Ab urbe condita

At last the Volsinians, tired of the war, obtained a truce for twenty years on condition that they paid an indemnity for their previous raid and supplied the year's pay for the army. It[*](Banishment of Camillus.) was in this year that Marcus Caedicius, a member of the plebs, reported to the tribunes that whilst he

was in the Via Nova where the chapel now stands, above the temple of Vesta, he heard in the silence of the night a voice more powerful than any human voice bidding the magistrates be told that the Gauls were approaching.

No notice was taken of this, partly owing to the humble rank of the informant, and partly because the Gauls were a distant and therefore an unknown nation. It was not the monitions of the gods only that were set at nought in face of the coming doom. The one human aid which they had against it, M. Furius Camillus, was removed from the City.

He was impeached by the plebeian tribune L. Apuleius for his action with reference to the spoils of Veii, and at the time had just been bereaved of his son. He invited the members of his tribe and his clients, who formed a considerable part of the plebs, to his house and sounded their feelings towards him. They told him that they would pay whatever fine was imposed, but it was impossible for them to acquit him.

Thereupon he went into exile, after offering up a prayer to the immortal gods that if he were suffering wrongfully as an innocent man, they would make his ungrateful citizens very soon feel the need of him. He was condemned in his absence to pay a fine of15,000 “ ases.”