Verginia protested with perfect truth that she entered the temple of Pudicitia as a patrician and a pure woman, the wife of one man to whom she had been betrothed as a virgin, and she had nothing to be ashamed of in her husband or in his honourable career and the offices which he had held.
The effect of her high-spirited language was considerably enhanced by her subsequent action. In the Vicus Longus, where she lived, she shut off a portion of her house, sufficient to form a moderately sized chapel, and set up an altar there.
She then called the plebeian matrons together and told them how unjustly she had been treated by the patrician ladies. “I am dedicating,” she said,“this altar to the Plebeian Pudicitia, and I earnestly exhort you as matrons to show the same
spirit of emulation on the score of chastity that the men of this City display with regard to courage, so that this altar may, if possible, have the reputation of being honoured with a holier observance and by purer worshippers than that of the patricians.”
The ritual and ceremonial practised at this altar was almost identical with that at the older one; no matron was allowed to sacrifice there whose moral character was not well attested, and who had had more than one husband.
Afterwards it was polluted by the presence of women of every kind, not matrons only, and finally passed into oblivion. The curule aediles, Cnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius, brought up several money-lenders for trial this year.
The proportion of their fines which was paid into the treasury was devoted to various public objects; the wooden thresholds of the Capitol were replaced by bronze, silver vessels were made for the three tables in the shrine of Jupiter, and a statue of the god himself, seated in a four-horsed chariot, was set up on the roof.
They also placed near the Ficus Ruminalis
Some graziers were also prosecuted for exceeding the number of cattle allowed them on the public land, and the plebeian aediles, L. Aelius Paetus and C. Fulvius Curvus, spent the money derived from their fines on public games and a set of golden bowls to be placed in the temple of Ceres.
Twice before they had been consuls together, they had held the censorship together, and the perfect unanimity between them, quite as much as their discharge of its duties, made their tenure of office a distinguished one.
But this was not to last for ever; the conflict which broke out between them was, however, I think, due more to the antagonism of the two orders to which they belonged than to any personal feeling on their part.
The patrician senators were extremely anxious that Fabius should have Etruria assigned to him without going through the usual procedure; the plebeian senators urged Decius to insist upon the question being settled in the usual way by lot. There was, at all events, a sharp division of opinion in the senate, and, when it became apparent that the Fabian interest was the stronger, the matter was referred to the people.
As both were first of all soldiers, trusting more to deeds than to words, their speeches before the Assembly were brief.
Fabius declared that it would be an unworthy proceeding if another should gather up the fruit beneath the tree which he had planted; he had opened up the Ciminian forest and made a way through pathless jungle for the arms of Rome. Why had they troubled him at his time of life, if they were going to carry on the war under another general?