Valerius being dictator and holding a levy of soldiers, the people, goaded by various injuries, occupied the Sacred Mount in arms. What is more atrocious than this ruin, when the body, cut off from the head, plotted the destruction of that through which it breathed? And it would have been all over with the Roman name through internal ruin, had not a hastened reconciliation crept in before the secession itself recognized what it was. Beyond those open disasters of wars, a clandestine ruin presses upon itself and looms over it with wretched success: for under the consuls Titus Geganius and Publius Minucius, two of the greatest abominations of all evils, famine and pestilence, seized the wearied City. There was a brief pause from battles, yet there was no pause from deaths.
The Veientine Etruscans, grievous enemies, rising up into wars with the forces of the neighbors joined to them, were met by the consuls Marcus Fabius and Gnaeus Manlius: where, after the oath of swearing by which the Romans had vowed themselves not to return to camp except after victory, the contest was so fierce, and the appearance of the vanquished and the victors so equal, that, the greater part of the army being lost and the consul Manlius and the ex-consul Fabius being slain in the fight, the consul Marcus Fabius refused to accept the triumph offered him by the senate, because, with such great losses to the commonwealth, mourning rather was owed.
That most glorious family of the Fabii, in number and strength, having drawn by lot the Veientine contest, what bereavement it brought upon the commonwealth by its downfall, the witnesses even until now are, by their infamous names, the river which destroyed and the gate which sent them forth. For when three hundred and six Fabii, truly the most illustrious lights of the Roman state, had demanded that a special war against the Veientes be decreed to them, they confirmed the hope of the rashly undertaken expedition by their first successes; thereafter, led into an ambush and surrounded by the enemy, they were all slaughtered on the spot, only one being reserved to announce the disaster, so that the fatherland might more wretchedly hear of those lost than it had lost them.
And not at Rome only were such things being done, but every province was seething with its own fires; and what the chief poet described in one city, I would say of the whole world: 'cruel everywhere is Grief, everywhere Dread, and very many an image of death.' Therefore at the same time Cyrus, king of the Persians—whom above, for the sake of unfolding the history, I had mentioned, who then was roaming Asia, Scythia, and the whole East with arms, while Tarquinius Superbus, whether as king or as enemy, was oppressing the City either with servitude or with war—Cyrus, as I said, when all those against whom he had gone were subdued, makes for the Assyrians and Babylon, a nation and city then more opulent than all; but the river Gyndes, second in size after the Euphrates, intercepted his onset.
For one of the royal horses, excelling in whiteness and form, persuaded by confidence in swimming across, was snatched away where the eddies, struck by the rapacious channel, rose up at the ford, and being cast headlong, they drowned it. The king, enraged, resolved to take vengeance on the river, declaring that he, who had now devoured a splendid horse, should be left passable for women scarcely wetting their knees. And being no slower in carrying it out, with all his forces, throughout a whole year, he broke up the river Gyndes into four hundred and sixty channels, cut and led off through great ditches. By this work, the diggers being thoroughly trained beforehand, he also diverted the Euphrates, by far the strongest river and flowing through the middle of Babylonia.
And thus, by passable fords, with the parts of the channel even dried and laid open, he made his way, and took the city—a thing which, that it could either be built by human work or be destroyed by human valor, both seemed almost incredible among mortals. For many have related that Babylon was founded by the giant Nimrod and restored by Ninus or Semiramis. It was conspicuous on every side by the flatness of the plain, most pleasant by the nature of the place, laid out in a square with walls equal in the fashion of a camp. The firmness and magnitude of its walls is scarcely credible in the telling, that is, in breadth fifty cubits, in height four times as much. Moreover, its circuit is surrounded by four hundred and eighty stadia.
The wall was compacted of baked brick with bitumen poured between, and a moat, lying broadly open on the outside, flows around it in place of a river. At the front of the walls are a hundred brazen gates. The breadth itself, at the topmost finish of the battlements, with dwellings for the defenders equally arranged on either side, holds swift four-horse chariots in the space left between in its middle. The houses within, of a fourfold habitation, are marvelous in their threatening loftiness. And yet that great Babylon, that first city founded after the renewal of the human race, is now conquered after almost even a very small delay—captured, it is overthrown. There then Croesus, king of the Lydians, famous for his wealth, when he had come to aid the Babylonians, being conquered, anxiously fled back into his kingdom.
