Priscus Tarquinius was slain by the sons of his predecessor. Servius Tullius was killed by an abominable crime at the hands of his son-in-law Tarquinius Superbus, who succeeded him in the kingdom. Nor did 'the gods withdraw, leaving their shrines and altars,' when so great a parricide had been perpetrated against the best king of that people—the very gods who, men say, in order to do this to wretched Troy and to leave her to be destroyed and burned by the Greeks, had been roused by the adultery of Paris; but on top of this, when his father-in-law had been killed, Tarquinius himself succeeded to the throne.
This abominable parricide of his father-in-law, ruling by that father-in-law's murder, glorying moreover in many wars and victories, and building the Capitol from his spoils—him those gods did not abandon, but, present and abiding, they watched, and they suffered their own king Jupiter to preside and reign for them in that loftiest temple, that is, in the work of a parricide. For he did not first build the Capitol while still innocent and afterward, for his evil deeds, get driven from the City; rather, he came to that very throne, in which he might build the Capitol, by the perpetration of a most monstrous crime. But that the Romans afterward drove him from the kingdom and shut him out from the walls of the city—this was not on account of his own deed regarding the violation of Lucretia, but the sin of his son, committed while he himself not only knew nothing of it but was even absent.
At that time he was besieging the city of Ardea, waging war on behalf of the Roman people: we do not know what he would have done if the outrage of his son had been brought to his notice; and yet, with his verdict unexplored and untried, the people took away his command from him, and, when the army by which he had been ordered to be deserted was recalled, they then shut the gates and did not allow him to enter as he returned.
But he, after most grievous wars by which he wore down these same Romans, having stirred up their neighbors, after that, when, deserted by those on whose aid he relied, he was unable to recover the kingdom, lived a private and quiet life in the town of Tusculum near Rome for fourteen years, as is reported, and grew old together with his wife—with a more enviable end, perhaps, than his father-in-law, who was destroyed by the deed of his own son-in-law, and that not without the daughter's knowledge, as the story goes. And yet the Romans did not call this Tarquinius cruel or wicked, but proud—perhaps because they could not endure his royal arrogance with that other pride of theirs. For the crime of his having slain his father-in-law, their own best king, they despised to such a degree that they made him their king;
and here I marvel if they did not, by a graver crime, render so great a reward to so great a crime. Nor did 'the gods withdraw, leaving their shrines and altars.' Unless perhaps someone should defend those gods thus, saying that they remained at Rome for this reason—that they might be more able to punish the Romans with torments than to help them with benefits, leading them astray with empty victories and grinding them down with most grievous wars. Such was the life of the Romans under the kings, during that praiseworthy period of that commonwealth, up to the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus, for nearly two hundred and forty-three years, while all those victories, purchased with so much blood and such great calamities, scarcely extended that dominion to within twenty miles of the City;
how far this distance falls short of being compared even with the territory of some Gaetulian city of the present day! CHAPTER XVI. Concerning the first consuls among the Romans, of whom one drove the other from the fatherland, and soon himself, after most atrocious parricides, died, wounded by a wounded enemy. To this period let us add also that time up to which Sallust says affairs were conducted with fair and moderate justice, while fear of Tarquinius and the grave war with Etruria lasted. For as long as the Etruscans aided Tarquinius in his attempt to return to the kingdom, Rome was shaken by a grievous war. That is why he says the commonwealth was conducted with fair and moderate justice—fear pressing, not justice persuading.
In this very brief period, how deadly was that year in which the first consuls were created, the royal power having been expelled! Indeed, they did not complete their year. For Junius Brutus, having stripped his colleague Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus of honor, cast him out of the City; then soon he himself fell in battle by wounds exchanged with the enemy, having first killed his own sons and his wife's brothers, because he had learned that they had conspired for the restoration of Tarquinius. This deed Virgil, after he had praiseworthily commemorated it, immediately shuddered at with compassion. For when he had said, 'And the father will summon to punishment his sons stirring up new wars, for the sake of fair liberty,' soon afterward he cried out and said, 'Unhappy man, however posterity shall bear these deeds.'
