal gave way, and the reward of victory was Africa, and, following Africa, at once the whole world.

7.1. After Carthage no one was ashamed to be conquered. At once there followed Africa the nations of Macedonia, Greece, Syria, and all the rest, as by a kind of tide and torrent of fortune; but first of all the Macedonians, a people once aspiring to empire.

7.2. And so, although Philip then presided over the kingdom, the Romans nevertheless seemed to themselves to be contending with King Alexander.

7.3. The Macedonian war was greater in name than in the actual sight of the nation.

7.4. Its cause began from a treaty of Philip, by which the king had long since joined to himself as an ally Hannibal, then lording it in Italy; afterwards it grew when Athens implored aid against the king's wrongs, since he was raging beyond the right of victory against the very temples, altars, and tombs.

7.5. It pleased the senate to bring aid to such suppliants. For now the kings, leaders, peoples, and nations were seeking protection for themselves from this city.

7.6. First, then, under the consul Laevinus, the Roman people, having entered the Ionian Sea, traversed the whole coast of Greece with a fleet as though in triumph.

7.7. For it displayed the spoils of Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, and the laurel that had sprung up on the admiral's ship promised a manifest victory.

7.8. There was at hand of its own accord, in aid, Attalus king of the Pergamenes; there were the Rhodians, a seafaring people, who shook everything with their ships from the sea, the consul with his cavalry and infantry from the land.

7.9. Twice was the king conquered, twice put to flight, twice stripped of his camp; yet nothing was more terrible to the Macedonians than the very sight of the wounds, which, dealt not by darts nor arrows nor any little Greek steel, but by huge javelins and swords no smaller, gaped open beyond what was mortal.

7.10. But indeed, under the leadership of Flamininus, we penetrated the hitherto pathless mountains of the Chaonians, and the river Aous making its way through ravines, and the very

7.11. barriers of Macedonia. To have entered was victory. For afterwards the king, never daring to engage, was overwhelmed at the hills they call Cynoscephalae, in a single battle and not even that a regular one.

7.12. And the consul indeed gave him peace and granted him his kingdom; soon, that there might be nothing hostile, he subdued Thebes and Euboea and Lacedaemon, which was being harried under its own tyrant Nabis.

7.13. Greece, indeed, he restored to its ancient state, that it might live by its own laws and enjoy its ancestral liberty.

7.14. What joy, what shouting there was, when this chanced to be proclaimed by a herald at the quinquennial games in the theatre at Nemea! With what applause did they contend! What

7.15. of these things did they pour out upon the consul! And again and again they bade the herald repeat that utterance by which the liberty of Achaia was proclaimed, nor did they enjoy that consular sentence otherwise than as some most measured strain of flutes or lyres.

8.1. Asia at once succeeded Macedonia, and Antiochus King Philip, by a kind of chance, as though fortune so steered it on purpose, that, just as from Africa into Europe, so from Europe into Asia, the empire should advance with occasions presenting themselves of their own accord, and the very order of victories should sail along with the situation of the world.

8.2. No other war was more terrible in repute; for, since they were thinking of the Persians and the East, of Xerxes and Darius, when it was reported that pathless mountains were dug through

8.3. and the sea covered with sails. To this were added the threats of heaven, when the Cumaean Apollo sweated with continual moisture; but this was the fear of the favouring deity of his own Asia.

8.4. Nor indeed was anything richer than Syria in men, wealth, and arms; but it had fallen into the hands of so cowardly a king that there was nothing in Antiochus more splendid than that he was conquered by the Romans.

8.5. Into that war the king was urged on the one side by Thoas, chief of Aetolia, who complained that the partnership of his soldiers in the war against the Macedonians had gone unhonoured among the Romans; on the other by Hannibal, who, conquered in Africa, a fugitive and impatient of peace, was seeking throughout the whole world an enemy for the Roman people.

8.6. And what a peril that would have been, if the king had given himself over to his counsels—that is, if the wretched Hannibal had used the strength of Asia! But the king, trusting to his own resources and his royal name, thought it enough to set the war in motion.

8.7. Europe now belonged beyond doubt to the Romans by the right of war. Here Antiochus claimed, as though by hereditary right, Lysimachia, a city set on the Thracian shore by his ancestors.

8.8. By this as by a star the tempest of the Asiatic war was set in motion. But the greatest of kings, content to have boldly declared war, when he had moved out of Asia with vast din and tumult, having at once occupied the islands and the shores of Greece, gave himself to ease and luxury as though he were a victor.

8.9. The island of Euboea, joined to the mainland, the Euripus cuts off by a narrow strait with its ebbing and flowing waters. Here he, having set up golden and silken tents beneath the very murmur of the strait, while the waters flowing past played with flutes and lyres, gathering roses from every side though it was winter, that he might not seem to be acting the leader in any way at all, held levies of maidens and boys.

8.10. So then, when the king had already been vanquished by his own luxury, the Roman people, under the consul Acilius Glabrio, attacking him on the island, by the very report of its coming

8.11. forced him at once to flee from the island. Then, having overtaken him in his headlong flight at Thermopylae, a place memorable for the glorious disaster of the three hundred Laconians, and finding him not resisting even there, despite confidence in the place, it forced him to give way by sea and land.

8.12. At once and immediately the march was into Syria. The royal fleet, entrusted to Polyxenidas and Hannibal—for the king could not even watch a battle—was wholly shattered, with Aemilius Regillus as leader and the Rhodians rowing alongside.

8.13. Let not Athens please herself: in Antiochus we conquered Xerxes, in Aemilius we equalled Alcibiades,

8.14. at Ephesus we balanced Salamis. Then, under the consul Scipio, to whom his brother, the late victor over Carthage, the African, was present on a voluntary embassy, it was resolved to finish off the king. And now he had given way over the whole sea, but we went further.

8.15. The camp was pitched at the river Maeander and Mount Sipylus. Here the king—incredible to tell—with what auxiliaries, with what forces, had taken his stand!

8.16. Three hundred thousand foot, no smaller number of horse and scythed chariots. With elephants besides of immense size, gleaming with gold, purple, silver, and their own ivory, he had walled in his line on either flank.

8.17. But all these were hampered by their very size, and besides by a rain which, suddenly pouring down, by a wonderful good fortune had spoiled the Persian bows. First there was confusion, then flight, then a triumph.

8.18. It was resolved to grant the conquered and suppliant king peace and a part of his kingdom, the more readily because he had given way so easily.

9.1. To the Syrian war succeeded—and it ought to have done so—the Aetolian. For, Antiochus being conquered, the Roman pursued the torches of the Asiatic war. So the avenging of it was entrusted to Fulvius Nobilior.

9.2. He at once battered with engines Ambracia, the head of the nation and the royal seat of Pyrrhus. A surrender followed.

9.3. There were present, at the prayers of the Aetolians, the men of Attica and the Rhodians, and we remembered their aid:

9.4. so it pleased us to pardon them. Yet the war crept more widely into the neighbouring parts, and all Cephallenia far and wide, Zacynthos, and whatever islands there are in that sea between the Ceraunian mountains and the ridge of Malea, became an appendage of the Aetolian war.

10.1. The Histri follow the Aetolians; for they had lately aided them in their war.

10.2. And the beginnings of the battle were prosperous for the enemy, and the same was the cause of their destruction. For when they had taken the camp of Gnaeus Manlius and were brooding over the rich plunder, Appius Pulcher attacked them feasting and frolicking, most of them not knowing, for their cups, who or where they were.

10.3. So with blood and breath they vomited up the victory ill-won. The king himself, Aepulo, set upon his horse, when he kept stumbling from drunkenness and dizziness of the head, learned only with difficulty, after he was awakened, that he had been captured.

