Ab urbe condita

The senate were alarmed at the prospect of the various religious ceremonies being thus shorn of their due ritual, and they sent envoys to Tibur, who were to make it their business to see that the Romans got these men back again.

The Tiburtines promised to do their best, and invited the musicians into the Senate-house, where they were strongly urged to return to Rome. As they could not be persuaded to do so the Tiburtines adopted a ruse quite appropriate to the character of the men they were dealing with.

It was a feast day and they were invited to various houses, ostensibly to supply music at the banquets. Like the rest of their class, they were fond of wine, and they were plied with it till they drank themselves into a state of torpor.

In this condition they were thrown into wagons and carried off to Rome. They were left in the wagons all night in the Forum, and did not recover their senses till daylight surprised them still suffering from the effect of their debauch.

The people crowded round them and succeeded in inducing them to stay, and they were granted the privilege of going about the City for three days every year in their long dresses and masks with singing and mirth; a custom which is still observed. Those members of the guild who played on solemn occasions in the temple of Jupiter had the right restored to them of holding their banquets there. These incidents occurred while the public attention was fixed on two most serious wars.

The[*](Further Successes in Samnium.) consuls drew lots for their respective commands; the Samnites fell to Junius, the new theatre of war in Etruria to Aemilius.

The Roman garrison of Cluvia in Samnium, alter being unsuccessfully attacked, were starved into surrender, and were then massacred after being cruelly mangled by the scourge.

Enraged at this brutality, Junius felt that the first thing to be done was to attack Cluvia, and on the very day he arrived before the place he took it by storm and put all the adult males to death. Thence his conquering army marched to Bovianum.

This was the chief city of the Pentrian Samnites, and by far the wealthiest and best supplied with arms.

There was not the same cause for resentment here as at Cluvia, the soldiers were mainly animated by the prospect of plunder, and on the capture of the place the enemy were treated with less severity; but there was almost more booty collected there than from all the rest of Samnium, and the whole of it was generously given up to the soldiers.

Now that nothing could withstand the overwhelming might of Roman arms, neither armies nor camps nor cities, the one idea in the minds of all the Samnite leaders was to choose some position from which Roman troops when scattered on their foraging expeditions might be caught and surrounded.

Some peasants who pretended to be deserters and some who had, either deliberately or by accident, been made prisoners, came to the consuls with a story in which they all agreed, and which really was true, namely, that an immense quantity of cattle had been driven into a pathless forest. The consuls were induced by this story to send the legions, with nothing but their kits to encumber them, in the direction the cattle had taken, to secure them.

A very strong body of the enemy were concealed on either side of the road, and when they saw that the Romans had entered the forest they suddenly raised a shout and made a tumultuous attack upon them.

The suddenness of the affair at first created some confusion, while the men were piling their kits in the centre of the column and getting at their weapons, but as soon as they had each freed themselves from their burdens and put themselves in fighting trim, they began to assemble round the standards. From their old discipline and long experience they knew their places in the ranks, and the line was formed without any orders being needed, each man acting on his own initiative.