'However,' he says, 'posterity may bear these deeds'—that is, prefer and extol them—'he who killed his sons is unhappy.' And as though to console the unhappy man, he adds: 'Love of country prevails, and the boundless desire for praise.' Is it not the case that in this Brutus—who both killed his sons and, struck by Tarquinius's son whom he had himself struck, could not survive, but rather Tarquinius himself survived him—the innocence of his colleague Collatinus seems to be vindicated, who as a good citizen suffered the same thing when this Tarquinius was expelled as the tyrant Tarquinius himself? For this same Brutus too is reported to have been a kinsman of Tarquinius; but it was, plainly, the likeness of name that bore down upon Collatinus, because he too was called Tarquinius. He would have been compelled, then, to change his name, not his fatherland;
in short, in his name this appellation could have been dropped, and he could simply have been called L. Collatinus. But he did not lose that which he could have lost without any harm; rather he was ordered to be deprived both of his honor as first consul and of his citizenship as a good citizen. Is this too glory—the detestable iniquity of Junius Brutus, of no use whatever to the commonwealth? Did 'love of country and the boundless desire for praise' triumph even for the perpetrating of this? When the tyrant Tarquinius had assuredly already been expelled, Lucretia's husband, L. Tarquinius Collatinus, was created consul together with Brutus. How justly the people attended to the citizen's character, not his name! How impiously Brutus, when he could—if this offended him—have deprived his colleague in that first and new power of his name only, deprived him both of his fatherland and of his honor!
These evil deeds were done, these adversities befell, while in that commonwealth 'affairs were conducted with fair and moderate justice.' Lucretius too, who had been substituted in Brutus's place, was carried off by disease before that same year was ended. Thus Publius Valerius, who had succeeded Collatinus, and Marcus Horatius, who had been appointed in place of the deceased Lucretius, completed that funereal and tartarean year, which had five consuls—the year in which the Roman commonwealth inaugurated the new honor and power of the consulship itself. CHAPTER XVII. By what evils the Roman commonwealth was harassed after the beginnings of consular government, while the gods whom it worshiped gave no aid.
'Then, fear being now somewhat diminished—not because the wars had subsided, but because they did not press with so heavy a weight—the time, that is, being now ended in which affairs were managed with fair and moderate justice, there followed those things which the same Sallust briefly sets forth: 'Then the senators began to exercise the plebs with servile command, to deal with their life and back after the manner of kings, to drive them from the land, and, with the rest excluded, to act alone in power. The plebs, oppressed by these cruelties and especially by usury, while at the same time enduring tribute and military service amid constant wars, took up arms and occupied the Sacred Mount and the Aventine, and then procured for itself tribunes of the plebs and other rights.
The end of these discords and of strife on both sides was the Second Punic War.') Why, then, should I endure such delays either in writing, or bring them to my readers? How wretched that commonwealth was—through so long an age, over so many years, right up to the Second Punic War, with wars never ceasing to disturb it from without and discords and civil seditions within—Sallust has briefly indicated. Accordingly, those victories were not the solid joys of the blessed, but the empty consolations of the wretched and alluring incitements, to men by no means at peace, for undergoing other and yet other barren evils. And let not the good and prudent Romans be angry with us because we say this:
although on this matter they need neither be entreated nor admonished, since it is most certain that they will be by no means angry. For we say nothing graver, or anything graver, than their own authors, to whom we are far inferior both in style and in leisure—authors whom they themselves have toiled to learn by heart and compel their own sons to learn. But those who are angry—how would they bear me if I were to say what Sallust says? 'Very many tumults, seditions, and at last civil wars arose, while a few powerful men, into whose favor most had passed, were aiming at domination under the honorable name of senators or of the plebs;
and citizens were called good and bad, not on account of their merits toward the commonwealth—all being equally corrupted—but according as each was most wealthy and stronger in doing injury, because he defended things present, he was reckoned good.' Now if those writers of history judged it to pertain to honorable liberty not to keep silent about the evils of their own city—which in many places they were compelled to praise with great proclamation, since they had no other and truer city, into which eternal citizens are to be chosen—what befits us to do, whose hope, being so much better and more certain in God, ought to make our liberty so much the greater, when men charge present evils against our Christ, in order that weaker and less learned minds may be estranged from that City in which alone we must live forever and in blessedness?
Nor do we say more horrible things against their gods than do their own authors, again and again, whom they read and proclaim, since indeed we have received from those very authors the things we would say, and in no way are we able to say either such things or all of them. Where, then, were those gods who are supposed worthy to be worshiped for the sake of this paltry and deceptive happiness of this world, when the Romans, to whom by most lying cunning they offered themselves to be worshiped, were harassed by such great calamities? Where were they, when the consul Valerius was killed while defending the Capitol, which had been scaled by exiles and slaves, and when he himself could more easily benefit the temple of Jupiter than that crowd of so many divinities, with their greatest and best king, could come to the aid of him whose temple he had freed?
