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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As soon as the pressing danger was removed, two of the tribunes impeacht the former consul T. Menenius for having left the Fabii without assistance. Their object was merely to get a declaration of his being guilty, not to take vengeance on an offender in behalf of whom his father's memory pleaded: hence the penalty was fixt at only two thousand ases, not more than a knight's yearly pay; and a sum many times as large would have been raised by his gentiles and clients. Thus far therefore his condemnation was of no importance: and in times of distraction such a sentence, pronounced by a court governed by the spirit of the opposite faction, rather raises a man in the estimation of his own. Hence we are perplext to find that it broke the heart of Menenius: he shut himself up in his house and died of grief. But it is no less incomprehensible that the tribunes should have been able to accuse him before the tribunal of their order for a matter not affecting its rights: though we may easily suppose that they brought their charge before the curies. And if these sacrificed him, for the sake of washing off their own guilt, if with vulgar thoughtlessness they estimated the sentence by the insignificance of the penalty, we can conceive that Menenius, who may have known that many of his judges, as far as wishes and commands went, were more culpable than he, should have sunk under his shame.

For twenty years before the institution of the decemvirate Rome was visited by all imaginable scourges, mortalities, earthquakes, calamitous defeats, as though heaven had resolved to exterminate the distracted nation from the face of the earth; and manifold signs, betokening an inward coil and stir of nature, announced that the times were out of joint. A similar combination of all natural horrours with the last extreme of human misery came again upon the city after the lapse of a thousand years, and left it desolate as a grave, three hundred years after Rome had experienced the first pestilence the ravages of which can be compared with those of this earlier period.

The first of these epidemic disorders makes its appearance in the year 282: its peculiar character is not described, only that it attackt every one without distinction of age or sex; that it rolled over the city like a torrent or a lava-stream, and would have swept all before it, had it made a longer stay. This sickness is expressly said to have visited the rest of Italy. The same thing is not stated of the second, which raged nine years after, in 291, though it is impossible to doubt that it was no less widely spread: an account has been preserved of its victims, sufficient to give a notion of its ravages, and deserving unqualified credit. It carried off both the consuls, three out of the five tribunes, two of the four augurs, the chief curio, and the fourth part of the senators.

By having the arbitrary power of fixing the value of every man's taxable property, and the exclusive management of the register of the citizens, the ruling order was enabled to pack the centuries in such a manner as for the most part decided the event of proceedings at their assemblies. If a man's taxable property might be multiplied by way of penalty, the same thing might be done under the plea of a well-earned reward: still oftener might general regulations be made, by the application of which the property of some stood higher, that of others lower in the classes than before: and how many direct falsehoods may have been resorted to, for the sake of getting a majority? Party-spirit is blind to the baseness of such frauds. So long as the army received no pay, too high an assessment seldom subjected a man to any other disadvantage than heavier duty in war: even from this the consuls might relieve him, since they made their levies at discretion: and if a tax was ever laid on, the quaestors, who were exclusively patricians, might pass over whom they chose in collecting it. The tribunes indeed undoubtedly took the part of those whose property the censors rated too low, in order to transfer them into an inferior class: but how were false voters to be convicted?

This is the war which Dion charges the patricians; with having excited for the sake of employing the commonalty: the Fabii, at that time the heads of the oligarchy, must accordingly have been the authors of this piece of statecraft: this guilt they expiated fearfully, and that too, as not seldom happens, after having done everything to atone for it.

During the first two years, 271 and 272, the hostilities seem to have been of little importance. I have already mentioned the unfortunate turn they took in 273, owing to the internal dissensions of the Romans. The infantry under Cæso Fabius agreed together that their general, whom they did not acknowledge as consul, should gain no triumph in a war which he and his house had stirred up, and which the centuries had not decreed. The cavalry, part of them as patricians, part carried along by the spirit which characterizes such troops, had broken the Etruscan line: but the cohorts refused to follow; and in spite of the consul's vehement exhortations that at least they would maintain their ground, in spite of his entreaties, of his threats, they gave way, abandoned their camp to the enemy, and soon fled in disgraceful confusion to Rome.

The departure of the Gauls gave the Romans nothing within the city except the desolate scene of a conflagration: and at least on the left bank of the Tiber it can only have been by accident if any house in the country had escaped destruction. The Peloponnesians in their invasions of Attica left no house and no tree standing, wherever they marcht; and the Gauls were barbarians, beneath whose tread everything living perisht. Ostia may have held out: with regard to the small Latin towns incorporated in the Roman territory, it is no less improbable that the Gauls should have refrained from attacking any place where booty was to be won, than that such places should have been able to resist them. The greatest part of the citizens had been swept away: most of the men in the prime of life fell on the Alia: an enormous number, including women and children, who could not effect their escape, must have died by the sword or been carried into slavery by the conquerors. How is it possible to believe that the Tiber can have covered the territory of Veii, at least so long as the Gallic army kept together? and many of the fugitives must have been overtaken by destruction in the very heart of Latium.