But Cyrus, after he had invaded Babylon as an enemy, overthrown it as a victor, and disposed it as a king, transferred the war into Lydia; where he overcame, with no trouble, the army already terrified by the earlier battle. He also captured Croesus himself, and, having captured him, granted him both life and patrimony. There is no need in this place to exaggerate the unstable conditions of changeable things: for whatever has been made by work and hand slips away and is consumed by age—captured Babylon confirms it; whose empire, as it first arose and was most powerful, so it also first yielded, that, as it were by a certain law of the succeeding age, the inheritance owed might be handed down to posterity, since they too would observe the same formula of handing it on.
Thus before the first assaults of the approaching Cyrus, great Babylon and mighty Lydia fell; the vast arms of the East, together with their very head, collapsed in the campaign of a single battle. And yet our contemporaries complain with unreflecting anxiety if those structures of the once most powerful Roman commonwealth now tremble, shaken more by the feebleness of their own old age than by foreign forces. So this same Cyrus, in the success of the time that followed, made war upon the Scythians. Their queen Thamyris, who then ruled the nation, although she could have stopped him from crossing the river Araxes, allowed him to cross: first out of confidence in herself, and then because of the advantage of having the enemy hemmed in by the barrier of the river.
And so Cyrus, having entered Scythia, pitched his camp far from the river he had crossed, and moreover by a stratagem abandoned that same camp, well stocked with wine and feasts, as though he had fled in terror. When this was learned, the queen sent a third part of her forces and her young son in pursuit of Cyrus. The barbarians, as though invited to a banquet, were overcome by drunkenness; then, when Cyrus returned, they were all slain together with the young man. Thamyris, having lost her army and her son, made ready to wash away the grief of a mother and a queen with the blood of her enemies rather than with her own tears. She feigned faintheartedness, as if in despair at the disaster inflicted upon her, and by gradually giving ground she lured the proud enemy into an ambush.
There indeed, with an ambush laid among the mountains, she destroyed two hundred thousand Persians together with the king himself; and to all this was added the wonder of the affair, that not even a single messenger of so great a slaughter survived. The queen ordered Cyrus's head to be cut off and thrown into a wineskin filled with human blood, rebuking him in no womanish fashion: 'Glut yourself,' she said, 'with the blood you thirsted for, of which through thirty years you remained insatiable.' In the 245th year from the founding of the City, after Cyrus had been killed among the Scythians, Darius after some interval obtained the kingdom by lot. For between them reigned Cambyses, son of Cyrus, who, having conquered Egypt, abominated the whole religion of Egypt and abolished its rites and temples.
After him too the Magi dared to creep into the kingdom under the name of the king whom they had killed; but they were soon detected and crushed. And so Darius, one of those who had checked the boldness of the Magi by the sword, was made king by the consent of all. After he had recovered by war the Assyrians and Babylon, which were falling away from the kingdom of the Persians, he made war upon Antyrus, king of the Scythians, chiefly for this reason: that he had failed to obtain the marriage of Antyrus's daughter, which he had sought. A great necessity indeed, that for one man's lust seven hundred thousand men should be exposed to the peril of death!
With incredible array indeed he entered Scythia with seven hundred thousand armed men; but since the enemy gave him no opportunity for a regular battle, and moreover were tearing apart the edges of his forces by sudden raids, he, fearing that his return might be cut off by the breaking of the bridge over the river Hister, fled in alarm with the loss of eighty thousand warriors—though he did not reckon this number among his losses, and what scarcely anyone would have dared to aspire to possess, he did not feel as lost. Then, attacking Asia and Macedonia, he subdued them. He also overcame the Ionians in a naval engagement. Next he made an assault upon the Athenians, because they had aided the Ionians against him, and directed his arms against them.
