goods which our forefathers did not have, whether in the tranquility of present things, or in the hope of things to come, or in a common refuge; and on this account they waged ceaseless wars, because, having no free fellowship for changing their abodes, by persisting in their own seats they were either unhappily slain or basely enslaved. This will be made clearer and more readily plain when the very deeds of the ancients are set forth in order. In the year 606 from the founding of the City — that is, in the same year in which Carthage too was destroyed — in the consulship of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Lucius Mummius, the overthrow of Corinth followed upon the ruin of Carthage, and within the small interval of a single span of time a pitiable conflagration of the two most powerful cities blazed in different parts of the world.
For when the praetor Metellus had conquered the Achaeans and Boeotians, joined together, in two battles — that is, first at Thermopylae, again in Phocis — the historian Claudius reports that in the former battle twenty thousand were killed, in the latter seven thousand cut down; Valerius and Antias affirm that the fighting was in Achaia and that twenty thousand of the Achaeans fell together with their leader Diaeus; Polybius the Achaean, although he was then in Africa with Scipio, yet, since he could not be ignorant of the disaster of his own land, asserts that the fighting was once in Achaia under the leadership of Critolaus, and shows that Diaeus, bringing soldiery from Arcadia, was crushed together with his army by the same praetor Metellus;
but concerning the variance of disagreeing historians we have already said something, and let it suffice that this ill-famed mark of their falsehoods has been exposed, since they plainly show that little credit is to be given in other matters, who in these things too, which they themselves saw, are at variance — therefore, after the garrisons of all Achaia were extinguished, while the praetor Metellus was contemplating the overthrow of the abandoned cities, the consul Mummius came suddenly with a few men into the camp. He, having at once dismissed Metellus, stormed Corinth without delay, a city then by far the most opulent of all in the whole world, since for many ages back it had been as it were the workshop of all craftsmen and crafts and the common emporium of Asia and Europe.
When license to plunder had also been cruelly granted to the captives, everything was so filled with slaughter and fires that, from the whole circuit of the walls, the conflagration overflowed as from a furnace, drawn together into a single peak. And so, the greater part of the populace having been consumed by sword and flame, the rest were sold at auction; the city being burned, the walls were razed to their foundations; the wall-stone was reduced to dust, and an immense booty was carried off.
Indeed, since on account of the multitude and variety of statues and images, in that conflagration of the city, gold, silver, and bronze had melted and flowed together into one, and all the metals at once, a new kind of metal was produced; whence down to the present day, whether from the metal itself or from imitation of it, there are spoken of, as it has been handed down to memory, Corinthian bronze and Corinthian vessels. Under the same consuls, Viriathus in Spain, a Lusitanian by birth, a herdsman and a brigand, first by infesting the roads, then by laying waste the provinces, and at last by conquering, routing, and subduing the armies of the praetors and consuls of Rome, became a very great terror to all the Romans. Indeed, against him, as he widely crossed and ranged over the Hiberus and the Tagus, the largest rivers of the most diverse regions, Gaius
Vetilius the praetor met him: but he, his whole army being immediately cut down almost to annihilation, the praetor himself with a few men scarcely escaped by flight. Then the same Viriathus routed the praetor Gaius Plautius, shattered in many battles. Afterward also Claudius Unimammus, sent against Viriathus with a great apparatus of war, as if to wipe out the earlier stain, himself incurred a more shameful infamy. For having engaged with Viriathus, the Roman army lost all the forces which he had led with him, and its greatest strength. Viriathus fixed up the consular robes, the fasces, and the other Roman insignia on his own mountains as trophies.
At the same time three hundred Lusitanians joined battle with a thousand Romans in a certain glade, in which Claudius reports that seventy Lusitanians, but three hundred and twenty Romans, fell; and when the victorious Lusitanians were departing, scattered and unconcerned, one of them, separated far from the rest, when he was caught on foot, surrounded by horsemen, having run through with his lance the horse of one of those horsemen and with a single stroke of the sword struck off the head of that very horseman, so struck all of them with fear that, while all looked on, he himself withdrew contemptuously and at his leisure. In the consulship of Appius Claudius and Quintus Caecilius Metellus, Appius Claudius, engaging against the Salassi, a Gallic people, and being defeated, lost five thousand soldiers. The battle renewed, he killed five thousand of the enemy.