11.1. The ruin of the Syrian war involved Gallograecia too.

11.2. Whether they had been among King Antiochus's auxiliaries, or whether Manlius Vulso, greedy of a triumph, pretended that they had been, is doubtful;

11.3. but certainly a triumph was denied to the victor, because he did not approve the cause of the war. For the rest, the nation of the Gallograeci, as the very name indicates, is mixed and adulterated: the remnant of the Gauls who, under the leadership of Brennus, had laid Greece waste, following the east, settled in the middle part of Asia;

11.4. and so, just as the seeds of crops degenerate with a change of soil, so that native wildness of theirs was softened by the pleasantness of Asia.

11.5. And so in two battles they were routed and put to flight, although at the enemy's approach they had abandoned their dwellings and withdrawn into the highest mountains. The Tolostobogi had occupied Olympus, the Tectosagi Magaba. Beaten down on both sides by slings and arrows, they surrendered themselves to a perpetual peace.

11.6. But—astonishing to relate—some were a marvel, when they tried the chains with their teeth and mouths, when they offered their throats to one another to be strangled. For the wife of King Orgiacon, having suffered outrage from a centurion, by a memorable example escaped from her captivity, and carried back to her husband the severed head of the adulterous enemy.

12.1. While other and yet other nations follow the ruin of the Syrian war, Macedonia raised itself again.

12.2. The memory and recollection of its nobility stirred that most valiant people, and a son, Perseus, had succeeded Philip, who, from the dignity of the nation, did not think Macedonia conquered once for all.

12.3. Much more vehemently under him than under his father did the Macedonians rise up. For they had drawn the Thracians into their cause, and so they tempered the industry of the Macedonians with the strength of the Thracians, and the ferocity of the Thracians with Macedonian discipline.

12.4. To these was added the counsel of their leader, who, having surveyed the situation of his regions from the top of Haemus, and having pitched camps along the precipices, had so walled in his Macedonia with arms and steel that there seemed to be no approach left for enemies who would come, save from heaven.

12.5. Yet, under the consul Marcius Philippus, the Roman people, having entered that province and carefully explored the approaches, made its way through the marsh of Ascuris and the hills of the Perrhaebi by paths pathless even, as it seemed, to birds, and surprised the king, secure and fearing nothing of the kind, by a sudden irruption of war. So great was his panic,

12.6. that he ordered all his money to be sunk in the sea lest it be lost, and his fleet to be burned lest it be set on fire.

12.7. Under the consul Paulus, when greater and more frequent garrisons had been posted, Macedonia was surprised by other roads, by the very great art and industry of the leader, who, threatening one thing, had burst in by another.

12.8. His very coming was so terrible to the king that he did not dare to take part himself, but entrusted the conduct of the war to his leaders.

12.9. So, conquered in his absence, he fled to the sea and to the island of Samothrace, trusting in its famous sanctity, as though temples and altars could defend one whom neither his own mountains nor his arms had been able to protect.

12.10. No king has longer retained the consciousness of his lost fortune. When, as a suppliant, he wrote to the general from that temple to which he had fled and signed his name to the letter, he added "king." But no one was more respectful of fallen majesty than Paulus.

12.11. When the enemy had come into his sight, he received him on his tribunal and admitted him to his table, and admonished his own children to reverence a fortune that had power over so great a man.

12.12. This too the Roman people led and beheld among its fairest triumphs over Macedonia, since with the spectacle of it he filled three days.

12.13. The first day carried past the statues

12.14. and paintings, the next the arms and money, the third the captives and the king himself, still astonished as at a sudden calamity and stupefied. But long before this the Roman people had received the joy of the victory, sooner than by the victor's letters. For on the same day on which Perseus was conquered in Macedonia, it was known at Rome, when two young men on white horses were washing off the dust and gore at the lake of Juturna.

12.15. These announced it. That they were Castor and Pollux was commonly believed, because they were twins; that they had been present in the battle, because they were wet with blood; that they came from Macedonia, because they were still panting.

13.1. The contagion of the Macedonian war drew in the Illyrians; for, that they might distract the Roman in his rear, they served for hire, paid by King Perseus.

13.2. Without delay they were subdued by the praetor Anicius. To have destroyed Scodra, the head of the nation, sufficed; a surrender followed at once. In short, this war was finished before it was announced at Rome that it was being waged.

14.1. By some fate, as though it had been agreed between the Carthaginians and Macedonians that every third time too they should be conquered, both at the same time stirred up arms.

14.2. But the Macedonian was the first to shake off the yoke, somewhat more troublesome than before, while he was despised.

14.3. The cause of the war was almost a thing to blush at. For Andriscus, a man of the lowest condition, doubtful whether a free man or a slave, but certainly a hireling, had seized the kingdom and the war alike; but because he was commonly called Philip, from his likeness to Philip son of Perseus, he filled up the royal form, the royal name, and the spirit of a king as well.

14.4. So, while the Roman people despised this very thing, content with the praetor Juventius, it rashly assailed a man strong not only with Macedonian but also with vast Thracian auxiliaries, and, unconquered by the true kings, was overcome by that imaginary and stage king.

14.5. But the consul Metellus most fully avenged the lost praetor and his legion. For he both punished Macedonia with slavery and brought back to the city in chains the leader of the war, surrendered to him by the Thracian chieftain to whom he had fled—fortune indulging him even in his misfortunes in this, that the Roman people triumphed over him as over a true king.

15.1. The third Punic war was both brief in time—for it was accomplished in four years—and, in comparison with the former ones, least in labour—for the fighting was not so much with men as with the city itself—but plainly greatest in result: for at last Carthage was finished.

15.2. And indeed, if one considers the periods of the three wars, the Punic war was begun in the first,

15.3. carried forward in the second, and in the third truly finished. But the cause of this war was that, contrary to the terms of the treaty, against the Numidians indeed, they had prepared a fleet and an army.

15.4. The frequent encroachments of Masinissa, however, alarmed them; but he, as a good and allied king, was favoured. When the question of war was being debated, the question of the end of war was discussed. Cato, with implacable hatred, declared that Carthage must be destroyed,

15.5. even when he was consulted about something else; Scipio Nasica, that it must be preserved, lest, fear of a rival city being removed, the prosperity of Rome should begin to run riot. The senate chose the middle course, that the city should only be moved from its place.

15.6. For nothing seemed more splendid than that there should be a Carthage which was not feared.

15.7. So, under the consuls Manilius and Censorinus, the Roman people, having attacked Carthage, threw out a hope of peace and burned, under the very face of the city, the fleet handed over by men who were willing.

15.8. Then, summoning the leading men, it ordered them, if they wished to be safe, to remove from their territory. This, by the atrocity of the thing, so stirred their wrath that they preferred the extreme. So there was at once a public lamentation, and with one voice the cry "To arms" was raised, and the resolve held to rebel by any means;

15.9. not that any hope now remained, but that they would rather their country were destroyed by the enemy's hands than by their own.

15.10. With what frenzy they rebelled may be understood even from this, that for the use of a new fleet they tore off the roofs of their houses; in the workshops gold and silver were melted down instead of bronze and iron for arms; the matrons gave their own hair for the cords of the engines. Then, under the consul Mancinus, the siege raged by land and sea.

15.11. The harbours were closed, the first and second wall stripped bare, now the third too, when nevertheless the Byrsa, which was the name of the citadel, resisted like a second city.

15.12. Although the destruction of the city was as good as accomplished, yet the name of the Scipios seemed fated for Africa. So the state, turning to another Scipio, demanded an end to the war. This one, begotten of Paulus the Macedonian, the son of that great African had adopted to the honour of his family, by this fate, plainly, that the city which the grandfather had shaken, his grandson should overthrow.

15.13. But just as the bites of dying beasts are wont to be most deadly, so there was more trouble with the half-ruined Carthage than with the whole. The enemy being driven into a single citadel, the Roman had blocked the harbour too from the sea.