Where were they, when the city, worn out by the most dense evils of seditions, while it was a little quiet awaiting the envoys sent to Athens to borrow laws, was devastated by a grievous famine and pestilence? Where were they, when again the people, while it labored under famine, first created a prefect of the grain supply, and, that famine growing severe, Spurius Maelius, because he distributed grain lavishly to the hungry multitude, incurred the charge of aiming at kingship, and at the insistence of that same prefect was killed by Quintus Servilius, the master of horse, through the dictator L. Quintius, decrepit with age, amid the greatest and most perilous tumult of the city?
Where were they, when, a very great pestilence having arisen, the people, long and greatly worn out by useless gods, thought it must offer new lectisternia, which it had never done before? Now couches were spread in honor of the gods, whence this rite—or rather sacrilege—took its name. Where were they, when, through ten continuous years of fighting badly, the Roman army received frequent and great defeats at Veii, unless at length aid was brought through Furius Camillus, whom afterward the ungrateful city condemned? Where were they, when the Gauls took Rome, plundered, burned, and filled it with slaughter?
Where were they, when that notable pestilence wrought so vast a slaughter, by which that very Furius Camillus too was destroyed—he who had both defended the ungrateful commonwealth from the Veientes before and avenged it upon the Gauls afterward? In that pestilence they brought in the scenic games, another new plague—not upon the bodies of the Romans, but, what is far more pernicious, upon their morals. Where were they, when another grave pestilence was believed to have arisen from the poisons of married women, of whom many, and of noble rank, were detected in conduct beyond belief, conduct graver than any pestilence?
or when, besieged by the Samnites at the Caudine Forks, both consuls together with the army were compelled to make a foul treaty with them, such that six hundred Roman knights were given as hostages, and the rest, having lost their arms and stripped and deprived of their other coverings, were sent under the enemy's yoke in single garments? or when, amid a grievous pestilence with all the rest suffering, many in the army as well perished, struck by lightning?
or when, by yet another unbearable pestilence, Rome was compelled to summon and call in Aesculapius from Epidaurus as a kind of physician-god, since the king of all, Jupiter, who had now long sat in the Capitol, had perhaps not allowed him to learn medicine on account of the many debaucheries to which he had given himself as a youth? or when, the enemy conspiring at one time—the Lucanians, Bruttians, Samnites, Etruscans, and Senonian Gauls—first their envoys were killed by them, then an army with its praetor was overwhelmed, seven tribunes perishing along with him, and thirteen thousand soldiers?
or when, after long and grievous seditions at Rome—by which at last the plebs had seceded to the Janiculum in hostile separation—so dire a calamity of this evil arose that, for the sake of this matter, as was wont to be done in extreme dangers, the dictator Hortensius was created, who, after recalling the plebs, expired in that very magistracy, which had happened to no dictator before, and which was a graver charge against those gods now that Aesculapius was present? Then indeed so many wars grew rife everywhere that, from a shortage of soldiers, those 'proletarii'—who, because they were free for the begetting of offspring and, by reason of poverty, unable to serve, had received this name—were enrolled for military service.
Pyrrhus too, king of Greece, then celebrated with immense glory, having been summoned by the Tarentines, was made an enemy of the Romans. To him, indeed, consulting about the future outcome of affairs, Apollo gave an ambiguous oracle wittily enough, so that, whichever of the two should happen, he himself might be held divine (for he said: 'I say that you, Pyrrhus, the Romans are able to conquer'—or, 'that you can conquer the Romans'); and so, whether Pyrrhus should be conquered by the Romans or the Romans by Pyrrhus, the soothsayer might securely await either outcome. What and how horrible were the slaughters of both armies at that time! In which, nevertheless, Pyrrhus came out superior, so that he might now be able to proclaim Apollo divine according to his own understanding, had not, in the very next battle, the Romans come off superior.
And amid so great a carnage of wars, a grievous pestilence of women too arose. For before they could bring forth their offspring to maturity, the pregnant women were dying. Here, I suppose, Aesculapius excused himself, professing himself a chief physician, not a midwife. The cattle likewise were perishing, so that even the race of animals was believed about to fail. And what of that memorable winter, raging with such incredible savagery that, with the snows remaining at a dreadful depth even in the forum for forty days, the Tiber too was hardened with ice? If this had happened in our times, what and how great things these people would have said! And what of that likewise huge pestilence—how long it raged, how many it destroyed!
