from the Romans came forth the three Horatii, and from the Albans the three Curiatii; by the three Curiatii two of the Horatii were overcome, but by the one surviving Horatius the three Curiatii were defeated and slain. Thus Rome emerged victorious in that carnage, though in the final combat, so that of six men one alone returned home. Whose was the loss on both sides, whose the mourning, but that of Aeneas's stock and Ascanius's posterity, of Venus's offspring and Jupiter's grandsons? For this too was more than a civil war, since a daughter city fought against her mother city. And to this last combat of the triplets there was added another atrocious and horrible evil. For as both peoples had formerly been friends (being indeed neighbors and kinsfolk), the sister of the Horatii had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii;
but afterward, when she beheld the spoils of her betrothed upon her victorious brother, she was slain by that very brother because she wept. To me the feeling of this one woman seems more human than that of the whole Roman people. She wept, I think, not blamably, for the man to whom she was already bound by a pledge already half-given—or perhaps she grieved even for her very brother, who had slain the man to whom he had promised his sister. For why, in Virgil, does the pious Aeneas laudably grieve for an enemy slain even by his own hand? Why did Marcellus, recalling the city of Syracuse, whose lofty splendor and glory a little before had suddenly fallen beneath his hands, pondering the common condition of mankind, pity it with tears?
I beg that we may obtain this from human feeling: that a woman should be allowed to weep without crime for her betrothed slain by her brother, if men wept even with praise for enemies vanquished by themselves. Therefore, at the very time when that woman was weeping for the death inflicted by her brother upon her betrothed, Rome was rejoicing that she had waged war against her mother city with such slaughter, and had conquered by so great an outpouring of kindred blood on this side and that. Why is the name of praise, the name of victory, held up before me? Let the obstacles of insane opinion be removed, and let the deeds be seen naked, weighed naked, judged naked. Let the case of Alba be stated, just as the adultery of Troy was alleged. No such case, none like it, is to be found; only that Tullus might rouse to arms men grown sluggish, and ranks now unused to triumphs.
By that vice, then, was perpetrated so great a crime of a war both allied and kindred—a vice which Sallust touches upon in passing as something great. For when, in praising them, he had briefly recalled more ancient times, when the life of men was passed without covetousness and each was well content with his own, he says: "But afterward, when in Asia Cyrus, and in Greece the Lacedaemonians and Athenians began to subdue cities and nations, to hold the lust of domination as a cause of war, to reckon the greatest glory to lie in the greatest empire," and the rest which he had set himself to say. For me let it suffice to have set down thus far his words. This lust of domination harasses and grinds down the human race with great evils.
By this lust Rome, then herself conquered, triumphed as though she had conquered Alba, and called the praise of her own crime 'glory'; for, as our Scripture says, "the sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, and he who does iniquity is blessed." Let the deceitful coverings, then, and the deceptive whitewashings be taken away from things, that they may be inspected by a sincere scrutiny. Let no one say to me: This or that man is great because he fought with such and such a one and conquered him. Gladiators also fight, and they too conquer, and that cruelty has the rewards of praise; but I think it better to pay the penalties of any sloth whatever than to seek the glory of those arms.
And yet, if gladiators were to advance into the arena to fight one another, of whom one were the son and the other the father, who could endure such a spectacle? Who would not put a stop to it? How, then, could the armed contest between two cities—the one a mother, the other a daughter—be glorious? Or was it different for this reason, that there was no arena there, and that the wider fields were filled not with two gladiators but with the many corpses of two peoples? That those combats were not encircled by an amphitheater, but by the whole world, and that an impious spectacle was set before both the living then and posterity, as far as that fame extends?
Yet those gods, presiders over the Roman empire, suffered violence to their zeal, and were as it were theater-spectators of such combats, until the sister of the Horatii, on account of the three slain Curiatii, was herself added as a third from the other side, by fraternal steel, to the two brothers—lest even Rome, which had conquered, should have fewer deaths. Then, for the fruit of victory, Alba was overthrown—Alba, where, after Ilium, which the Greeks destroyed, and after Lavinium, where Aeneas had established a foreign and fugitive kingdom, those Trojan divinities had dwelt in the third place. But after their custom, they had perhaps already migrated even from there, and therefore it was destroyed. "Departed indeed were all the gods, their shrines and altars forsaken, by whom that empire had stood."