Moreover, when the Athenians learned that Darius was approaching, although they had asked for help from the Lacedaemonians, nevertheless, since they had learned that the Persians were being detained by the four-day inactivity of a religious observance, they seized the opportunity for hope, and with only ten thousand citizens drawn up and a thousand Plataean auxiliaries, they burst forth against six hundred thousand of the enemy on the plains of Marathon. Miltiades was then in command of that war; relying more on speed than on strength, in a quite spirited charge he closed with the enemy hand to hand before he could be driven back by an unimpeded volley of arrows. So great was the difference in fighting in that battle that on one side men seemed ready to kill, on the other cattle seemed prepared to die.
Two hundred thousand Persians fell on the plains of Marathon in that storm of war. Darius felt this loss; for, defeated and put to flight, he fled back to the Persians, having seized his ships. But when he was renewing the war and striving to take vengeance upon the victors, he died in the very midst of his preparations, in the 74th Olympiad, that is, in the 275th year after the founding of the City—at which time at Rome the maiden Popilia was buried alive for the crime of unchastity. Xerxes, succeeding to the kingdom of his father Darius, for five years prepared the war against Greece undertaken by his father; which Demaratus the Lacedaemonian, who then happened to be in exile at Xerxes's court, betrayed to his own people on tablets, first written upon and then waxed over.
And so Xerxes is said to have had seven hundred thousand armed men from his own kingdom and three hundred thousand from his auxiliaries, and moreover twelve hundred beaked warships and three thousand transports in number; so that it was recorded that, with an unexpected army and an immense fleet, the rivers scarcely sufficed for drink, the lands scarcely for marching, the seas scarcely for the voyage. Against this host, so incredible to our times—whose number it is now harder to set down than it then was to defeat—Leonidas, king of the Spartans, stood opposed with four thousand men in the narrows of Thermopylae. But Xerxes, in contempt of the smallness of the force set against him, ordered battle to be joined and hand to be set to hand.
Now those whose kinsmen and comrades-in-arms had fallen on the plains of Marathon became at once the beginning both of the contest and of the slaughter. Then, as a greater and more sluggish throng pressed up behind, when now it could neither charge forward freely nor was unencumbered for fighting nor ready for flight, but was propped up only by death, for three continuous days it was not a battle of two sides but the butchery of a single people. But on the fourth day, when Leonidas saw the enemy pouring around on every side, he urged his allied auxiliaries to withdraw themselves from the fight, to escape to the summit of the mountain, and to reserve themselves for better times; but that for himself and his own Spartans another lot was to be undergone: that he owed more to his fatherland than to his life.
Having dismissed his allies, he admonished the Spartans that much was to be hoped for in glory, nothing in life; that they must wait neither for the enemy nor for daylight, but, seizing the opportunity of the night, must break through the camp, mingle in combat, and throw the columns into confusion; that nowhere would victors perish more honorably than in the camp of the enemy. Persuaded therefore to prefer to die, they armed themselves for the avenging of their coming death, as though they themselves both exacted and avenged their own destruction. Wondrous to tell: six hundred men burst into the camp of six hundred thousand. An uproar arose throughout the whole camp. The Persians themselves even helped the Spartans by their own mutual slaughter.
The Spartans, seeking the king and not finding him, cut down and laid low everything, ranged through the whole camp, and among the dense heaps of bodies could scarcely overtake the few living men: victors without a doubt, had they not chosen to die. The battle was drawn out from the beginning of the night into the greater part of the day; at last, wearied with conquering, when each of them, as his limbs failed, seemed to himself glutted with the avenging of his own death, there, amid the obstacles of corpses and a field quivering with thick and half-frozen blood, he sank down weary, fell, and died. Xerxes, twice defeated on land, prepared a naval battle.