15.14. They dug for themselves another harbour from another part of the city, not that they might flee; but from where no one believed even that they could escape, thence as though new-born,

15.15. a fleet suddenly burst forth; while meanwhile, now by day, now by night, some new mass, some new engine, some new band of desperate men, like a sudden flame from a buried fire, came forth from the ashes.

15.16. When at last their affairs were beyond hope, thirty-six thousand men surrendered—what is the more incredible, under the leadership of Hasdrubal.

15.17. How much more bravely the woman, the leader's wife! She, having seized her two children, hurled herself from the top of her house into the midst of the fire, imitating the queen who founded Carthage.

15.18. How great a city was destroyed, to say nothing of the rest, may be proved from the duration of the fire. For through seventeen continuous days the conflagration could scarcely be extinguished which the enemy of their own accord had set to their houses and temples; so that, since the city could not be wrested from the Romans, the triumph blazed.

16.1. As though that age were hastening on through the overthrows of cities, the ruin of Carthage was at once followed by Corinth, the head of Achaia, the glory of Greece, set as it were for a spectacle between two seas, the Ionian and the Aegean. This—an unworthy crime—was crushed before it was reckoned in the number of certain enemies.

16.2. Critolaus was the cause of the war, who used the liberty given by the Romans against the Romans themselves, and violated the Roman envoys, doubtful whether by hand too, but certainly in speech.

16.3. So to Metellus, who was then in the very act of ordering the affairs of Macedonia, the avenging was entrusted; and hence the Achaean war. And first the consul Metellus cut down the whole band of Critolaus across the open plains of Elis at the Alpheus.

16.4. And by a single battle the war had been finished; for the siege was now terrifying the city itself; but—the destiny of events—when Metellus had done the fighting, Mummius came in for the victory. He routed the army of the other leader, Diaeus, widely under the very jaws of the Isthmus, and stained the twin harbours with blood.

16.5. Then the city, deserted by its inhabitants, was first plundered, then, the trumpet sounding,

16.6. was destroyed. What of statues, what of garments, what of paintings was carried off, burned, and cast away! How great a wealth he both took away and burned, you may know from this, that whatever Corinthian bronze is praised throughout the whole world we have found to have survived the fire.

16.7. For the very harm done to that most opulent city made the mark of its bronze more precious, since, in the fire, with very many statues and images mingled together, the veins of bronze, gold, and silver flowed into a common mass.

17.1. As Corinth followed Carthage, so Numantia followed Corinth; nor thereafter was anything in the whole world left untouched by arms.

17.2. After those two burnings of most famous cities, war was waged far and wide and everywhere, not by turns but all together and at once, as though it were one war on every side; so that those two seemed, as though winds were stirring, to have scattered certain fires of war over the whole world.

17.3. Spain never had the mind to rise up against us all together, never cared to bring its strength into one, nor either to try for empire or to defend its own liberty as a people. Otherwise it is so walled in on every side by the sea and the Pyrenees that by the nature of its situation it could not even be approached.

17.4. But it was besieged by the Romans before it knew itself, and alone of all the provinces it understood its own strength after it was conquered.

17.5. In it there was fighting for nearly two hundred years, from the first Scipios to the first Caesar Augustus, not continuously nor coherently, but as occasions provoked, nor at first with the Spaniards but with the Carthaginians in Spain; thence the creeping contagion and the causes of wars.

17.6. The first to carry the Roman standards over the Pyrenean ridge were Publius and Gnaeus Scipio, and in mighty battles they cut down Hanno and Hasdrubal, the brothers of Hannibal; and Spain had been seized in the rush, had not those most valiant men, overwhelmed by Punic treachery in the very moment of their victory, fallen, conquerors though they were by land and sea.

17.7. So, as though it were a new and untouched province, Scipio, soon to be called the African, the avenger of his father and uncle, invaded it; and he at once, having taken Carthage and other cities, not content with having expelled the Carthaginians, made it a tributary province to us, subjected to the empire all the peoples on this side and beyond the Hiberus, and was the first of Roman leaders to reach as victor Gades and the shores of the Ocean. It is more to hold a province than to make one.

17.8. And so by parts leaders were sent now here, now there, who, with much labour and not without bloody contests, taught those most ferocious peoples, free up to that time and therefore impatient of the yoke, to serve.

17.9. Cato the censor broke the Celtiberians, that is, the strength of Spain, in several battles. Gracchus, that father of the Gracchi, punished the same with the destruction of a hundred and fifty cities.

17.10. The famous Metellus, who had earned his surname from Macedonia, earned to be called Celtibericus as well, when he both took Contrebia by a memorable example and, with greater glory, spared Nertobriga.

17.11. Lucullus subdued the Turduli and the Vaccaei, of whom that later Scipio, in single combat,

17.12. when a king had been the challenger, had carried off the spoils of honour. Decimus Brutus ranged somewhat more widely over the Celtici and Lusitani and all the peoples of Callaecia, and the river of Oblivion that was a terror to the soldiers; and, having traversed the shore of the Ocean as a victor, he did not turn his standards back until, not without a kind of dread and horror of sacrilege, he caught sight of the sun sinking into the seas and its fire quenched by the waters.

17.13. But the whole weight of the contests was with the Lusitani and the Numantines. And not without reason. For these alone of the nations of Spain found leaders. It would have been so with all the Celtiberians too, had not the leader of that movement, Olyndicus, been overwhelmed by force at the beginning of the war—a man of the highest cunning and audacity, who, had he gone on, would have been the Romulus of Spain, who, brandishing a silver spear as though sent from heaven, like one prophesying, had turned the minds of all upon himself.

17.14. But when, with like rashness, he had approached the consul's camp by night, he was received on the pike of a sentry close by the very tent.

17.15. The Lusitani, on the other hand, Viriathus roused, a man of the keenest craft. He, from a hunter a robber, from a robber suddenly a leader and general, and, had fortune favoured him, the Romulus of Spain, not content with defending the liberty of his own people, for fourteen years laid waste with fire and sword all the country this side and beyond the Hiberus and the Tagus,

17.16. attacked even the camps and garrisons of the praetors, cut down the army of Claudius Unimanus almost to extermination, and fixed in his own mountains, as trophies, the insignia which he had taken from our robes of state and rods of office.

17.17. At last Fabius Maximus the consul had overwhelmed him too; but the victory was sullied by his successor Popilius. For he, eager to finish the business, having attacked the broken leader, who was already debating the last terms of surrender, by fraud and snares and his own assassins, gave the enemy this glory, that he seemed unable to be conquered otherwise.

18.1. Numantia, as much inferior to Carthage, Capua, and Corinth in resources, so equal to them all in the name and honour of valour, and—if you judge truly—the supreme glory of Spain.

18.2. For it—without a wall, without towers, set on a moderately raised hill by a river—with four thousand Celtiberians alone withstood for eleven years an army of forty thousand; nor only withstood it, but sometimes struck it more savagely and afflicted it with shameful treaties. At last, when it was agreed that it was unconquered, there was need of the man who had overthrown Carthage.

18.3. Not lightly, if one may confess it, was there ever a more unjust cause of any war. They had received their allies and kinsmen the Segidenses,

18.4. who had escaped from the hands of the Romans. The intercession made on their behalf availed nothing. When they were withdrawing themselves from all contagion of war, they were ordered, as the price of a lawful treaty, to lay down their arms. This was so taken by the barbarians as though their hands were being cut off. And so at once, under their most valiant leader Megaravicus, they turned to arms. Having attacked Pompeius in battle, they preferred nevertheless a treaty, though they could have finished him off; then Hostilius Mancinus:

18.5. him too they so subdued by continual slaughter that no one could endure even the eyes or the voice of a Numantine man.

18.6. Yet with him too they preferred a treaty, content with the spoils of arms, though they could have raged to extermination.

