me geese, sacred to Juno, cried out and
flapped their wings, which noise awakened M. Manlius, who rushed to the
cliff and overpowered the foremost Gaul. A panic seized the rest, and the
capitol was saved. At length, when the siege had lasted seven months, and
famine pressed, the invaders were bought off by a ransom of one thousand
pounds weight of gold. "The iron of the barbarians had conquered; but they
sold their victory, and by selling, lost it." They were subsequently
defeated by Camillus, and Manlius, surnamed Torquatus, from the gold
collar he took from a gigantic Gaul, and also by other generals.

The destruction of Rome was not a permanent calamity; it was a misfortune.
The period which followed was one of distress, but the energy of Camillus
reorganized the military force, and new alliances were made with the Latin
cities. Etruria, humbled and restricted within narrower limits, and
moreover enervated by luxury, was in no condition to oppose a people
inured to danger and sobered by adversity.

(M813) The subsequent fate of Manlius, who saved the city, suggests the
fickleness and ingratitude of a republican State. The distress of the
lower classes, in consequence of the Gaulish invasion, became intolerable.
They became involved in debt, and thus were in the power of their
creditors. Manlius undertook to be their defender, but the envy of the
patricians caused him to be accused of aspiring to the supreme power, and
he was, in spite of his great services, sentenced to death and hurled from
the Tarpeian rock. His error was in premature reform. But, in the year 367
B.C., the tribunes Licinius and L. Sextius secured the passage of three
memorable laws in the Curiata Tributa--the abolition of the military
tribunate, which had increased the power of the patricians, and the
restoration of the consulate, on the condition that one of the consuls
should be a plebeian; the second, that no citizen should possess more than
five hundred jugera of the public lands; and the third, that all interest
thus paid on loans should be deducted from the principal. These were
called the _Licinian Rogations_. But a new curule magistracy was created,
as a sort of compensation to the patricians, that of praetors, to be held
by them, exclusively. These political changes were made peaceably, and
with them the old gentile aristocracy ceased to be a political
institution. The remaining patrician offices were not long withheld from
the plebeians.