But Themistocles, the leader of the Athenians, when he had understood that the Ionians—against whom, while he was furnishing aid in the earlier war, he had turned upon himself the onslaught of the Persians—were bringing a fitted-out fleet to the aid of Xerxes, resolved to win them over and to withdraw them from the enemy to his own side. And since the chance of conversing with them was denied him, he ordered tokens to be set up and fastened to the rocks in the places to which the Ionians seemed likely to bring their ships, reproaching with apt rebuke those once allies and sharers of dangers, but now unjustly idle, and persuading them by a reverent exhortation to the rights of their ancient treaties, and above all admonishing them that, when battle was joined, they should hold back their oars in the manner of those giving way and withdraw themselves from the fight.
And so the king, keeping back part of his ships for himself, remained on the shore as a spectator of the battle. But on the other side Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, who had come to the aid of Xerxes, mingled most fiercely in the fight among the foremost commanders, so that, by a reversal of roles, in the man was seen a womanish caution, and in the woman a manly daring. But when the battle hung in doubt, the Ionians, according to the instruction of Themistocles, began little by little to withdraw themselves from the contest; their defection openly persuaded the Persians, already looking about for flight, to flee. In that panic many ships were sunk and captured; yet still more, fearing the cruelty of their king as though it were the savagery of an enemy, slipped away to their homes.
Mardonius approached the king, weighed down by so many evils, urging that the king ought to return into his kingdom before adverse report should set new troubles astir at home; but that he himself, if the remaining forces were handed over to him, would both exact vengeance from the enemy and ward off domestic disgrace, or, if the fortunes of war should continue adverse, would indeed yield to the enemy, yet without infamy to the king. The plan being approved, the army was handed over to Mardonius. The king set out for Abydos, where he had joined a bridge as though a conqueror of the sea, with a few men. But when he found the bridge dissolved by the winter storms, he crossed in trepidation in a fisherman's skiff. Truly there was something which the human race ought to have beheld and grieved over, measuring out the changes of things by this very greatest of vicissitudes:
that he was content with a tiny boat's flank, beneath which the very sea had earlier hidden itself and had borne the yoke of its own captivity by a joined bridge; that he needed the service of one most worthless little slave—he to whose power, while mountains were cut down, valleys were filled, rivers were drained dry, even the very nature of things had yielded. The foot forces too, which had been entrusted to his commanders, so wasted away with toil, hunger, and fear, and, as disease grew rampant, so great a plague and so great a foulness of the dying arose, that the roads were filled with corpses, and even dread birds and ravening beasts, enticed by the allurements of food, followed the dying army.
But indeed Mardonius, to whom Xerxes had entrusted the remainder of the war, first puffed up by brief success, soon was cast down into the depths. For he stormed Olynthus, a town of Greece. Having undertaken to lead the Athenians by various solicitation into a hope of peace, when he saw their unconquerable love of liberty, he burned part of the city and led down all his apparatus of war into Boeotia. There too a hundred thousand Greeks pursued him, and, battle being joined without delay, with his forces destroyed they compelled Mardonius himself to flee with a few men, stripped as though from a shipwreck; they captured the camp stuffed with royal wealth, with no small loss indeed to ancient discipline: for after the division of this booty, Persian gold was the first corruption of Greek virtue.
And so utter ruin pressed hard upon the wretched men who had begun the venture. For by chance on the same day on which the forces of Mardonius were destroyed in Boeotia, a part of the Persian army in Asia was fighting a naval battle beneath Mount Mycale. There a sudden new rumor filled the ears of both fleet and people: that the forces of Mardonius had been wiped out, that the Greeks had emerged victorious. Wondrous the ordering of the divine judgment! that in Boeotia the war was joined at sunrise, and in Asia at the noonday hours of the same day it was announced, with such great spaces of sea and land lying between! And this rumor especially confirmed the very outcome, because it rendered the Persians—seized first by grief and then by despair when they heard of the disaster of their allies—neither ready for battle nor fit for flight.
And so the enemy, made bolder by the success of his good fortune, fell upon them, dismayed and ruined as they were. Xerxes, having become contemptible to his own people through the war waged unhappily in Greece, was surrounded in his palace through Artabanus his prefect and slain. O times most worthy of longing and remembrance! O those days of unbroken serenity, which are set before us to look back upon as though out of darkness! In which, within the briefest interval, from the bowels of a single kingdom three wars under three successive kings snatched away one million nine hundred thousand men—to say nothing of most unhappy Greece then, which by dying surpassed all this number over which we now grow faint.