18.7. But the Roman people, no less blazing with the disgrace of the Numantine treaty than of that famous Caudine one, whether from shame, expiated indeed the disgrace of the present outrage by the surrender of Mancinus,

18.8. but for the rest, under the leadership of Scipio, schooled by the burning of Carthage to the destruction of cities, at last blazed up in vengeance. But then there was fiercer fighting in the camp than in the field,

18.9. and one had to do battle with our own soldier rather than with the Numantine.

18.10. For, worn out with continual and unjust and most servile tasks, they who knew not arms were ordered to carry the rampart more fully, to be defiled with mud because they would not with blood. To this, the camp-followers, the harlots, the drudges, all baggage save what was necessary for use, were cut away.

18.11. It was truly proved that an army is worth as much as its general. So, the soldier being brought back into discipline, battle was joined, and what no one had ever hoped to see came to pass, that anyone should see the Numantines flee.

18.12. They even wished to surrender themselves, if conditions endurable to men were imposed. But when Scipio wished a true and unconditional victory, driven to this by necessity, they first rushed into battle resolved on death, having first filled themselves with feasts as though at funeral rites of half-raw flesh and caelia—so they call a native drink made from grain.

18.13. The plan was understood by the general, and so battle was not granted to men resolved to die. When, surrounded by a ditch and a wall and four camps, famine pressed them, begging battle of the leader, that he might slay them as men, when they did not obtain it, they resolved on a sally.

18.14. So, joining battle, very many were slain, and, as famine pressed, they lived for some while thereafter on this. At last the plan of flight was resolved; but this too their wives took from them by cutting the girths of the horses—a great crime through love.

18.15. And so, despairing of escape, turned to the utmost rage and frenzy, at last, under the leadership of Rhoecogenes, they finished themselves, their people, and their country with steel, poison, and fire set on every side.

18.16. Hail, most valiant and, in my judgement, most blessed even in its misfortunes of cities! It championed its allies with fidelity; a people supported by the strength of the whole world it withstood, with so small a band, for so long a time. At last, overwhelmed by the greatest leader, the city left the enemy no joy in it.

18.17. For there was not one Numantine man who could be led in chains; plunder, as from the very poorest, there was none: they burned their own arms. The triumph was over a name only.

19.1. Thus far the Roman people was fair, excellent, dutiful, holy, and magnificent; the rest of the age, as it is equally great, so it is even more turbulent and foul, its vices growing with the very greatness of its empire;

19.2. so that, if one divides this third, overseas age of it, which we have made of two hundred years, he would rightly and deservedly confess these first hundred, in which it subdued Africa, Macedonia, Sicily, and Spain, to be golden,

19.3. as the poets sing, but the following hundred plainly iron and bloody and, if there be anything more monstrous; since, by the wars with Jugurtha, the Cimbri, Mithridates, the Parthians, and the pirates, by the Gallic and German wars, by which it climbed to heaven itself in glory, it mingled the murders of the Gracchi and of Drusus, and besides these the slave wars, and, that nothing should be wanting to its disgrace,

19.4. the gladiatorial. Finally, turned against itself, by the hands of the Marians and Sullans, last of all of Pompey and Caesar, as though through frenzy and madness—unspeakable!—it tore itself in pieces.

19.5. And although all these things are joined among themselves and confused, yet, that they may appear the better, and at the same time lest the crimes drown out the virtues, they shall be related separately; and first, as we have begun, we shall record those just and dutiful wars with foreign nations, that the greatness of the empire daily increasing may appear; then we shall return to those crimes of citizens and shameful and impious battles.

20.1. Spain conquered in the west, the Roman people kept peace toward the east; nor peace only, but by a kind of unusual and unheard-of good fortune, wealth left by royal bequests, and whole kingdoms at once, came to it.

20.2. Attalus king of the Pergamenes, son of King Eumenes, once our ally and fellow soldier, left a will: "Let the Roman people be the heir of my goods." Among the royal goods these were. So, the inheritance being entered upon, the Roman people held the province not indeed by war nor by arms,

20.3. but, what is more just,

20.4. by the right of the will. But it is hard to say whether the Roman people lost this more easily or recovered it. Aristonicus, a fierce young man of royal blood, partly easily stirred up the cities accustomed to obey kings, partly took by force the few that resisted—Myndus, Samos, Colophon; and he cut down the army of the praetor Crassus and took the man himself.

20.5. But he, mindful both of his family and of the Roman name, with a stick blinded his barbarian guard and so provoked him, as he wished, to his own destruction.

20.6. Soon he was subdued by Perperna, captured, and held in chains by surrender.

20.7. Aquilius finished off the remnants of the Asiatic war by—unspeakable—mingling poison with the springs, to the surrender of certain cities. Which thing, as it made the victory quick, so it made it infamous; for he had, against the law of the gods and the customs of our ancestors, defiled with impure drugs the Roman arms that had been sacrosanct until that time.

1.1. These things toward the east; but not toward the southern region was there the same quiet. Who would have expected, after Carthage, any war in Africa? And yet Numidia stirred itself not lightly, and there was in Jugurtha something to be feared after Hannibal.

1.2. For the most crafty king assailed with wealth a Roman people unconquered in arms; and, beyond the hope of all, fortune favoured him,

1.3. so that a king pre-eminent in fraud was caught by fraud. He, having Masinissa for grandfather and Micipsa for father by adoption, when, driven by lust of the kingdom, he had resolved to kill his cousins, and feared no less than them the senate and people of Rome, in whose protection and clientship the kingdom was, first entrusted his crime to ambush.

1.4. Having got the head of Hiempsal, when he had turned against Adherbal, and the latter had fled to Rome, he drew the senate over to his view by money sent through envoys.

1.5. And this was his first victory over us. Then, attacking in like fashion those who were sent to divide the kingdom between him and Adherbal, when in Scaurus he had stormed the very morals of the Roman empire, he completed by audacity the wickedness he had begun.

1.6. But crimes do not long lie hidden. The wickedness of the corrupted embassy burst out, and it pleased them to pursue the parricide with war.

1.7. First the consul Calpurnius Bestia was sent into Numidia; but the king, knowing that gold is stronger than steel against the Romans, bought a peace.

1.8. When, as guilty of this outrage, he was summoned by the senate under a public safe-conduct, with equal audacity both he came and finished off, by an assassin sent against him, Massiva, a competitor for his kingdom.

1.9. This was the second cause of war against the king. So the following vengeance was entrusted to Albinus. But his brother too—for shame—so corrupted the army that the Numidian conquered by a voluntary flight of our men and got possession of the camp, a shameful treaty being added besides as the price of safety, by which the army released those whom it had bought.

1.10. At last Metellus rose up, in vengeance not so much of the Roman empire as of its honour, who most craftily assailed with his own arts an enemy who eluded him now with prayers, now with threats, now with feigned, now with real flight.

1.11. Not content with the ravaging of fields and villages, he made an attack upon the very capitals of Numidia; and Zama indeed he assaulted in vain, but Thala, heavy with arms and the royal treasures, he plundered.

1.12. Then he pursued the king, stripped of his cities and now a fugitive from his own borders and kingdom, through the Moors and Gaetulia.

1.13. At last Marius, with his forces much increased, when, by reason of the obscurity of his birth, he had bound by the military oath the men reckoned by their persons, having attacked the king when already routed and wounded, yet conquered him no more easily than if he had been whole and fresh.

1.14. He both overcame, by a kind of marvellous good fortune, the city Capsa, founded by Hercules, set in the midst of Africa and walled in by serpents and sands, and penetrated, through a Ligurian, by an approach steep and inaccessible, the city Molucha, set upon a rocky mountain.

1.15. Soon he heavily defeated, near the town of Cirta, not only the king himself but Bocchus too, king of Mauretania, championing the Numidians by right of blood.

1.16. He, when, distrusting his own affairs, he feared to become an addition to another's disaster, made the king the price of treaty and friendship.

