Ab urbe condita

In many places showers of earth were reported to have fallen, and a large number of men in the army under Appius Claudius were said to have been struck by lightning.

The Sacred Books were consulted in view of these occurrences. During this year Q. Fabius Gurges, the consul's son, who was an aedile, brought some matrons to trial before the people on the charge of adultery. Out of their fines he obtained sufficient money to build the temple of Venus which stands near the Circus.

The Samnite wars are still with us, those wars which I have been occupied with through these last four books, and which have gone on continuously for six-and-forty years, in fact ever since the consuls, M. Valerius and A. Cornelius, carried the arms of Rome for the first time into Samnium.

It is unnecessary now to recount the numberless defeats which overtook both nations, and the toils which they endured through all those years, and yet these things were powerless to break down the resolution or crush the spirit of that people;

I will only allude to the events of the past year. During that period the Samnites, fighting sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with other nations, had been defeated by Roman armies under Roman generals on four several occasions, at Sentinum, amongst the Paeligni, at Tifernum, and in the Stellate plains;

they had lost the most brilliant general they ever possessed; they now saw their allies —Etruscans, Umbrians, Gauls —overtaken by the same fortune that they had suffered; they were unable any longer to stand either in their own strength or in that afforded by foreign arms.

And yet they would not abstain from war; so far were they from being weary of defending their liberty, even though unsuccessfully, that they would rather be worsted than give up trying for victory.

What sort of a man must he be who would find the long

story of those wars tedious, though he is only narrating or reading it, when they failed to wear out those who were actually engaged in them?

Q. Fabius and P. Decius were succeeded in the consulship by L. Postumius Megellus and M. Atilius Regulus.

Samnium was assigned to both of them as the field of operations in consequence of information received that three armies had been raised there, one being destined for Etruria, another was to ravage Campania, and the third was intended for the defence of their frontiers.

Illness kept Postumius in Rome, but Atilius marched out at once in accordance with the senate's instructions, with the view of surprising the Samnite armies before they had started on their expeditions.

He met the enemy, as though they had had a previous understanding, at a point where he himself was stopped from entering the Samnite country and at the same time barred any movement on their part towards Roman territory or the peaceable lands of her allies.

The two camps confronted each other, and the Samnites, with the recklessness that comes of despair, ventured upon an enterprise which the Romans, who had been so often victorious, would hardly have undertaken, namely an attack on the enemy's camp. Their daring attempt did not achieve its end, but it was not altogether fruitless.