When this, in another year, was stretching on far more grievously, with Aesculapius present in vain, recourse was had to the Sibylline books. In which kind of oracles, as Cicero relates in his books on divination, more credit is wont to be given to the interpreters as they can or will, conjecturing doubtful things. Then, therefore, it was said that this was the cause of the pestilence—that many men privately held very many sacred temples that they had occupied: thus, for the time being, Aesculapius was freed from the great charge of ignorance or of sloth. But whence had those temples been occupied by many with no one forbidding,
except that to so great a crowd of divinities supplication had long been made in vain, and so the places were little by little deserted by their worshipers, so that, as if empty, they could be claimed at least for human uses without anyone's offense? For then, having been carefully sought out again and restored as it were to allay the pestilence, unless afterward in the same way, being neglected and usurped, they lay hidden, surely no great expertise would be attributed to Varro for relating, when he writes about the sacred temples, so many things that were unknown. But then, for the time being, an elegant excuse was procured—not of the pestilence's repelling, but of the gods. CHAPTER XVIII. How great the disasters that wore down the Romans in the Punic Wars, the protection of the gods having been sought in vain.
Now indeed in the Punic Wars, when between the two empires victory long hung doubtful and uncertain, and the two most powerful peoples were driving their most valiant and wealthy assaults against each other, how many smaller kingdoms were crushed! What ample and noble cities were destroyed, how many afflicted, how many states ruined! How far and wide were so many regions and lands laid waste! How often were the conquerors conquered, now here, now there! What a multitude of men was consumed, whether of fighting soldiers or of peoples free from arms! What a host of ships, overwhelmed in sea-battles too and sunk by the variety of diverse storms! If we should attempt to relate or commemorate it, we too should be nothing other than writers of history.
Then the Roman state, troubled with great fear, ran to vain and ridiculous remedies. By the authority of the Sibylline books the secular games were restored, whose celebration had been instituted within an interval of a hundred years, and which in happier times had perished through neglectful memory. The pontiffs also renewed the sacred games to the gods below, even these abolished in better years gone by. No wonder, then, that, when they were renewed, the gods below—enriched by so great an abundance of the dying—were delighted even to play, since indeed the wretched men were waging the very mad wars and bloody passions and funereal victories, now here, now there, as great games of the demons and rich banquets of the powers below.
Nothing assuredly more pitiable befell in the First Punic War than that the Romans were so defeated that even that famous Regulus was captured—of whom we made mention in the first and second book—a man plainly great, and formerly the victor and tamer of the Carthaginians, who would even have brought to a close that very First Punic War, had he not, through excessive greed for praise and glory, imposed on the wearied Carthaginians harsher conditions than they could bear. That man's most unexpected captivity and most unworthy servitude, his most faithful oath-keeping and most cruel death—if these do not compel those gods to blush, it is true that they are of bronze and have no blood. Nor were the most grievous evils lacking within the walls at that time.
For with the river Tiber overflowing far beyond its custom, nearly all the level parts of the city were overthrown, some swept away by the rush as of a torrent, others, as by a long-standing pool, soaked through and undermined. Then a more destructive plague of fire followed this, which, having seized whatever was loftier around the forum, did not even spare the temple of Vesta, its most familiar haunt, where the virgins—not so much honored as condemned—had been wont to give it, as it were, perpetual life by the most diligent replenishing of wood. There, however, the fire not only lived but even raged.
Terrified by its onslaught, the virgins, when they could not free those fated sacred objects—which had already pressed upon three cities in which they had been—from that conflagration, Metellus the pontiff, forgetful, as it were, of his own safety, rushing in, half-burned, snatched them away. For neither did the fire even recognize him, nor was there truly any divine power present there, which, even if it had been present, would not have fled. A man, therefore, was able to benefit Vesta's sacred objects rather than they the man. But if they could not ward off fire from their very selves, what could they help the city, whose safety they were thought to guard, against those waters and flames? as indeed the very event made plain that they could avail nothing at all.
These things would by no means be objected by us against them, if they would say that those sacred rites were instituted not for safeguarding these temporal goods, but for signifying eternal ones, and therefore, when it happened that they perished, because they were corporeal and visible, nothing was diminished from those things for which they had been instituted, and they could be restored anew for the same uses. But now, with marvelous blindness, they suppose it could have come about, through those sacred objects which could perish, that the earthly safety and temporal felicity of the city could not perish. Accordingly, when, even with those sacred rites still abiding, either the wreck of safety or unhappiness is shown to have rushed in, they blush to change the opinion they cannot defend. CHAPTER XIX.