1.17. So the most fraudulent of kings was, by the fraud of his son-in-law his father-in-law, led into the ambush of Sulla and handed over into his power; and at last the Roman people beheld in triumph Jugurtha covered with chains.

1.18. But he too, although conquered and bound, saw the city which he had foretold, in vain, was for sale and one day to perish, if it had had a buyer. Now, granted it had been for sale, it had a buyer; when he had escaped that, it was certain that it would not perish.

2.1. Thus toward the south the Roman people fared. Far more atrociously and in manifold ways more . . . from the north there came . . .

2.2. Nothing is more hostile than this region. A savage climate, and tempers to match. On every side, then, a violent enemy burst out, from the right and the left and from the middle of the north.

2.3. The first beyond the Alps to feel our arms were the Saluvii, when the most faithful and friendly state of Massilia complained of them.

2.4. Then the Allobroges and the Arverni, when the like complaints of the Aedui demanded our help and aid against them: witnesses of either victory are the rivers Isara and Vindelicus and the swift Rhône, swiftest of rivers.

2.5. The greatest terror to the barbarians were the elephants, a match for the hugeness of those nations. Nothing was so conspicuous in the triumph as the king Bituitus himself in his parti-coloured arms and his silver chariot, just as he had fought.

2.6. How great and how full the joy of either victory was may be estimated even from this, that both Domitius Ahenobarbus and Fabius Maximus raised stone towers on the very spots where they had fought, and fixed upon them trophies decked with the enemy's arms—though this custom was unusual with us. For never did the Roman people, when its enemies were subdued, reproach them with its victory.

3.1. The Cimbri, Teutones, and Tigurini, fugitives from the farthest parts of Gaul, when the Ocean had flooded their lands,

3.2. sought new dwellings throughout the world; and, shut out from both Gaul and Spain, when they were migrating into Italy, they sent envoys to the camp of Silanus, and thence to the senate, asking that the people of Mars should give them some land as it were for pay, and for the rest should use their hands and their arms as it wished.

3.3. But what lands should the Roman people give, when it was about to fight among itself over agrarian laws? Repulsed, therefore, in what they could not obtain by prayers,

3.4. they began to seek by arms. But neither the first onset of the barbarians could Silanus withstand, nor the second Manilius, nor the third Caepio; all were put to flight,

3.5. all stripped of their camps. It would have been all over, had not Marius fallen to that age. He too, not daring to engage at once, kept his soldier in the camp, until that unconquered frenzy and impetus, which the barbarians count for valour, should grow old.

3.6. So they withdrew, taunting us, and—so great was their confidence of capturing the city—asking whether we had any message to send to their wives. And no more slowly than they had threatened, in three columns they were borne toward the Alps, that is, the barriers of Italy.

3.7. Marius at once, with marvellous speed, having seized the short cuts, forestalled the enemy, and, having overtaken the leading Teutones at the very roots of the Alps, in a place which they call Aquae Sextiae, in what a battle—heaven be witness—he overwhelmed them! The enemy held the valley and the river between, our men had no supply of water.

3.8. Whether the general did this by design, or turned an error into a stratagem, is doubtful; certainly valour, driven by necessity, was the cause of victory.

3.9. For when the army demanded water, "If you are men," he said, "there you have it." And so they fought with such ardour, and there was such slaughter of the enemy, that the victorious Roman drank from the bloody river no more water than the blood of barbarians.

3.10. Certainly the king himself, Teutobodus, who was wont to vault over four or six horses at a time, scarcely mounted one when he fled, and, captured in a wood close by, was a notable spectacle of the triumph. For, being a man of extraordinary stature, he towered above his own trophies.

3.11. The Teutones being utterly destroyed, he turned upon the Cimbri. These already—who would believe it?—through the winter, which raises the Alps higher, had rolled down over the Tridentine ridges into Italy as though in an avalanche.

3.12. The river Atesis they assailed first with their bodies, not with a bridge or ships, but with a kind of barbaric stupidity; and after they had tried in vain to hold back the stream with their hands and shields,

3.13. they leaped across it choked with a forest thrown in. Had they at once made for the city in hostile array, it would have been a great crisis; but in Venetia, in which tract Italy is about the softest, the very mildness of the soil and sky weakened their strength. Besides, softened by the use of bread and cooked meat and the sweetness of wine, Marius attacked them in good time.

3.14. They came of their own accord—for fear leaves no trace in barbarians—and asked of our general a day for battle; and so he gave them the next. They met on a most open plain, which they call Raudium. There sixty-five thousand fell, on our side fewer than three hundred; through the whole day the barbarian was cut down.

3.15. Here too the general had added cunning to valour, following Hannibal and the art of Cannae. First, having got a misty day, that he might fall upon the enemy unawares; then a windy one too, that the dust might be carried into their eyes and faces; then with his line turned toward the east, so that—as was soon learned from the captives—from the gleam of the helmets, the bronze reflecting it, the sky seemed as it were to be on fire.

3.16. Nor was the battle with their wives less than with the men themselves; for, with wagons and carts set about on every side, they fought from on high as from towers with axes and pikes.

3.17. The death of these women was as glorious as their fighting. For when, an embassy having been sent to Marius, they had not obtained liberty and the priesthood (nor was it lawful), they strangled and crushed their own infants everywhere, and either fell by mutual wounds or hung themselves from the trees and the yokes of the wagons by a noose made of their own hair.

3.18. King Boiorix, fighting energetically in the front line, was slain not unavenged. The third band, of the Tigurini, which had occupied the Norican heights of the Alps as though in reserve, having slipped away in different directions, vanished in an obscure flight and in robberies.

3.19. This tidings, so joyful and so happy, of Italy delivered and the empire championed, the Roman people received not through men, as was usual, but through the gods themselves, if it is lawful to believe it.

3.20. For on the very day on which the thing was done, young men were seen before the temple of Pollux and Castor handing a laurelled letter to the praetor, and there was a frequent rumour in the spectacle of the Cimbrian victory. . . .

3.21. "Good fortune!" he said. Than which what can be more wonderful, what more remarkable? For, as though Rome were lifted up upon her hills and present at the spectacle of the war, which is wont to happen at a gladiatorial show, at one and the same moment, while the Cimbri were succumbing in the line of battle, the people in the city was applauding.

4.1. After the Macedonians, if it please the gods, the Thracians rebelled, they who were once tributary to the Macedonians; nor content to overrun only the nearest provinces, Thessaly and Dalmatia, they came as far as the Adriatic Sea; and, held back by that boundary, as though nature intervened,

4.2. they hurled their darts twisted into the very waters. Meanwhile, through all that time, no remnant of cruelty was left in their savagery against the captives: to make offering to the gods with human blood, to drink from the bones of heads, to defile death with mockeries of every kind, both with fire and with smoke, to wrench out by torture the unborn children of pregnant women.

4.3. The fiercest of all the Thracians were the Scordisci, but cunning too had been added to their strength:

4.4. the situation of the woods and the mountains agreed with their temper. And so by these the army which Cato led was not only routed or put to flight but—like a prodigy—wholly cut off entire.

4.5. Didius drove back within their own Thrace those who roamed and were spread abroad in unrestrained plundering. Drusus drove them farther and forbade them to cross the Danube. Minucius laid waste the whole Hebrus, though with the loss of many, while the cavalry rode over the treacherous frozen river.

4.6. Volso penetrated to Rhodope and Caucasus. Curio came as far as Dacia, but dreaded the darkness of its forests. Appius reached even the Sarmatians, Lucullus the boundary of the nations, the Tanais and the Maeotian lake.

4.7. Nor were these most bloodthirsty of enemies tamed otherwise than by their own customs. For there was raging against the captives with fire and sword; but nothing seemed more dreadful to the barbarians than that, their hands cut off, they were left and bidden to live on, survivors of their own punishment.

