X. CHAP. ment yet to come. The commons could now elect their tribunes freely, and they had formally obtained the right of discussing all national questions in their own assembly. Thus their power spread itself out on every side, and tried its strength, against that time when from being independent, it aspired to become sovereign, and swallowed up in itself all the powers of the rest of the community. CHAPTER XI. WARS WITH THE ÆQUIANS AND VOLSCIANS-LEGENDS "Pandite nunc Helicona Deæ, cantusque movete : VIRGIL, En. VII. 641. XI. foreign his led tory of Rome. NOTHING Conveys a juster notion of the greatness of CHAP. Roman history than those chapters in Gibbon's work, Introducin which he brings before us the state of the east and tion to the of the north, of Persia and of Germany, and is unavoidably to write an universal history, because all nations were mixed up with the greatness and the decline of Rome. This indeed is the peculiar magnificence of our subject, that the history of Rome must be in some sort the history of the world; no nation, no language, no country of the ancient world, can altogether escape our researches, if we follow on steadily the progress of the Roman dominion till it reached its greatest extent. On this vast field we are now beginning to enter; our view must be carried a little beyond the valley of the Tiber, and the plain of the Campagna; we must go as far as the mountains which divide Latium from Campania, which look down upon the level of the Pontine marshes, and even command the island summits of the Alban hills: we must cross CHAP. the Tiber, and enter upon a people of foreign extracXI. tion and language, a mighty people, whose southern The Opi cans or Ausonians, Opican na and the two tions, the Equians and Volscians. cities were almost within sight of Rome, while their most northern settlements were planted beyond the Apennines, and, from the great plain of the Eridanus, looked up to that enormous Alpine barrier which divided them from the unknown wildernesses watered by the Ister and his thousand tributary rivers. In the days of Thucydides, the Greek city of Cuma' is described as situated in the land of the Opicans. The Opicans, Oscans, or Ausonians, for the three names all express the same people, occupied all the country between Enotria and Tyrrhenia, that is to say, between the Silarus and the Tiber; but the seacoast of this district was full of towns belonging to people of other nations, such as the Greek cities of Cuma and Neapolis, and those belonging to the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians, such as Tarracina, Cerceii, Antium, and Ardea. The Opicans were an inland people, and it was only by conquest that they at last came down to the sea-coast, and established themselves in some of the Tyrrhenian towns. They had various subdivisions; but the two nations of them with whom the Romans had most to do, and whose encroachments on Latium we are now to notice, are known to us under the name of the Equians and Volscians. It is absolutely impossible to offer any thing like a connected history of the Volscian and Equian wars with Rome during the first half century from the beginning of the Commonwealth. But in order to give some clearness to the following sketch, I must first describe the position of the two nations, and class their contests with Rome, whether carried on singly or jointly, under the names respectively of the Equian 1 Thucyd. VI. 4. 1 and Volscian wars, according to the quarter which CHAP. was the principal field of action. 2 XI. geographical The Volscians, when they first appear in Roman Their history, are found partly settled on the line of high- position. lands overlooking the plain of Latium, from near Præneste to Tarracina, and partly at the foot of the hills in the plain itself. It has been already noticed that just to the south of Præneste a remarkable break occurs in this mountain wall, so that only its mere base has been left standing, a tract of ground barely of sufficient elevation to turn the waters in different directions, and to separate the source of the Trerus, which feeds the Liris, from the streams of the Campagna of Rome. This breach or gap in the mountains forms the head of the country of the Hernicans, who occupied the higher part of the valley of the Trerus, and the hills on its left bank downward as far as its confluence with the Liris. But at Præneste the mountain wall rises again to its full height, and continues stretching to the northward in an unbroken line, till it is again interrupted at Tibur or Tivoli by the deep valley of the Anio. Thus from the Anio to the sea at Tarracina, the line of hills is interrupted only at a single point, immediately to the south of Præneste, and is by this breach divided into two parts of unequal length, the shorter one extending from Tibur to Præneste, the longer one reaching from the point where the hills again rise opposite to Præneste as far as Tarracina and the sea. Of this mountain wall the longer portion was held by the Volscians, the shorter by the Equians. 2 Taking a parallel case from English geography, the gap in the oolitic limestone chain of hills which occurs in Warwickshire, between Farnborough and Edge Hill, may be compared to the gap at Præneste; the line of hills northward and southward from this point, overlook- CHAP. XI. Seat of the wars with the But it is not to be understood that the whole of this highland country was possessed by these two Opican nations. Latin towns were scattered along Equians; the edge of it overlooking the plain of Latium, such as Tibur and Præneste in the Equian portion of it, and in the Volscian, Ortona, Cora, Norba, and Setia. The Equians dwelt rather in the interior of the mountain country; their oldest seats were in the heart of the Apennines, on the lake of Fucinus, from whence they had advanced towards the west, till they had reached the edge overhanging the plain. Nor is it possible to state at what time the several Latin cities of the Apennines were first conquered, or how often they recovered their independence. Tibur and Præneste never fell into the hands of the Æquians, their natural strength helping probably to secure them from the invaders. The Equians seem rather to have directed their efforts in another direction against the Latin towns of the Alban hills, pouring out readily through the breach in the mountain line already noticed, and gaining thus an advanced position from which to command the plain of Rome itself. with the Volscians. Volscian conquests in Latium. The Volscian conquests, on the other hand, were effected either in their own portion of the mountain line, or in the plain nearer the sea, or finally, on the southern and western parts of the cluster of the Alban hills, as the Equians attacked their eastern and northern parts. Tarracina appears to have fallen into their hands very soon after the overthrow of the Roman monarchy; and Antium was also an early 3 4 seems therefore to have fallen soon after the date of the treaty with Carthage, in which it is spoken of as a Latin city. 4 It belonged to the Volscians in the year 261, the year in which the Roman league with the Latins was concluded.~ Livy, II. 33. |