Then followed a long silence. The consuls were unable to breathe a word either in favour of a capitulation so humiliating or against one so necessary.
At last L. Lentulus, of all the staff-officers the most distinguished, both by his personal qualities and the offices he had held, spoke: “I have often,” he said, “heard my father, consuls, say that he was the only one in the Capitol who refused to ransom the City from the Gauls with gold, for the force in the Capitol was not invested and shut in with fosse and rampart, as the Gauls were to indolent to undertake that sort of work; it was therefore quite possible for them to make a sortie involving, perhaps, heavy loss, but not certain destruction.
If we had the same chance of fighting, whether on favourable or unfavourable ground, which they had of charging down upon the foe from the capitol, in the same way as the besieged have often made sorties against their besiegers, I should not fall behind my father's spirit and courage in the advice which I should give.
To die for one's country is, I admit, a glorious thing, and as concerns myself I am ready to devote myself for the people and legions of Rome or to plunge into the midst of the enemy.
But it is here that I beheld my country, it is on this spot that all the legions which Rome possesses are gathered, and unless they wish to rush to death for their own sakes, to save their honour, what else have they that they can save by their death.
“The dwellings of the City,” somebody may reply, “and its walls, and that crowd of human beings who form its population.” Nay, on the contrary, all these things are not saved, they are handed over to the enemy if this army is annihilated.
For who will protect them? A defenceless multitude of non-combatants, I suppose; as successfully as it defended them from the approach of the Gauls.
Or will they implore the help of an army from Veii with Camillus at its head? Here and here alone are all our hopes, all our strength. If we save these we save our country, if we give these up to death we desert and betray our country.
“Yes,” you say, “but surrender is base and ignominious.” It is; but true affection for our country demands that we should preserve it, if need be, by our disgrace as much as by our death.
However great then the indignity, we must submit to it and yield to the compulsion of necessity, a compulsion which the gods themselves cannot evade! Go, consuls, give up your arms as a ransom for that State which your ancestors ransomed with gold!”
The consuls left to confer with Pontius. When the victor began to insist upon a treaty, they told him that a treaty could not possibly be made without the orders of the people nor without the fetials and the usual ceremonial.
So that the convention of Claudium did not, as is commonly believed and
as even Claudius asserts, take the form of a regular treaty. It was
concluded through a