That most renowned Leonidas of the Lacedaemonians, in that war against Xerxes which was the last for himself and for his enemies, when with his six hundred he had spoken those most famous incitements—'Breakfast as men about to dine among the dead'—yet mercifully toward his auxiliaries, whom he was bidding to withdraw from the war, reserving them for himself, that they might keep themselves for better times. Behold: while he promised that better things were to come, those others assert that the better things are past. What else may be gathered, with each detesting the present in his own circumstances, save that good things are either always present but unwelcome, or never any better at all? But at Rome—to return to that time from which I have digressed:
for I am not compelled by any interval of miseries to pass over to other peoples, but, just as once the evils boiling up everywhere bound themselves together with the very deeds, so too they are reported intermingled: for my purpose is to compare among themselves the times of the world, not to insult over the labors of any one part of it—at Rome, then, in the 260th year after the founding of the City, with war suspended for a little, a grievous pestilence, which there always either cut short the rare truces granted or compelled them to be made, raged violently through the whole city, so that fittingly, by a preceding prodigy, the sky seemed to burn, when the head of the nations blazed with so great a fire of diseases.
For in that year the pestilence consumed both consuls, Aebutius and Servilius, carried off the military forces for the most part, and destroyed many nobles, and especially the common people, by a foul wasting; although already in the fourth year before, an outbreak of plague had ravaged that same people. Then in the very next year exiled citizens and runaway slaves, under the leadership of Herdonius, a Sabine man, invaded and set fire to the Capitol. There indeed the younger men resisted most bravely, with Valerius as consul and commander; but so fierce and grievous was the crisis of the battle that the consul Valerius himself was killed there, and crowned an unworthy victory over slaves even with his own death besides. There follows a year in which a consul, his army defeated, was besieged.
For the Aequi and Volsci overcame the consul Minucius when he had joined battle, and hemmed him in as he fled on Mount Algidus with hunger and the sword; and the affair would have gone disastrously, had not Quintius Cincinnatus, that excellent dictator, broken the close siege by crushing the enemy. He, found in the country, summoned from the plough to the fasces, having taken up the honor and equipped an army, was soon made victor, imposed a yoke upon the Aequi, and, holding his victory as though it were a plough-handle, drove the subjugated enemy before him as the first to do so. In the year that was the next before the three-hundredth from the founding of the City, while ambassadors sent to the Athenians for the transferring of the laws of Solon were awaited, Roman arms, ropes, and pestilence held all in check.
But in that very three-hundredth year, that is, in the ninety-fifth Olympiad, the power of the consuls was handed over to the decemvirs for the sake of establishing the Attic laws, and brought a great ruin upon the commonwealth. For first, with the others standing down, Appius Claudius alone of the decemvirs continued his command for himself, and at once a conspiracy of the others followed, so that, with the custom despised whereby the insignia of command lay with one man but the power was common, all of them stirred up all things by their own caprices. And so, among the other things which they all most insolently presumed, suddenly they came forth singly, each with twelve fasces and the other commanders' insignia:
and by the novel undertaking of a wicked arrangement, with the reverence of the consuls cast aside, a band of tyrants flashed forth, two tables of laws having been added to the ten earlier ones; performing very many things with most insolent arrogance, on the day on which it was the custom to lay down their magistracy, they came forth with the same insignia. The lust of Appius Claudius too increased the very greatest hatred, who, in order to inflict defilement upon the maiden Verginia, first brought forward a claim of slavery; wherefore Verginius the father, driven by grief for liberty and shame at the disgrace, slew his daughter—dragged off to slavery—in the sight of the people, a dutiful parricide. By the atrocity of which necessity the people was stirred and, warned by the peril to liberty, seized armed the Aventine hill.