But since, according to the law by which it had been established that whoever should have slain five thousand of the enemy should have the power of triumphing, he too had demanded a triumph, but had not obtained it on account of the earlier losses, he triumphed at his own private expense, using shameless impudence and ambition. In the consulship of Lucius Caecilius Metellus and Quintus Fabius Maximus Servilianus, among other portents, an androgyne was seen at Rome and, by order of the soothsayers, was sunk in the sea. But the management of that impious expiation availed nothing; for so great a pestilence suddenly arose that even the attendants for performing funerals first were not enough and then ceased to exist; and now even great houses, empty of the living, remained full of the dead:
most ample inheritances within, and absolutely no heirs at all. Then at last not only the means of living in the City, but even of approaching the City, was denied, so savagely throughout the whole City were exhaled the stenches of the corpses rotting beneath the roofs and on their own beds. That cruel expiation, which paved a way to the deaths of men by the death of a man, became known at last — amid their miseries, to the shame of the Romans — how wretched and vain it was. For it had been held beforehand as a means of forestalling the disaster, and so the pestilence followed after; which nevertheless, without any satisfactions of sacrifices, was abated solely according to the measure of a hidden judgment, when the affliction had run its course.
And if those artificers of trickery, the soothsayers, had by chance celebrated it during the very abatement of the diseases, as they are wont, they would without doubt have claimed for themselves, for the gods, and for their own rites the glory of restored health. Thus the wretched city, ill-religious unto sacrileges, was mocked by the very lies from which it could not be freed. Therefore the consul Fabius, fighting against the Lusitanians and Viriathus, freed the town of Buccia, which Viriathus was besieging, by driving back the enemy, and received it into surrender along with very many other strongholds. He committed a deed execrable even to the most remote barbarians of Scythia — I will not say to Roman faith and moderation. For of five hundred of their chief men, whom he had received in surrender, invited by fellowship, he cut off their hands.
Pompeius, consul of the following year, having entered the territory of the Numantines, withdrew after suffering a very great disaster, not only with almost his whole army crushed, but also with very many of the nobles who attended him in that campaign slain. Viriathus, however, when for fourteen years he had ground down the leaders and armies of Rome, was killed by the treachery of his own men, the Romans behaving bravely toward him in this one thing only — that they judged his slayers unworthy of a reward. But I could now, and indeed often, weave in those inextricable wars of the East, which rarely ever begin or end except in crimes; yet the wars of the Romans, with whom our business lies, are so great that other men's wars are justly disdained.
For at that time Mithridates, king of the Parthians, the sixth from Arsaces, having conquered the prefect of Demetrius, invaded as victor the city of Babylon and all its territories. He subdued, besides, all the nations which lie between the river Hydaspes and the Indus. He extended his bloody empire even to India. Demetrius himself, meeting him in a second war, he conquered and captured: and when he had been captured, a certain Diodotus, with his son Alexander, usurped his kingdom and the royal name. He afterward killed that very son Alexander, whom he had had as a partner of the peril in seizing the kingdom, lest he should have him as a consort in holding it. In the consulship of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, various portents appeared and, as far as in them lay, were dealt with according to custom.
But favorable outcomes do not always support the soothsayers, those hunters of events and contrivers of deceits. For the consul Mancinus, after he had taken over the army from Popilius at Numantia, waged all his battles so unhappily, and was brought into such final desperation, that he was compelled to make a most shameful treaty with the Numantines. And although Pompeius too had a little before concluded another equally infamous treaty with the same Numantines, the senate ordered the treaty to be dissolved and Mancinus to be handed over to the Numantines; and he, his body stripped bare and his hands bound behind his back, was exposed before the gates of the Numantines, and remaining there until night, deserted by his own men, but not received by the enemy, offered to both a lamentable spectacle.
