I remember what an outrage was committed by the young Sabines on a similar occasion, I shudder lest any ill-advised and reckless incident should occur. For our sakes, and yours, consuls, I thought it right to give you this warning.
As far as I am concerned, it is my intention to start at once for home, lest, if I stay, I should be involved in some mischief either of speech or act.” With these words he departed.
These vague hints, uttered apparently on good authority, were laid by the consuls before the senate. As generally happens, the authority rather than the facts of the case induced them to take even excessive precautions. A decree was passed that the Volscians should leave the City, criers were sent round ordering them all to depart before nightfall.
Their first feeling was one of panic as they ran off to their respective lodgings to take away their effects, but when they had started a feeling of indignation arose at their being driven away from the Games, from a festival which was in a manner a meeting of gods and men, as though they were under the curse of heaven and unfit for human society.
As they were going along in an almost continuous stream, Tullius, who had gone on in advance, waited for them at the Ferentine Fountain. Accosting their chief men as they came up in tones of complaint and indignation, he led them, eagerly listening to words which accorded with their own angry feelings, and through them the multitude, down to the plain which stretched below the road.
There he began a speech: “Even though you should forget the
wrongs that
Have you not felt that they have won a triumph over you today, that as you departed you were a spectacle to the townsfolk, to the strangers, to all those neighbouring populations; that your wives, your children, were paraded as a gazing-stock before men's eyes?
What do you suppose were the thoughts of those who heard the voice of the criers, those who watched us depart, those who met this ignominious cavalcade? What could they have thought but that there was some awful guilt cleaving to us, so that if we had been present at the Games we should have profaned them and made an expiation necessary, and that this was the reason why we were driven away from the abodes of these good and religious people and from all intercourse and association with them?
Does it not occur to you that we owe our lives to the haste with which we departed if we may call it a departure and not a flight? And do you count this City as anything else than the City of your enemies where had you lingered a single day you would all have been put to death? War has been declared against you to the great misery of those who have declared it if you are really men.”
So they dispersed to their homes, with their feelings of resentment embittered by this harangue. They so worked upon the feelings of their fellow-countrymen, each in his own city, that the whole Volscian nation revolted.
By the unanimous vote of the states, the conduct of the war was entrusted to Attius Tullius and Cn. Marcius, the Roman exile, on whom their hopes chiefly rested.
He fully justified their expectations, so that it became quite evident
that the strength of