Nor did it cease to defend liberty by arms until the conspiracy of the conspirators abdicated even those very honors. In the hundred-and-third and the hundred-and-fifth Olympiad, through nearly the whole year, earthquakes in Italy were so frequent and so grievous that Rome was wearied by constant reports of countless shakings and ruins of country houses and towns; then there was a drought so persistent and parching that it denied the hope of the present and of the coming year for the bringing forth of the fruits of the earth. And at the same time, when the Fidenates, enemies hemmed about by a band of the greatest reinforcements, hung terrible over the citadels of the Romans, Aemilius, dictator for the third time, drove off and healed a great mass of evil with Fidenae itself scarcely captured.
So great was the strife of evils and of spirits in those men, that either wars overflowing from without blotted out domestic disasters, or, after the losses of wars and truces granted as a respite, diverse plagues, blazing in sky and on earth, corrupted them with unceasing infestation. Sicily was from the beginning the fatherland of the Cyclopes, and after them was ever the nurse of tyrants, and often even the captive of slaves; of whom the first fed on the flesh of men, the middle on tortures, the last on deaths—except for that which in foreign wars was either held as plunder or given as a prize.
This land, to dispatch the matter as briefly as I can, knows no respite from evils except now; nay, that the diversities of the times may be declared more evidently, just as before it alone among all peoples ever endured tumults whether internal or external, so now alone of all it never endures them. For indeed—to be silent about the long duration either of that calamity by which it was once pressed, or contrariwise of that peace which it now enjoys—Etna itself, which then seethed with frequent eruptions to the destruction of cities and fields, now smokes only with a harmless appearance, as testimony to things past.
And so—to pass over for the moment the matter of the tyrants, of whom whoever came next was soon made the avenger as successor—in the middle time, that is, in the 335th year from the founding of the City, when the people of Rhegium in Sicily were laboring under discord, and the city, divided by dissension, was split into two parts, one part called veterans from Himera, a city of Sicily, to its aid. But those men, having first driven from the city those against whom they were being invoked, and then soon slaughtered even those to whose aid they had come, seized the city together with the wives and children of their allies, daring a crime comparable to no tyrant's: since indeed it would have been better for the men of Rhegium to suffer anything whatever, than of their own accord to invite those to whom they themselves, as exiles, left their fatherland, wives, children, and household gods for plunder.
But the Catinians too, when they were suffering the Syracusans as oppressive and hostile, sought auxiliaries from the Athenians. But the Athenians sent a fleet fitted out more for their own zeal than for that of their allies into Sicily, since they were both striving to extend their own empire and feared that the Syracusan fleet, recently fitted out, would profit the Lacedaemonians. And since the Athenians who had been sent had taken prosperous beginnings by slaughtering the enemy, they brought back greater forces and a more robust army into Sicily with Laches and Chariades as commanders. But the Catinians, moved by weariness of the war, entered into a treaty with the Syracusans and spurned the aid of the Athenians;
but afterward, when the Syracusans transgressed the conditions of peace in their meditation of domination, they again sent envoys to Athens, who, squalid in hair and beard and clad in mourning, might beg for pity and aid both by speech and by appearance. And so a great fleet was fitted out under the commanders Nicias and Lamachus, and Sicily was sought again with such great forces that even those who had obtained them feared their own votes. The Athenians at once fought two land battles with favorable successes, and shut in the enemy worn out in the city and surrounded by the fleet set against them, by land and by sea. But the Syracusans, their fortunes broken and exhausted, sought aid from the Lacedaemonians. By whom Gylippus was soon sent—one man indeed, but in whom was displayed the equal of all reinforcements.
He, on coming, when he heard that the state of the war was already inclined against them, with auxiliaries gathered partly in Greece and partly in Sicily, occupied positions advantageous for the war. Then, defeated in two battles yet not terrified, in a third encounter he killed Lamachus, turned the enemy to flight, and freed his allies from the siege. Hence the Athenians, beaten in a land battle, undertook the trials of the sea and prepared to engage in a naval contest; which being learned, Gylippus summoned a fleet fitted out by the Lacedaemonians; the Athenians likewise sent Demosthenes and Eurymedon in the place of the lost commander, with a supplement of forces; the Peloponnesians too, with the consent and decree of many cities, sent enormous reinforcements to the Syracusans.