At this point grief demands that I cry out. Why, O Romans, do you falsely claim for yourselves those great names of justice, faith, fortitude, and mercy? Learn these things more truly from the Numantines. Was fortitude needed? They conquered by fighting. Was faith required? Trusting others as they would be trusted, they dismissed under a covenanted treaty those whom they could have killed. Was justice to be approved? Even the senate, though silent, approved it, since the same Numantines through their envoys demanded back either the inviolate peace alone, or all those whom they had dismissed alive upon receiving the pledge of peace. Did mercy seem to need examining? They gave proof enough, either by sending forth the hostile army to life, or by not receiving Mancinus for punishment.
Ought Mancinus, I ask, to have been handed over, who by holding out the shield of the covenanted treaty drove away the impending slaughter of a conquered army, who reserved his country's imperiled strength for better times? Or, if the treaty which was concluded displeased them, why was the soldier, ransomed by this pledge, either received when he returned, or not given back when he was demanded? Or, if the provision for the saved soldier, of whatever sort, pleased them, why was Mancinus, who concluded it, alone handed over? Lately Varro, in order that an over-hasty battle might be entered upon, drove on his colleague Paulus who resisted, hurled forward the trembling army, and at infamous Cannae — infamous for Roman disasters — drew up his unhappy forces not for combat but set them against death;
more than forty thousand Roman soldiers he lost there by his own impatience alone — from which Hannibal had already long been presuming victory for himself. With his colleague Paulus too — what a man, after all! — destroyed, he most shamelessly dared at last to return to the City almost alone, and earned the reward of his shamelessness. For thanks were publicly rendered to him in the senate, because he had not despaired of the commonwealth — which yet he himself had made desperate. But on the other hand Mancinus, who labored that an army surrounded by the lot of war might not perish, was condemned by the same senate to be handed over. I know, O Romans, that in Varro's case too it displeased you, but it was conceded to the occasion; and in Mancinus's case it pleased you, but it was presumed according to the occasion;
and therefore from the beginning you have brought it about that neither does a citizen take counsel fittingly for the ungrateful, nor does an enemy faithfully trust the faithless. Meanwhile Brutus in Further Spain, having surrounded by a most fierce and difficult war sixty thousand of the Gallaecians, who had come to the aid of the Lusitanians, although they were unwary, overwhelmed them: of whom fifty thousand are reported to have been slain in that battle, six thousand captured, a few escaped by flight. In Hither Spain the proconsul Lepidus obstinately attempted to storm the Vaccaei, an innocent and suppliant people, even though the senate forbade it. But soon, suffering a very grievous disaster, he paid the penalties of his wicked obstinacy. Six thousand Romans indeed were most justly cut down in this unjust war; the rest, stripped of their camp, their arms too being lost, escaped.
Nor was this disaster under Lepidus less shameful than that under Mancinus. So now let them ascribe these times to themselves in place of felicity — not, I would say, the Spaniards, beaten and wearied by so many wars, but at least the Romans themselves, subdued by such continual disasters and so often overcome; so that I may not reproach them with how many of their praetors, how many legates, how many consuls, how many legions and how great armies were consumed, but recall this one thing alone: how great was the madness of fear by which the Roman soldier was so dulled that now he could not even restrain his foot or steel his mind for the trial of war, but soon, at the mere sight of the Spanish enemy in particular, fleeing away, he believed himself almost conquered before he was even seen.
By which argument it is plain that those wretched times were judged so by both sides, since both the Spaniards, even if they could conquer, nevertheless unwillingly forsook their sweet leisure and endured foreign wars, and the Romans, the more shamelessly they thrust themselves upon another's repose, were so much the more basely conquered. In the consulship of Servius Fulvius Flaccus and Quintus Calpurnius Piso, at Rome a boy born of a maidservant had four feet, four hands, four eyes, as many ears, and a doubled male nature. In Sicily, Mount Aetna belched forth and poured out vast fires, which, after the manner of torrents rushing headlong down the slopes, burned with their flames whatever was nearest, while the more distant places they scorched with hot ashes, mingled with a heavy vapor, flitting far and wide:
which native breed of monstrous portent of Sicily is wont not to portend evil but to inflict it. In the territory of Bononia, crops sprang up on the trees. Then in Sicily a servile war arose, which was so grievous and atrocious in the multitude of slaves, the equipment of forces, and the magnitude of strength, that it terrified — I will not say the Roman praetors, whom it utterly crushed — but the consuls too. For seventy thousand slaves are reported to have then conspired in arms, except for the city of Messana, which kept the slaves it treated generously at peace.