5.1. The Pontic nations lie to the left toward the north, named from the Pontic sea. The most ancient king of these nations and regions was Aeetes, after him Artabazes, sprung from the seven Persians, then Mithridates,

5.2. by far the greatest of all. For whereas four years sufficed for Pyrrhus and thirteen for Hannibal, he held out for forty years, until, subdued in three mighty wars, he was consumed by the good fortune of Sulla, the valour of Lucullus, and the greatness of Pompey.

5.3. The pretext of that war he had alleged before the legate Cassius, that his boundaries were being encroached upon by Nicomedes of Bithynia; but, carried away by vast designs, he burned with a desire for the whole of Asia and,

5.4. if he could, for Europe. Hope and confidence our own vices gave him. For, while we were distracted by civil wars, the occasion invited him, and the exposed flank of the empire was shown by Marius, Sulla, and afar off

5.5. Sertorius. Amid these wounds of the state and these tumults, suddenly, as though it had caught its time, upon men at once weary and distracted, the sudden whirlwind of the Pontic war burst forth, as it were, from the farthest watchtower of the north.

5.6. The first onset of the war at once seized Bithynia; thence Asia was carried away in like terror, nor did our cities and peoples without hesitation revolt to the king.

5.7. He was at hand, he pressed on, he used savagery as though it were valour. For what was more atrocious than that one edict of his, when he ordered all who were in Asia of the Roman citizenship to be slain? Then indeed houses, temples, and altars,

5.8. all rights human and divine, were violated. But this terror of Asia opened Europe too to the king. And so, his prefects Archelaus and Neoptolemus being sent, except for Rhodes, which stood more firmly for us, the rest, the Cyclades, Delos, Euboea, and Athens itself, the very glory of Greece, were held.

5.9. The king's terror now breathed upon Italy and the city of Rome itself. And so Lucius Sulla made haste, a man best in arms, and with equal violence drove back, as with a hand, the enemy rushing onward.

5.10. And first the city of Athens—who would believe it?—the mother of crops, he reduced by siege and famine to human food; soon the harbour of Piraeus, girt with six walls or more, was undermined. After he had subdued the most ungrateful of men, yet, as he himself said, in honour of the dead he granted it to its own rites and fame.

5.11. Soon, when he had driven the king's garrisons from Euboea and Boeotia, he scattered all his forces in one battle at Chaeronea and in another at Orchomenus, and at once, having crossed into Asia, overwhelmed the king himself. And it would have been finished, had he not preferred to triumph over Mithridates quickly rather than truly.

5.12. And then indeed Sulla had given this settlement to Asia. A treaty was struck with the Pontic king, Nicomedes recovered Bithynia from the king, Ariobarzanes Cappadocia, Asia was again ours as it had been, Mithridates only driven back. And so that issue did not break the Pontic peoples,

5.13. but kindled them. For the king, allured as it were by Asia and Europe, now demanded them back, not as another's but, because he had lost them, as snatched from him by the right of war.

5.14. So, just as fires ill quenched revive in a greater flame, so he afresh, his forces increased in greater measure, came at last with the whole weight of his kingdom again into Asia, by sea, land, and rivers.

5.15. Cyzicus, a famous city, makes the shores of the Asiatic region illustrious with its citadel, walls, harbour, and marble towers. This he had assailed as though it were a second Rome with all his war.

5.16. But a message gave the townsmen confidence to resist, telling them that Lucullus was approaching, who—horrible to tell—through the midst of the enemy's ships, suspended on a skin and steering his way with his feet, had got through, to those who saw him from afar like some sea-monster.

5.17. Soon, the disaster being reversed, when famine pressed the king from the length of the siege, and pestilence from famine, Lucullus overtook him as he withdrew and so cut him down that the rivers Granicus and Aesepus were made bloody.

5.18. The crafty king, skilled in Roman greed, ordered gold and money to be scattered by the fugitives, that he might delay the pursuers by it. Nor was his flight by sea happier than by land. For a storm, falling upon a fleet of more than a hundred ships, heavy with the apparatus of war, on the Pontic sea, tore it with so foul a slaughter

5.19. that it produced the likeness of a naval battle, and plainly so that Lucullus seemed, by a kind of compact with the waves and storms, to have handed over the king to the winds to be finished off.

5.20. Now all the forces of that most powerful kingdom were worn away, but his spirit was increased by misfortunes.

5.21. And so, turning to the neighbouring nations, he involved almost the whole east and north in his own ruin. The Iberi, the Caspii, the Albani, and both the Armenias were stirred up; through all which Fortune was seeking glory and a name and titles for her own Pompey.

5.22. He, when he sees Asia ablaze with fresh movements and king after king coming forth, judging that there must be no delay, before the strength of the nations should unite among themselves, at once, a bridge of ships being made, first of all before him crossed the Euphrates, and, having caught the fleeing king in the middle of Armenia—how great the man's good fortune!—finished him off in a single battle.

5.23. That battle was a night battle, and the Moon was on our side. For, as though serving with the goddess, she showed herself behind the enemy and before the Romans, and the Pontic men, by mistake, aimed at their own shadows falling far off as though they were the bodies of the enemy.

5.24. And Mithridates indeed was vanquished on that night. For he availed nothing afterward, though he tried everything, after the manner of serpents which, their head crushed, threaten at the last with their tail.

5.25. For when he had escaped his enemy as far as Colchis, to bridge the Bosphorus, thence to leap across through Thrace and Macedonia and Greece, and so to invade Italy unexpected—this much he meditated.

5.26. But, forestalled by the revolt of his citizens and the crime of his son Pharnaces, he drove out with the sword a life ill assailed with poison.

5.27. Gnaeus the Great meanwhile, pursuing the remnants of rebellious Asia, ranged through the various nations and lands. For toward the east, following the Armenians, when he had taken Artaxata, the head of the nation itself, he bade the suppliant Tigranes reign.

5.28. But in the north, following his Scythian course as it were by the stars at sea, he cut down the Colchians, pardoned Iberia, spared the Albani. The king of these, Orodes, having pitched his camp beneath the very Caucasus, he bade come down into the plain, and Arthoces, who ruled the Iberi, to give his children as hostages; Orodes he even rewarded, who of his own accord sent from his Albania a golden couch and other gifts.

5.29. And, his column being turned toward the south too, having crossed Lebanon of Syria and Damascus, he carried the Roman standards round through those fragrant groves, through the forests of frankincense and balsam.

5.30. The Arabs, whatever he commanded, were ready. The Jews tried to defend Jerusalem; but this too he both entered and beheld that great secret of the impious nation laid open, the heaven beneath a golden vine. And, made arbiter between the brothers quarrelling over the kingdom, he bade Hyrcanus reign; Aristobulus, because he was renewing the war, he put in chains.

5.31. So, under the leadership of Pompey, the Roman people, having ranged over the whole of Asia at its widest, made the province which it had as the farthest of its empire a middle one. For, except the Parthians, who preferred a treaty, and the Indians, who as yet did not even know us, all Asia between the Red Sea and the Caspian and the Ocean was held, tamed or overwhelmed by the Pompeian standards.

6.1. Meanwhile, while the Roman people was distracted over the various parts of the world, the Cilicians had invaded the seas, and, commerce being abolished and the bond of the human race broken, had thus closed the seas with war as with a tempest.

6.2. Audacity was given to those abandoned and frenzied robbers by Asia, restless with the Mithridatic battles, while under the tumult of another's war and the odium of a foreign king they prowled unpunished.

6.3. And at first, content under their leader Isidorus with the nearest sea, between Crete and Cyrene and Achaia and the gulf of Malea, which from its spoils they themselves called the Golden,

6.4. they played the robber. And Publius Servilius, sent against them, although with a heavy and warlike fleet he harried their light and fleeting cutters, conquered them by a victory not bloodless.

6.5. But not content to have driven them from the sea, he overthrew their strongest cities, abounding with long-gathered plunder, Phaselis and Olympus, and Isaura, the very citadel of Cilicia, whence, conscious of his great labour, he gladly took the surname Isauricus.