They had departed, forsooth—behold, now for the third time—so that to them a fourth Rome might, most providently, be entrusted. For Alba too had displeased them, where Amulius reigned after driving out his brother, and Rome had pleased them, where Romulus reigned after slaying his brother. But before Alba was demolished, her people, they say, were transferred into Rome, that from the two one city might be made. Be it so; let it have been done thus. Yet that city, the kingdom of Ascanius and the third dwelling-place of the Trojan gods, was overthrown—a mother by a daughter city; and that the remnants of the war from the two peoples might make one, much blood of both was first shed, a pitiable cement.
Why should I now recount, one by one, under the remaining kings, those same wars so often renewed, which seemed to be ended by victories, yet were finished off again and again with such great slaughters, and again and again, after treaty and peace, taken up anew between fathers-in-law and sons-in-law and their stock and posterity? No small token of this calamity was that none of those kings closed the gates of war. None of them, therefore, under so many presiding gods, reigned in peace. And what ends did the kings themselves have? As to Romulus, let fabulous flattery see to it, whereby he is reported to have been received into heaven;
but let certain of their own writers see to it—those who said that he was torn to pieces by the senate on account of his ferocity, and that a certain Julius Proculus was suborned to say that Romulus had appeared to him and had charged him to bid the Roman people that he be worshiped among the divinities; and that in this way the people, who had begun to swell against the senate, were repressed and pacified. For there had occurred also an eclipse of the sun, which the ignorant multitude, not knowing that it was produced by the fixed law of the sun's course, attributed to the merits of Romulus. As if, forsooth, had that been the sun's mourning, he ought not rather on that account to be believed slain, and the very crime shown even by the aversion of the daily light; as indeed happened when the Lord was crucified by the cruelty and impiety of the Jews.
That this darkening of the sun did not happen from the regular course of the heavenly bodies is sufficiently shown by the fact that it was then the Passover of the Jews; for that is solemnly kept at the full moon, whereas a regular eclipse of the sun occurs only at the moon's waning. Cicero too sufficiently indicates that Romulus's reception among the gods was rather supposed than accomplished, when, in praising him in his books On the Republic, in the discourse of Scipio, he says:
"He achieved so much that, when he had suddenly failed to appear during an eclipse of the sun, he was thought to have been placed in the number of the gods—an opinion which no mortal was ever able to attain without an extraordinary glory of virtue." (But as for his saying that Romulus suddenly failed to appear, there is surely to be understood either the violence of a tempest or the secrecy of murder and crime;)
for other of their writers add to the eclipse of the sun also a sudden tempest, which assuredly either afforded occasion for the crime, or itself consumed Romulus. Concerning Tullus Hostilius too, who was the third king from Romulus, and who was himself likewise consumed by a thunderbolt, the same Cicero says in those same books that this man was for this reason not believed to have been received among the gods by such a death—because, perhaps, what had been proved (that is, made credible) in the case of Romulus, the Romans were unwilling to make common, that is, to make cheap, if it were readily attributed to another also. He says also openly in his invectives:
"Him who founded this city, Romulus, we have raised to the immortal gods by goodwill and by fame"—thus showing that it was not truly done, but that, on account of the merits of his virtue, it was benevolently bruited and spread abroad. But in the dialogue Hortensius, when he was speaking of the regular eclipses of the sun, he says: "That it may produce the same darkness which it produced at the destruction of Romulus, which came about by an eclipse of the sun." Here assuredly he was in no wise afraid to speak of the destruction of a man, because he was a debater rather than a eulogist. But the other kings of the Roman people—except Numa Pompilius and Ancus Marcius, who died of disease—what horrible ends did they have! Tullus Hostilius, as I said, the conqueror and overthrower of Alba, was consumed together with his whole household by a thunderbolt.
Priscus Tarquinius was slain by the sons of his predecessor. Servius Tullius was murdered by a nefarious crime through his son-in-law Tarquinius Superbus, who succeeded him in the kingdom. Nor did "the gods depart, forsaking their shrines and altars" when so great a parricide was perpetrated against the best king of that people—those gods who, they say, were moved by the adultery of Paris to do this to wretched Troy and to leave her to be demolished and burned by the Greeks; but, over and above, Tarquinius himself, having slain his father-in-law, succeeded him.
This man, a nefarious parricide reigning through the murder of his father-in-law, moreover glorying in many wars and victories, and building the Capitol from his spoils—these gods, not withdrawing but present and abiding, beheld; and they suffered their king Jupiter to preside and reign for them in that loftiest temple, that is, in the work of a parricide. For it was not while yet innocent that he built the Capitol and was afterward driven from the City for his ill deserts; but he came to that very kingship, in which he built the Capitol, by the perpetration of a most monstrous crime. And as for the Romans afterward driving him from the kingdom and shutting him out from the walls of the city, this was not on account of his own outrage upon Lucretia, but the sin of his son, committed while he not only knew nothing of it but was even absent.