Sicily, moreover, was in this respect the more wretched, in that, being an island and never possessed of a settled order proper to its own condition, it was now subject to tyrants, now to slaves, the former demanding servitude by their wicked domination, the latter, by a perverse presumption, exchanging their state for liberty; and chiefly because, shut in on every side by the sea, it cannot easily expel abroad the evil bred within it. For by its own lust it nourished a viperous conception, increased to its own destruction and destined to live by its own death. And in this matter the rousing of a servile uprising, the rarer it is among the rest of mankind, the more savage it is; for a free multitude is moved by the intention of enlarging its fatherland, but a servile one by the intention of destroying it.
In the six hundred and twentieth year from the founding of the City, when an almost greater infamy from the treaty struck at Numantia than that which once at the Caudine Forks had weighed down the shame of the Roman brow, Scipio Africanus was made consul by the consent of all the tribes and was sent with an army to storm Numantia. Now Numantia, in Hither Spain, situated not far from the Vaccaei and the Cantabri at the head of Gallaecia, was the last city of the Celtiberi. For fourteen years, with only four thousand of its own men, it not only withstood forty thousand Romans but even conquered them and bound them with shameful treaties.
Therefore Scipio Africanus, on entering Spain, did not at once throw himself upon the enemy as if to surround them when off their guard, knowing that this race of men is never so relaxed in body and mind into idleness that, by the very quality of their bodily condition, they would not surpass the equipment of others; rather for some time he exercised his soldiery in the camp as if in a school. And when he had passed a part of the summer and the whole winter without even attempting battle, even so he accomplished little well-nigh by this discipline. For when the chance of fighting came, the Roman army, overwhelmed by the onset of the Numantines, turned its back; but at the rebuke and threats of the consul, who flung himself in their way and held them back with his hand, it at last returned indignant against the enemy, and compelled to flee the very foe from whom it had been fleeing.
Hard then to credit in the telling: the Romans both put the Numantines to flight and beheld them fleeing. Wherefore, although Scipio rejoiced and boasted, because it had happened beyond hope, yet he declared that no further daring against them in war was to be ventured. And so Scipio judged that he must press on with these unlooked-for successes, and shut up the city itself with a siege; he also surrounded it with a ditch, whose breadth was ten feet and depth twenty. Then he fortified the very rampart, built up beforehand with stakes, with frequent towers, so that, if any irruption should be attempted against him by a sallying foe, he might now fight not as a besieger with the besieged, but, the case reversed, as one besieged with the besieger.
Now Numantia, situated on a hill not far from the river Durius, embraced within the circuit of its wall three thousand paces; although some assert that it was both of small extent and without a wall. Hence it is credible that, when they were hard pressed by war, they enclosed this space for the care of feeding and guarding their cattle, or even for the convenience of tilling the land, while they themselves held a small citadel naturally fortified; otherwise so small a number of men seemed not so much to fortify so wide an extent of city as to betray it. So the Numantines, long shut in and slaughtered by famine, offered their surrender, if endurable terms were imposed, often even begging for the opportunity of a fair fight, that it might be granted them to die as men.
At last they all suddenly burst forth from two gates, having first taken a copious draught, not of wine, of which that place is not productive, but of a juice of wheat artfully prepared, which juice, from its heating, they call caelia. For by fire the strength of the germinating moistened grain is roused, and then it is dried, and afterwards, reduced to flour, mixed with a mild juice, and by this ferment a taste of tartness and the warmth of intoxication is added. With this draught, then, growing warm again after long hunger, they offered themselves to battle. The struggle was fierce and lasted even to the peril of the Romans, and once more the Romans would have proved that they were fighting against the Numantines by fleeing, had they not been fighting under Scipio.