6.6. Yet not even so, tamed by so many disasters, could they keep to the land; but, like certain animals which have a twofold nature of dwelling in water and on land, at the very withdrawal of the enemy, impatient of the soil, they leaped back into their own waters, and, somewhat more widely than before, they wished to terrify by a sudden coming the shores of Sicily too and our Campania.

6.7. So the Cilician was judged worthy of a victory by Pompey and was made an addition to the Mithridatic province. He, wishing to extinguish once and for all the pest scattered over the whole sea, attacked it with a kind of divine apparatus.

6.8. For, since he abounded with fleets both his own and those of his allies the Rhodians, he embraced both the shores of the Pontus and of the Ocean with many legates and prefects.

6.9. Gellius was set over the Tuscan sea, Plotius over the Sicilian; Atilius beset the Ligurian gulf, Pomponius the Gallic, Torquatus the Balearic, Tiberius Nero the strait of Gades, where first the threshold of our sea is opened; Lentulus Marcellinus the Libyan and the Egyptian, the young Pompeii the Adriatic, Varro Terentius the Aegean and the Ionian, Metellus the Pamphylian, Caepio the Asiatic;

6.10. the very jaws of the Propontis Porcius Cato closed with ships set across as though with a gate.

6.11. So through all the harbours, gulfs, hiding-places, recesses, headlands, straits, and peninsulas of the sea, whatever there was of pirates was shut in by a kind of net.

6.12. Pompey himself made for Cilicia, the origin and source of the war; nor did the enemy decline the contest.

6.13. Not out of confidence, but because they were beaten, they seemed to have dared; yet no more than that they ran together at the first stroke. Soon, when they saw the beaked ships poured round on every side, throwing down their weapons and oars at once, with applause equally from all sides, which was the sign of suppliants, they begged for their lives.

6.14. Never have we used any victory so bloodless, nor was any nation found more faithful thereafter; and this was provided by the singular counsel of the leader, who removed the maritime race far from the sight of the sea and bound them as it were to inland fields, and at the same time both recovered the use of the sea for ships and restored its own men to the land.

6.15. What should you wonder at first in this victory? Its speed? It was won in forty days. Or its good fortune? Not even a single ship was lost. Or its permanence? There were no more pirates.

7.1. The Cretan war, if we will tell the truth, the mere desire of conquering a noble island brought about. It seemed to have favoured Mithridates; this it pleased us to avenge by arms.

7.2. First Marcus Antonius invaded the island, with so great a hope and confidence of victory that he carried more chains than arms in his ships.

7.3. And so he paid the penalty of his folly. For the enemy intercepted most of his ships, and, binding the captive bodies to the sails and ropes, hung them up, and so, sailing in triumphant fashion, the Cretans rowed back to their own harbours.

7.4. Then Metellus, having laid waste the whole island with fire and sword, drove them within their strongholds and cities, Cnossos, Eleutherna, and, as the Greeks are wont to say, the mother of cities, Cydonia;

7.5. and so savagely were the captives dealt with that very many finished themselves with poison, while others sent their surrender to the absent Pompey.

7.6. And when he, conducting affairs in Asia, sent thither also Antonius as prefect into another's province, it was in vain; and the more hostile Metellus exercised the right of victor upon the enemy, and, having conquered Lasthenes and Panares, the leaders of Cydonia, returned victorious. Nor yet did he bring back anything more from so famous a victory than the surname Creticus.

8.1. Since the house of Metellus Macedonicus had grown accustomed to warlike surnames, one of his sons being made Creticus, there was no delay before the other too was called Balearicus.

8.2. The Balearic islands at that time had corrupted the seas with piratical frenzy. You would wonder that men so wild and savage dared even to look out from their rocks upon the seas.

8.3. They even mounted rude rafts and from time to time terrified those sailing past by a sudden onset.

8.4. But when they had sighted the Roman fleet coming from the deep, thinking it plunder, they dared even to meet it, and at the first onset covered the fleet with a vast shower of stones and rocks.

8.5. Each man fights with three slings. Who should wonder that their strokes are sure, when these are the only arms of the nation, and this their one pursuit from infancy? The boy receives no food from his mother save what, at her bidding, he has struck. But not for long did they terrify the Romans with their stone-throwing.

8.6. For after it came to close quarters, and they had felt the beaks and the javelins coming, raising a cry after the manner of cattle, they sought the shores in flight, and, dispersed into the nearest hills, they had to be sought out to be conquered.

9.1. The destiny of the islands was at hand. So Cyprus too was taken without war. The island, abounding in ancient riches and on that account sacred to Venus, Ptolemy ruled.

9.3. But so great was the fame of its riches, and not falsely, that the people that conquered nations and was wont to give kingdoms away, under the leadership of Publius Clodius, tribune of the commons, ordered the confiscation of an ally and a living king.

9.4. And he indeed by poison forestalled his fate at the report of the thing.

9.5. For the rest, Porcius Cato carried the wealth of Cyprus in Liburnian ships through the mouth of the Tiber. Which thing filled the treasury of the Roman people more amply than any triumph.

10.1. Asia being subdued by the hands of Pompey, the rest that remained in Europe Fortune transferred to Caesar.

10.2. There remained, however, the most savage of nations, the Gauls and the Germans, and, though divided from the whole world, yet because it pleased him to conquer them, the Britons. The first movement of Gaul began from the Helvetii, who, set between the Rhône and the Rhine, their lands not sufficing, came to seek a dwelling, having burned their own walls;

10.3. this was their oath, that they would not return. But, time being asked for deliberation, when in the delay Caesar had taken away their flight by cutting the bridge over the Rhône, he at once led back that most warlike nation into its own dwellings as a shepherd leads flocks into the fold.

10.4. The next battle, and far and far more bloody, was that of the Belgae, fighting indeed for liberty. Here were many marks of distinction of the Roman soldiers, and that conspicuous one of the leader himself, that, when the army was wavering into flight, having snatched a shield from the hand of a fugitive and flying into the front line, he restored the battle with his own hand.

10.5. Then with the Veneti there was even a naval war, but a greater struggle with the Ocean than with the ships themselves. For those ships, rude and shapeless and at once wrecked when they had felt the beaks; but the battle stuck fast in the shallows, when the Ocean, drawn off by its usual tides in the very contest, seemed to interrupt the war.

10.6. Those varieties too occurred, according to the nature of the nations and the places. The Aquitani, a crafty race, withdrew into caves: he ordered them to be shut in; the Morini slipped away into the woods: he ordered them to be burned. Let no one say the Gauls are only fierce:

10.7. they act by treacheries. Indutiomarus stirred up the Treveri, Ambiorix the Eburones. Both, in Caesar's absence, having made a conspiracy, fell upon his legates.

10.8. But the one was bravely driven off by Dolabella, and the king's head brought back; the other, by ambushes set in a valley, struck down by guile. And so both the camp was plundered and we lost the legates Aurunculeius Cotta with Titurius Sabinus. Nor was there soon any vengeance for the king; for he lay hidden in perpetual flight beyond the Rhine.

10.9. The Rhine therefore was not exempt either; for it was not right that it should be a free harbourer and defender of enemies.

10.10. And the first battle against the Germans was for the most just causes indeed. The Aedui complained of their incursions.

10.11. What pride was that of King Ariovistus! who, when the envoys said "Come to Caesar," said "And who is Caesar? And if he wishes, let him come; and what is it to him what our Germany is doing? Do I interpose myself in the affairs of the Romans?"

10.12. And so there was so great a terror of the new nation in the camp that wills were written everywhere even at headquarters. But those huge bodies, the greater they were, the more they were exposed to swords and steel.

10.13. What ardour there was in the soldiers in fighting can be expressed by nothing better than this, that, when the barbarian covered himself with a testudo, their shields raised over their heads, the Romans leaped upon the very shields, and thence came down with their swords upon the throats.