He was then besieging the city of Ardea, waging war on behalf of the Roman people; we do not know what he would have done, had the outrage of his son been brought to his notice; and yet, with his verdict unexamined and untried, the people took away his sovereignty; and, having recalled the army, which had been bidden to desert him, then, with the gates shut, they did not permit him to enter as he returned.
But he, after most grievous wars, by which he wore down those same Romans with his neighbors stirred up against them, afterward, being deserted by those on whose aid he had relied and unable to recover the kingdom, spent, it is said, fourteen years of private life in quiet in the town of Tusculum near Rome, and grew old with his wife—perhaps with a more desirable end than his father-in-law, who, by the crime of his son-in-law, with even his daughter not unaware, as is reported, was done to death. Yet the Romans did not call this Tarquinius cruel or wicked, but Proud—perhaps because their own pride could not brook his royal haughtiness. For the crime of the best king, his father-in-law, slain by him, they so utterly despised that they made him their king;
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wherein I marvel if they did not repay so great a reward for so great a crime by a still graver crime. Nor did "the gods depart, forsaking their shrines and altars." Unless perchance someone should defend these gods in such a way as to say that they remained at Rome for this reason: that they might the more punish the Romans with torments than aid them with benefits, seducing them 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 about two hundred and forty-three years, while all those victories, bought with so much blood and such great calamities, scarcely extended that empire to within twenty miles from the City;
a compass so small that it can by no means be compared even now with the territory of any Gaetulian city. To this period let us add also that time during which, Sallust says, affairs were conducted under a fair and moderate rule, so long as the fear of Tarquinius and the grievous war with Etruria lasted. For as long as the Etruscans lent aid to Tarquinius striving to return to the kingdom, Rome was shaken by grievous war. Therefore he says the commonwealth was administered under a fair and moderate rule, with fear pressing, not with justice persuading. In which very brief period, how deadly was that year in which the first consuls were created, when the royal power had been expelled! For they did not complete their year. For Junius Brutus expelled from the City his colleague Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, after depriving him of his honor;
then soon he himself fell in battle by mutual wounds with the enemy, having first slain his own sons and his wife's brothers, because he had learned that they had conspired to restore Tarquinius. And this deed, after Virgil had laudably commemorated it, he straightway humanely shuddered at. For when he had said, "The father shall summon to punishment his sons stirring up new wars, for the sake of fair liberty," he presently thereupon exclaimed and said, "Unhappy man, however posterity shall bear those deeds." However posterity may bear those deeds, he says—that is, prefer and extol them—he who slew his sons is unhappy. And as if to console the unhappy man, he subjoined: "The love of country conquers, and the boundless desire for praise."
Does it not seem that in this Brutus, who both slew his sons and, struck down by the son of Tarquinius whom he himself had struck, could not survive—so that Tarquinius rather outlived him—the innocence of his colleague Collatinus was avenged? For Collatinus, a good citizen, suffered upon the expulsion of Tarquinius the same thing that the tyrant Tarquinius himself suffered. For this same Brutus too is reported to have been a blood-relation of Tarquinius; but Collatinus, forsooth, the likeness of his name pressed hard, because he too was called Tarquinius. He should therefore have been compelled to change his name, not his country; or, in the end, in his name this word should have been dropped, and he should have been called merely L. Collatinus. But he did not lose that which he might have lost without any detriment, so that he was bidden to be deprived both of the honor of being first consul and of his citizenship as a good citizen.
Is this too glory—the detestable iniquity of Junius Brutus, in no way useful to the commonwealth? Was it also "the love of country and the boundless desire for praise" that conquered, in order to perpetrate this? When the tyrant Tarquinius had been expelled, Lucretia's husband, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, was created consul together with Brutus. How justly did the people regard character in a citizen, not his name! How impiously did Brutus deprive of both country and honor the colleague of that first and new power—a man whom, if he was offended by this, he could have deprived of his name only! These evil deeds were done, these adversities befell, when in that commonwealth "affairs were conducted under a fair and moderate rule." Lucretius too, who had been substituted in Brutus's place, was carried off by disease before that same year came to an end.
Thus Publius Valerius, who had succeeded Collatinus, and Marcus Horatius, who had been substituted in place of the deceased Lucretius, completed that funereal and hellish year, which had five consuls—the year in which the Roman commonwealth inaugurated the new honor and power of the consulship itself. Then, the fear being now somewhat diminished—not because the wars had subsided, but because they no longer pressed with so grievous a weight—the time being ended, that is, during which affairs were conducted under a fair and moderate rule, there followed the things which the same Sallust briefly sets forth: "then the senators exercised the plebs with a servile despotism, disposed of their life and person after the manner of kings, drove them from their land, and, all others being excluded from the soil, held sway alone."
