also involves the sons of Publicola, while they struggle to defend their uncle's body 25, is avenged by the Roman dictator, who, with his cohort, defeats and routs the royal emigrants. In vain Mamilius attempts to rally the fugitives. He also falls by the hand of T. Herminius, a man of consular rank, one of the two comrades of Horatius Cocles at the battle of the bridge. Despair urges the last heir of the Tarquins, with the royalists, to renew the battle now already lost; he perishes with the majority of his followers. The Roman knights had fought on foot; their horses are now brought up; they mount, and pursue the flying enemy. The Latin camp is taken in the first dismay. In this battle the dictator had vowed a temple to the Dioscuri; and two young knights on white steeds were seen fighting in the foremost rank of the Romans, and recognised by both parties as supernatural beings. The pursuit was still kept up, when these heroes appeared at Rome covered with dust and blood. They washed themselves and their armour in a spring at the temple of. Vesta, and made known to the assembled populace the events of the day.

25

After this battle, Tarquinius, now far advanced in

According to the Fasti, M. Valerius did not fall in this battle; for eleven years afterwards he was nominated to the dictatorship; and P. Valerius, Publicola's son, was, according to Dionysius' own account, sent some years after as commissary, to purchase corn to relieve the famine. Both statements are really of the historical kind, and decide as to the credibility of the account of the battle. See Sylburg and Glareanus on Dionysius VI. c. 12.

years, bereaved of his children and all his hopes, betook himself to Cuma to the tyrant Aristodemus *. In this asylum he died early in the following year. Aristodemus whose name is notorious even amongst those of the Greek tyrants for greater atrocities, was his heir, and substantiated his claim against the commonwealth for the private property of the Tarquinian family, when some years after, the state ordered a quantity of corn to be purchased in his city, at that time the mart of Campania. The Roman royalists, scattered and helpless, became extinct.

From the battle at the Regillus, commences a real history of Rome, at first feeble and obscure, but gradually becoming more connected and richer in historical incidents. The annals of the Pontifices and the Fasti Triumphales seem to have begun about this time; and many domestic occurrences were preserved to future generations by ineffaceable records. Poetical compositions now become rare; they recur somewhat fully in the History of Coriolanus. But historic truth is displaced by intentional falsification as it had previously yielded to ideal composition. This falsification, especially in narratives of military exploits, was the work of family vanity, in the whole exhibition of Rome's external relations, of national pride,-in the accounts and descriptions of her internal relations and civil commotions, of the party

26 The Cumaan history of this period was not less mythic than that of Rome, and the extract in Dionysius is chiefly remarkable because it puts forward this fact so plainly, VII. c. 3. et seq. But the Persian wars of early Greece are not less poetic than the victories of Cuma over innumerable Italian barbarians.

spirit of the classes. This false and artificial surface almost everywhere betrays itself. Often, where it palpably usurps the place of obliterated truth, it still does not permit us to detect what has been concealed or substituted, with a conviction which we can communicate to others. Even where ampler materials present more frequent opportunities of discovering the truth, we can only partially restore them and only for purposes of general remark. Down to this epoch the ancient fable was rich, the annals which succeed it originally poor and meagre in the extreme. Proof of this appears in the fragments of the Annals of Ennius, if we may assume that the numbers of his books as quoted have been given correctly; for the History of the Kings occupies the three first books, and in the fifth he relates the war of Pyrrhus; so that an historical period of almost equal length is comprised within one-third of the space which he devotes to the fabulous age.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE LATIN LEAGUE.

I LEAVE the path of chronology to notice the Latin league of the consul, Sp. Cassius, though it was first concluded after the reconciliation of the orders, whose feuds had broken out in the year of the last king's death.

It was three years after the battle at the Regillus, (in the year 261) when both nations first entered into a league, the terms of which were held valid in their essentials during a century and a half. During that time external circumstances must have frequently occurred, and indeed evidently did so to disturb the carrying into effect that equality which should have been mutually maintained according to the letter of the compact. But the war had previously terminated, at least as far as feelings were concerned and by acts of reconciliation. In the year after the battle the prisoners were either returned to' the Latins, or exchanged. The Romans say the former, and style it an act of grace with which the

senate requited the Latins, for having rejected the solicitations of the Volscians to prosecute the war, and for having warned the Romans to that effect. But the latter is more probable, and that both nations were conscious of the urgent necessity of union. This view certainly might have been taken on account of the Volscians, and it required some extraordinary dread of a foreign foe, to restore an ancient alliance broken off by a war of extreme bitterness. The Volscians are now for the first time specifically named as inhabitants of Latium, and in possession of the two cities Pometia and Cora, which in the year 251 still belonged to the Auruncians. The nation which, in the seventh year after, wrested so many towns from the Latins, and encamped in triumph under the walls of Rome, must have been at that time very formidable to both, though the former may not have been stripped of all their possessions in the plains, by these incursions, as Cato at least mentions, of a still earlier period". He speaks of a time, of which no historical records could have been extant, and it is very credible that an event of later date is here also transferred to the remote mythic age. No confusion can arise in this instance, from its being stated of this Etruscan Mezentius that the Volscians also were subject to his dominion, for at the time when this Mythic Prince is said to have reigned, it is at least doubtful whether the Etruscans themselves had extended as far as the Tiber.

Ager qui nunc Volscorum est campestris plerus Aboriginum fuit. Cato. Fragm. Origg, in Cortius.