By this time they were completely invested by the Dictator, and were hardly able to keep up the fight against one army. Then their lines were attacked by Quinctius' army, who had completed the circumvallation and resumed their arms. They had now to maintain a fresh conflict, the previous one was in no way slackened.
Under the stress of the double attack they turned from fighting to supplication, and implored the Dictator on the one side and the consul on the other not to make their extermination the price of victory, but to allow them to surrender their arms and depart. The consul referred them to the Dictator, and he, in his anger, determined to humiliate his defeated enemy.
He ordered Gracchus Cloelius and others of their principal men to be brought to him in chains, and the town of Corbio to be evacuated. He told the Aequi he did not require their blood, they were at liberty to depart; but, as an open admission of the defeat and subjugation of their nation, they would have to pass under the yoke.
This was made of three spears, two fixed upright in the ground, and the third tied to them across the top. Under this yoke the Dictator sent the Aequi.
Their camp was found to be full of everything —for they had been sent away with only their shirts on —and the Dictator gave the whole of the spoil to his own soldiers alone.
Addressing the consul and his army in a tone of severe rebuke, “You, soldiers,” he said, “will go without your share of the spoil, for you all but fell a spoil yourselves to the enemy from whom it was taken; and you, L. Minucius, will command these legions as a staff officer, until you begin to show the spirit of a consul.”
Minucius laid down his consulship and remained with the army under the
Dictator's orders. But such obedience did men in those days pay to
authority when ably and wisely exercised, that the soldiers, mindful of
the service he had done them rather than of the disgrace inflicted on
them, voted to the Dictator a gold crown a pound in weight, and when he
left they saluted him as their “patron.”
Quintus Fabius, the prefect of the City, convened a meeting of the senate, and they decreed that Quinctius, with the army he was bringing home, should enter the City
in triumphal procession. The commanding officers of the enemy were led in front, then the military-standards were borne before the general's chariot, the arm followed