"The plebs, oppressed by these cruelties and especially by usury, while at the same time enduring tribute and military service in continual wars, took up arms and occupied the Sacred Mount and the Aventine, and then procured for themselves tribunes of the plebs and other rights. The end of the discords and struggles on both sides was the Second Punic War." Why, then, should I endure such long delays, whether in writing them, or should I inflict them on those about to read? How wretched that commonwealth was, throughout so long an age, over the whole span of years down to the Second Punic War—with wars from without not ceasing to disquiet it, and within with discords and civil seditions—has been briefly intimated by Sallust.
Accordingly, those victories were not the solid joys of the blessed, but the empty solaces of the wretched, and enticing incitements to men by no means at rest, to undergo yet other and other barren evils. And let not good and prudent Romans be angry with us because we say this; although concerning this matter they need neither to be entreated nor admonished, since it is most certain that they will in no wise be angry. For we say nothing more grievous, nor anything more grievous, than their own authors—far inferior to whom we are both in style and in leisure—yet whom they themselves have labored to learn thoroughly, and compel their sons to labor at. But those who are angry—how would they bear me, if I were to say what Sallust says?
"Very many disturbances, seditions, and at last civil wars arose, while a few powerful men, into whose favor most had yielded, under the honorable name of senators or of plebs, aimed at domination; and good and bad citizens were so called, not for their merits toward the commonwealth—all being equally corrupt—but according as each was most wealthy and mightier in doing injury, because he defended the present state of things, he was reckoned as 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, truer city, into which the eternal citizens are to be chosen:
what does it befit us to do, whose hope in God is so much better and more certain, that our liberty ought to be by so much the greater, when they impute present evils to our Christ, in order that weaker and more ignorant minds may be alienated from that city in which alone one must live perpetually and blessedly? Nor do we say things more horrible against their gods than do their own authors, again and again, whom they read and proclaim—since indeed we have received the very things we would say from those authors themselves, and are in no way able to say either such things or all of them. Where, then, were those gods who are thought worthy of worship for the sake of the scanty and deceitful felicity of this world, when the Romans—to whom, by most mendacious cunning, they vaunted themselves as worthy of worship—were harassed by such great calamities?
Where were they, when the consul Valerius was slain while defending the Capitol, set on fire by exiles and slaves—and he himself was more easily able to profit the temple of Jupiter than that throng of so many divinities, with their greatest and best king, whose temple he had freed, was able to come to his aid? Where were they, when the city, wearied by the densest evils of seditions, while it awaited, a little at rest, the envoys sent to Athens to borrow laws, was laid waste by grievous famine and pestilence? Where were they, when again the people, laboring under famine, first created a prefect of the corn-supply, and when, as that famine grew strong, Spurius Maelius, because he lavished grain upon the hungry multitude, incurred the charge of aiming at kingship, and, at the insistence of that same prefect, through the dictator, Lucius
Quintius, decrepit with age, he was slain by Quintus Servilius, the master of the horse, 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 wearied by the useless gods—resolved to exhibit new lectisternia (couch-spreadings), which it had never done before? Now couches were spread in honor of the gods, whence this rite—or rather this sacrilege—received its name. Where were they, when for ten continuous years, by fighting badly, the Roman army had received frequent and great defeats at Veii, unless at last help was brought through Furius Camillus, whom the ungrateful city afterward condemned? Where were they, when the Gauls took Rome, despoiled it, burned it, and filled it with slaughter?
Where were they, when that notable pestilence gave so vast a slaughter, in which that Furius Camillus too was carried off—he who had both defended the ungrateful commonwealth against the Veientes before, and afterward avenged it upon the Gauls? In this pestilence they introduced scenic games, a new plague, not upon the bodies of the Romans, but—what is far more pernicious—upon their morals. Where were they, when another grievous pestilence was believed to have arisen from the poisonings of matrons, whose morals, beyond belief, in the case of many and noble women, were found out to be graver than any pestilence?
Or when, at the Caudine Forks, both consuls with their army, besieged by the Samnites, were compelled to make a shameful treaty with them, such that, six hundred Roman knights being given as hostages, the rest, having lost their arms and being stripped and deprived of their other coverings, were sent under the enemy's yoke each in a single garment? Or when, amid a grievous pestilence with the rest laboring, many even in the army perished, struck by lightning? Or when, likewise in another intolerable pestilence, Rome was compelled to summon and employ Aesculapius from Epidaurus as a physician-god, since the many debaucheries in which Jupiter, king of all, who had long sat in the Capitol, had indulged in his youth had perhaps not allowed him to learn medicine?