10.14. Again the Tencteri complained of the German. Here indeed Caesar of his own accord crossed the Moselle by a bridge of boats and sought the enemy on the Rhine itself and in the Hercynian forests; but the whole nation had fled into the woods and marshes. So great a panic did the Roman, suddenly seen within their bank, strike into them.

10.15. Nor was the Rhine crossed once only, but a second time too, and indeed by a bridge made. There was somewhat greater consternation. For, when they saw their own Rhine thus taken by a bridge as by a yoke, again there was flight into the woods and marshes; and, what was most bitter to Caesar, there were none to be conquered.

10.16. All things having been traversed by land and sea, he looked toward the Ocean, and, as though this world did not suffice for the Romans, he meditated another. So, a fleet being prepared, he crossed to Britain with marvellous speed; for, having set sail from the harbour of the Morini at the third watch, in less than midday he entered the island.

10.17. The shores were full of hostile tumult, and the chariots, in alarm at the sight of the new thing, flew about. And so their alarm was as good as a victory for us. He received arms and hostages from the panic-stricken, and would have gone farther, had not the Ocean chastised his unruly fleet with shipwreck.

10.18. Returning therefore into Gaul, with a larger fleet and increased forces, he crossed again into the same Ocean and against the same Britons. Following the Caledonians into the woods, he put one of their kings too, Casuellanus, in chains.

10.19. Content with these things (for it was not a province but a name that was studied), he sailed back with greater plunder than before, the Ocean itself too being calmer and more propitious, as though confessing itself unequal to him.

10.20. But the greatest of all, and likewise the last, was the conspiracy of the Gauls, when it drew together at once all the Arverni and the Bituriges, the Carnutes together with the Sequani, under one terrible in body, in arms, in spirit, and even in a name composed as it were for terror, Vercingetorix.

10.21. He, on festival days and at assemblies, when he had them most thronged in the groves, by fierce words roused them to their ancient right of liberty.

10.22. Caesar was then absent at Ravenna, holding a levy, and the Alps had grown with winter: so they thought his road cut off. But he, such as he was, at the report of the thing, with most fortunate daring, over the heights of the mountains till that time pathless, over untrodden roads and snows, with a light band having traversed Gaul, both drew his camps together from the distant winter quarters, and was in the middle of Gaul before he was feared from its farthest part.

10.23. Then, attacking the very heads of the war, the cities, he levelled with the flames Avaricum with its forty thousand defenders, Alesia supported by a youth of two hundred and fifty thousand.

10.24. About Gergovia of the Arverni was the whole weight of the war. For when eighty thousand were defending that greatest city with its wall and citadel and steep banks,

10.25. having surrounded it with a rampart of stakes and a ditch, and a river led into the ditch, and besides with eighteen forts and a vast circumvallation, he first subdued it by famine, soon, as it dared sallies, cut it down on the rampart and stakes,

10.26. and at last reduced it to surrender. That king himself, the greatest glory of the victory, when he had come a suppliant into the camp, threw his horse and trappings and his own arms before the knees of Caesar. "Take," he said, "a brave man, you bravest of men: you have conquered."

11.1. While the Roman people, through Caesar, was finishing off the Gauls in the north, it meanwhile received a grievous wound from the Parthians in the east. Nor can we complain of fortune;

11.2. the disaster is without consolation. With both gods and men against it, the greed of the consul Crassus, while he gaped after Parthian gold, was punished by the destruction of eleven legions and by his own

11.3. head. And the tribune of the commons, Metellus, had devoted the departing leader with hostile curses; and when the army had crossed at Zeugma, the Euphrates swallowed the standards snatched away by sudden whirlwinds,

11.4. and when he had pitched camp near Nicephorium, envoys sent by King Orodes announced that he should remember the treaties struck with Pompey and Sulla.

11.5. He, gaping after the royal treasures, answered that he would give his answer—not even by any imaginary right—but at Seleucia.

11.6. And so the gods, avengers of treaties, were lacking neither to the snares nor to the valour of the enemy. First of all the Euphrates, which alone could both bring up supplies and protect the rear, was abandoned, while trust was put in a certain Syrian, Mazara, who feigned to be a deserter.

11.7. Then the army was led by the same guide into the middle of the vastness of the plains, that it might be exposed on every side to the enemy.

11.8. And so it had scarcely come to Carrhae, when on every side the king's prefects Silaces and Surenas displayed their standards quivering with gold and silken banners. Then without delay the cavalry, poured round on every side, hurled their dense weapons like hail and storms alike. So the army was destroyed in a pitiable slaughter.

11.9. Crassus himself, drawn out to a parley, would, a signal being given, have fallen alive into the hands of the enemy, had not the tribunes, resisting, with the sword forestalled their leader's flight—that is, anticipated his capture by his own death at the barbarian's hand.

11.10. The leader's son they covered in like manner with their weapons, almost in his father's sight. The remnants of the unhappy army, whithersoever flight carried each, scattered into Armenia, Cilicia, and Syria, scarcely brought back the news of the disaster. His head, cut off with his right hand and carried back to the king, was a mockery, and not an undeserved one. For molten gold was poured into the gaping mouth, so that the body of him whose soul had burned with greed of gold, even dead and bloodless, should be burned with gold.

12.1. This is that third, overseas age of the Roman people, in which, having dared to advance beyond Italy, it carried its arms round the whole world. Of which age the earlier hundred years were holy, dutiful, and, as we have said, golden, without outrage, without crime, while the integrity of that pastoral discipline was still sincere and harmless, and while the impending fear of the Carthaginian enemy kept the old discipline.

12.3. The later hundred, which we have traced from the destructions of Carthage, Corinth, and Numantia and the Asiatic inheritance of King Attalus down to Caesar and Pompey and Augustus, who followed these and of whom we shall speak, were as splendid in the glory of warlike affairs, so wretched and shameful in domestic disasters.

12.4. For, just as it was fair and seemly to have acquired Gaul, Thrace, Cilicia, Cappadocia, the richest and strongest provinces, and the Armenians too and the Britons, great names, if not for use, yet for the appearance of empire,

12.5. so it was at the same time base and pitiable to have fought at home with citizens, allies, slaves, gladiators, and the whole senate among itself.

12.6. And I know not whether it would have been better for the Roman people to have been content with Sicily and Africa, or even to have lacked these very things while ruling in its own Italy, than to grow to such greatness that it should be overthrown by its own strength.

12.7. For what else gave birth to civil frenzies but excessive prosperity? Syria first, when conquered, corrupted us,

12.8. then the Asiatic inheritance of the Pergamene king. Those resources and riches ruined the morals of the age, and the state, sunk in its own vices, they brought to ruin as it were by their bilge. For whence should the Roman people demand of the tribunes lands and food, save through the famine which luxury had made? Hence, then, the first and second Gracchan sedition and that third Apuleian one.

12.9. Whence was the knight, by the judiciary laws, torn from the senate, save from avarice, that the revenues of the state and the very courts might be held for gain? Hence Drusus and the citizenship promised to Latium and through this the arms of the allies.

12.10. And what besides? Whence came to us the slave wars but from the abundance of households? Whence the gladiatorial armies against their own masters, but the largess poured out to win the favour of the commons, while, indulging in spectacles, it made

12.11. into an art what was once the punishment of enemies? And, to touch more splendid vices, was not the ambition of office stirred up by the same riches? And from thence the Marian, thence the Sullan tempest.

12.12. Or the magnificent apparatus of banquets and lavish largess, springing from wealth, was it not soon to bring forth want? This drove Catiline against his own country.

12.13. Finally that very lust of the principate and of dominion, whence came it but from excessive wealth? And this it was that armed Caesar and Pompey with frenzied torches for the destruction of the state.

12.14. All these domestic disturbances, then, separated from the foreign and just wars, we shall follow out in order.