The Numantines, when the bravest of their men had been slain, gave way in the fight, yet they returned into the city in ordered ranks and not like fugitives; they refused to receive for burial the bodies of the slain that were offered to them. In a final hope born of desperation, all resolved upon death, and themselves set fire to their closed-up city from within, and all alike were consumed by sword, by poison, and by fire. The Romans had from these conquered foes nothing at all save their own safety; for they reckoned that, Numantia overthrown, they had not so much conquered the Numantines as escaped them. Not one Numantine did the victor's chain hold; whence Rome saw no triumph granted; the gold or silver that might have survived the fire was not found among such poor men; the fire devoured the arms and clothing.
Therefore at that season, when these things were done at Numantia, at Rome the seditions of the Gracchi were being stirred up. Now Scipio, when, Numantia destroyed, he was settling the other peoples of Spain in peace, consulted a certain Thyresus, a Celtic chieftain, by what resource the Numantine state had either earlier endured unconquered or afterwards been overthrown. Thyresus answered: 'Concord made it unconquered, discord brought it to ruin.' This the Romans received in the manner of an example, as if spoken to them and about them, since indeed there was already being announced to them of the seditions of the whole City torn by discord. With Carthage and Numantia destroyed, there died among the Romans a useful contribution toward foresight, and there arose a disgraceful contention over ambition.
Gracchus, tribune of the plebs, angered at the nobility because he had been censured among the authors of the Numantine treaty, resolved that the land hitherto possessed by private persons should be divided among the people. When Octavius, a tribune of the plebs, opposed him, he took away his office and gave Minucius as his successor. For these causes anger seized the senate, and arrogance the people. And then by chance Attalus, son of Eumenes, dying, had ordained by his will that the Roman people should succeed as heir to the empire of Asia. Gracchus, seeking the favor of the people at a price, brought forward a law that the money which had been Attalus's should be distributed to the people. With Nasica opposing, Pompeius also pledged that he would accuse Gracchus as soon as he had left office.
When Gracchus strove that he himself might remain tribune of the plebs for the following year, and when on the day of the elections he was kindling the seditions of the people, the nobility, inflamed at Nasica's instigation, with fragments of the benches put the plebs to flight. Gracchus, fleeing by the steps that are above the Calpurnian arch, his cloak stripped off, was struck by a fragment of a bench and fell, and rising again was killed by another blow of a club driven into his brain. Two hundred others besides were slain in that sedition, and their bodies were cast into the Tiber; the unburied corpse of Gracchus himself wasted away. Moreover, the contagion of a servile war, arisen in Sicily, infected many provinces far and wide.
For at Minturnae four hundred and fifty slaves were put on the cross, and at Sinuessa about four thousand slaves were crushed by Quintus Metellus and Gnaeus Servilius Caepio; in the mines also of the Athenians the same servile tumult was broken up by the praetor Heraclitus; at Delos too the slaves, swelling up with a fresh disturbance, were put down by the townsmen who forestalled them — apart from that first kindling of the Sicilian evil, from which these, like flying sparks, sowed these scattered conflagrations. For in Sicily, after the consul Fulvius, the consul Piso stormed the town of Mamertium, where he slew eight thousand fugitives, and those whom he was able to take captive he fastened to the gibbet.
When the consul Rutilius had succeeded him, he likewise recovered by war Tauromenium and Henna, the firmest refuges of the fugitives: more than twenty thousand slaves are reported to have been slaughtered at that time. Wretched indeed and inextricable was the cause of such a war. The masters must needs perish, unless the insolent slaves were met with the sword. Yet even amid these most unhappy losses of battle and the still more unhappy gains of victory, as many as perished of the conquered, so much did the conquerors lose. In the six hundred and twenty-second year from the founding of the City, Publius
Licinius Crassus, consul and pontifex maximus, sent with a most fully equipped army against Aristonicus, brother of Attalus, who had overrun Asia, handed over to the Romans by testament, and aided besides by great kings — that is, Nicomedes of Bithynia, Mithridates of Pontus and Armenia, Ariarathes of Cappadocia, Pylaemenes of Paphlagonia — and by their very great forces, was nevertheless defeated when battle was joined; and when, his army after very great slaughter put to flight, he himself was now surrounded by the enemy and almost taken, he drove the rod which he had been using for his horse into the eye of a Thracian; but the barbarian, when he had blazed up with anger and pain, ran Crassus through the side with his sword. Thus he, by a contrived manner of death, escaped both disgrace and slavery.