Or when, the enemies conspiring at one time—the Lucanians, the Bruttii, the Samnites, the Etruscans, and the Senonian Gauls—the envoys were first slain by them, and then an army was overwhelmed together with its praetor, seven tribunes perishing along with him and thirteen thousand of the soldiers? Or when, after long and grievous seditions at Rome, in which at last the plebs had seceded to the Janiculum in hostile separation, so dire was the calamity of this evil that, for the cause of this matter—as was wont to be done in extreme perils—Hortensius was created dictator, who, having recalled the plebs, expired in that same magistracy—which had befallen no dictator before, and which, now that Aesculapius was present, was a graver charge against those gods?
But then so many wars grew rife everywhere that, through a scarcity of soldiers, those proletarians—who, because they were free for begetting offspring (proles) but, on account of their poverty, were unable to serve as soldiers, had received this name—were enrolled for military service. Pyrrhus too, king of Greece, then celebrated with vast glory, was summoned by the Tarentines and became an enemy of the Romans. To him, indeed, consulting about the future outcome of events, Apollo delivered an ambiguous oracle urbanely enough, so that, whichever of the two should come to pass, he himself might be held divine (for he said: "I say that you, Pyrrhus, can conquer the Romans"); and thus, whether Pyrrhus were conquered by the Romans or the Romans by Pyrrhus, the prophet might securely await either outcome. What then, and how horrible, was the slaughter of both armies!
In which, nevertheless, Pyrrhus came off the superior, so that he might now be able to proclaim Apollo divine according to his own understanding, had not the Romans, in the very next battle, come off superior. And amid so great a slaughter of wars, a grievous pestilence of women also arose. For before they brought forth their offspring at the due term, the pregnant women were dying. Here Aesculapius, I suppose, excused himself, on the ground that he professed to be a chief physician, not a midwife. Cattle also were likewise perishing, so that the race of animals too was believed to be about to fail. What of this?
That memorable winter, raging with such incredible severity that, with the snows remaining at a horrible depth even in the forum for forty days, the Tiber too was hardened with ice—if it had happened in our times, what and how great things would these men have said! What of that likewise huge pestilence—how long it raged, how many it destroyed! And when it stretched into another year far more grievously, in vain with Aesculapius present, recourse was had to the Sibylline books. In which kind of oracles, as Cicero recalls in his books On Divination, it is customary to give credence rather to the interpreters, who conjecture doubtful things as they can or as they will. Then, therefore, it was declared that the cause of the pestilence was this: that many held for private use very many sacred edifices they had occupied;
thus for the time being Aesculapius was freed from a great charge of ignorance or of negligence. But why had those edifices been occupied by many, with no one forbidding, except because so great a throng of divinities had long been supplicated in vain, and thus little by little the places were being deserted by their worshipers, so that, as though empty, they might, without any offense to anyone, be claimed at least for human uses? For unless those edifices—then, as though to allay the pestilence, diligently sought out again and repaired—had afterward, being neglected and usurped in the same way, lain hidden, it would not have been attributed to Varro's great learning that, writing about sacred edifices, he records so many as unknown. But then, for the time being, an elegant excusing of the gods, not an averting of the pestilence, was procured.
But now, in the Punic Wars, when victory long hung doubtful and uncertain between the two empires, and two most powerful peoples urged their bravest and most opulent onsets against one another, how many lesser kingdoms were crushed! What ample and noble cities were destroyed, how many afflicted, how many ruined communities! How far and wide were so many regions and lands laid waste! How often were the conquerors on this side and that themselves conquered! What a multitude of men was consumed, whether of soldiers fighting or of peoples free from arms! What a force of ships was overwhelmed even in naval battles, and sunk by the variety of diverse storms! If we should attempt to narrate or to recount it, we ourselves should be nothing else than writers of history.
Then the city of Rome, thrown into confusion by great fear, ran to empty and preposterous remedies. On the authority of the Sibylline books the Secular Games were restored, whose celebration had been appointed once every hundred years and, in happier times, had lapsed because the memory of them was neglected. The pontiffs likewise renewed the sacred games in honour of the powers below, games which had themselves been abolished in better years gone by. And no wonder: for when they were renewed, the powers below, enriched by so great a throng of the dying, took delight even in the sport, since assuredly those wretched men, by their very frenzied wars and bloody feuds and funereal victories on this side and on that, were staging grand games for the demons and rich banquets for the gods of the underworld.