Concerning the affliction of the Second Punic War, by which the strength of both parties was consumed. But in the Second Punic War it is too long to recount the disasters of two peoples fighting so far and wide with each other—so much so that, by the admission even of those who set out not so much to narrate the Roman wars as to praise the Roman empire, the one who conquered was more like the conquered. For with Hannibal rising up from Spain, and the Pyrenees mountains surmounted, and Gaul traversed, and the Alps shattered through, his forces increased by so long a circuit, laying waste or subduing everything in the manner of a torrent as he burst through into the gates of Italy—how bloody were the battles waged, how often were the Romans overcome! how many towns went over to the enemy, how many were captured and crushed!
how dire the battles, and how often glorious to Hannibal by a Roman defeat! As for the wonderfully horrible disaster of Cannae, what shall I say, where Hannibal, although he was most cruel, nevertheless, sated by so great a slaughter of his most savage enemies, is reported to have ordered that they be spared? Whence he sent three pecks of golden rings to Carthage, that they might understand how great a Roman dignity had fallen in that battle, so that measure rather than number might more easily comprehend it, and that thence the slaughter of the remaining multitude—so much more numerous as it was lower in rank, which lay without rings—should be thought rather to be guessed at than reported.
Finally, so great a shortage of soldiers ensued that the Romans gathered those guilty of crimes with impunity offered, gave liberty to slaves, and by these the army was not so much supplemented as established—a shameful one. Thus to slaves—nay rather, lest we do them injury, now to freedmen—who were to fight on behalf of the Roman commonwealth, arms were lacking. They were stripped from the temples, as if the Romans were saying to their gods: 'Lay down what you have so long held in vain, lest perchance our chattels be able to make some useful thing from them, from which our divinities could not.'
Then too, when the treasury had failed for the meeting of the soldiers' pay, private wealth came into public use, each man contributing what he had, to such a degree that, except for single rings and single bullae—pitiable insignia of rank—the senate itself, much more the other orders and tribes, left nothing of gold to themselves. Who would endure these men, if in our times they were forced to such poverty?—since we scarcely bear with them now, when, for the sake of superfluous pleasure, more is given to actors than was then contributed to the legions for their utmost safety. CHAPTER XX. Concerning the end of the Saguntines, to whom, perishing on account of their friendship with the Romans, the Roman gods brought no aid.
But in all these evils of the Second Punic War, nothing was more pitiable, or more worthy of a pitiable complaint, than the destruction of the Saguntines. For this city of Spain, most friendly to the Roman people, while it kept faith with that same people, was overthrown. For from here Hannibal, having broken the treaty, sought pretexts by which he might provoke the Romans to war. He was therefore fiercely besieging Saguntum. When this was heard at Rome, envoys were sent to Hannibal to withdraw from its siege. Despised, they proceed to Carthage and lay down their complaint of the broken treaty, and, the matter unaccomplished, return to Rome. While these delays are being transacted, that wretched city, most wealthy, most dear to its own commonwealth and to the Roman, was destroyed by the Carthaginians in the eighth or ninth month.
To read of its destruction—how much more to write of it—is a thing of horror. Yet I will briefly commemorate it; for it pertains much to the matter under discussion. First it wasted away with famine; for it is even reported to have been fed by some on the corpses of their own people. Then, worn out by all things, lest at least it should come captive into Hannibal's hands, it publicly built a huge pyre, into which, as it blazed, they cast themselves and their own—even those slain by the sword. Here let the gluttonous and worthless gods do something, gaping after the fat of sacrifices and deceiving with the fog of lying divinations; here let them do something, let them come to the aid of a city most friendly to the Roman people, let them not allow one perishing through the keeping of faith to perish.
They themselves, surely, presided as mediators, when it was joined to the Roman commonwealth by the interposing of a treaty. Keeping faithfully, therefore, that which it had joined by a covenant under those very gods as guarantors, had bound by faith, had bound fast by an oath, it was besieged, overwhelmed, and consumed by a faithless foe. If those gods afterward terrified Hannibal by storm and thunderbolts when he was very near the Roman walls, and drove him far off, then they should first have done some such thing. For I dare to say that it would have been more honorable for them to be able to rage with a storm on behalf of friends of the Romans then in peril—so that they might not break faith with the Romans, and having then no help—than on behalf of the Romans themselves, who were fighting for themselves and were wealthy against Hannibal.
If, then, they were the guardians of Roman felicity and glory, they would have turned aside from her so grievous a crime as the calamity of Saguntum; but now how foolishly is it believed that, with those gods as defenders, Rome did not perish when Hannibal was victorious — those gods who could not come to the aid of the city of Saguntum, lest it should perish on account of its friendship with Rome! If the people of Saguntum had been Christian, and had suffered something of this kind for the faith of the Gospel — although they would not have destroyed themselves with sword or fire, yet if they had suffered ruin for the faith of the Gospel — they would have suffered it in that hope by which they had believed in Christ, not for the reward of a most brief span of time, but of an endless eternity.