The consul Perpenna, who had succeeded Crassus, on hearing of the death of Crassus and the disaster of the Roman army, flew swiftly into Asia, and falling unexpectedly with war upon Aristonicus, who was now resting from his recent victory, stripped him of all his forces and put him to flight; and when he had encircled with a siege the city of Stratonice, to which Aristonicus had fled, he forced him by famine, all but dead, to surrender. The consul Perpenna, seized by sickness at Pergamum, met his end; Aristonicus, by order of the senate, was strangled in prison at Rome. In the same year the wretched life of Ptolemy, king of the Alexandrians, gave to his life a still more wretched end. For he, having known his own sister by debauchery and then taken her in marriage, at last cast her off more shamefully than he had wedded her.
But his own stepdaughter — that is, the daughter of his sister and wife — he took as his consort; his own son, whom he had begotten of his sister, and also his brother's son, he slew. Wherefore, abominable for such great incests and parricides, he was driven from his kingdom by the Alexandrians. At the same time Antiochus, not content with Babylon and Ecbatana and the whole empire of Media, engaged Phrahates, king of the Parthians, and was defeated. He, when he seemed to have in his army a hundred thousand armed men, was dragging along besides more than two hundred thousand camp-servants and sutlers, mixed with harlots and stage-players. And so he easily perished, crushed together with his whole army by the forces of the Parthians. In the consulship of Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus and Marcus Acilius, Publius
Scipio Africanus, who the day before in a public assembly had borne witness concerning the peril of his own life — because he had learned that it was being threatened against him by wicked and ungrateful men while he labored for his country — was on the next morning found lifeless in his bedchamber; and I should not rashly reckon this among the greatest of Roman ills, especially since in that city the vigor and modesty of Africanus availed so much that, while he lived, it was easily believed that neither a war of the allies nor a civil war could arise. Some report that he was killed by the guile of his own wife Sempronia, the sister of the Gracchi — lest, as I believe, that accursed family, born for the ruin of its own country, should not be even more monstrous amid the impious seditions of its men through the crimes of its women also. In the consulship of Marcus Aemilius and Lucius
Orestes being consuls, Aetna, shaken by a vast trembling, poured forth in fiery globes; and again on another day the island of Lipara and the neighboring sea around it boiled up to such a degree that it dissolved even the scorched rocks, scorched away the planking of ships with their wax melted, cooked the lifeless fishes floating on the surface, and even suffocated men — except those who were able to flee farther off — by the rebounding breath of the hot air with their vitals burnt within. In the consulship of Marcus Plautius Hypsaeus and Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, while Africa was scarcely at rest from the ravages of wars, a horrible and unwonted destruction followed.
For when throughout all Africa immense multitudes of locusts had massed together, and not only had now scraped away every hope of crops and all the grasses together with part of their roots, and consumed the leaves of trees together with the tender shoots of the branches, but were even gnawing through the bitter bark and dry wood, they were suddenly snatched up by a wind and driven together into masses and carried long through the air, and were plunged into the African sea.
When the waves, with the surge driving them on far and wide, had thrust forward immense heaps of these along the widely extended shores, the decaying and putrefied mass exhaled a stench too foul and pestilential beyond belief, whence so great a pestilence followed upon all living creatures alike that the corpses, putrefied here and there, of birds, cattle, and beasts, dissolved by the corruption of the air, increased the bane of the corruption. But indeed how great was the plague of men, I myself, while I recount it, shudder in my whole body: