gainst whom he had used violent language, had him
arrested on a charge of treason, perhaps with good reason. Though he
showed the many honors he had received for services to his country, he
was condemned to death and his house razed to the ground. Thus the
patricians dealt with the benefactors of the poor.

_THE CURTIAN GULF._

During three years--363 to 361 B.C.--Rome was ravaged by the plague,
which was so violent and fatal as to carry off the citizens by hundreds.
In its first year it found a noble victim in Camillus, the conqueror of
Veii and the second founder of Rome, who four years before had a second
time defeated the Gauls. He was the last of the old heroes of Rome,
those whose glory belongs to romance rather than history. The Gauls had
destroyed the records of old Rome, and left only legend and romance.
With the new Rome history fairly began.

But we have another romantic tale to tell before we bid adieu to the
story of early Rome. In the second year of the pestilence a strange and
portentous event occurred. The Tiber rose to an unusual height,
overflowed with its waters the great circus (_Circus Maximus_), and put
a stop to the games then going on, which were intended to propitiate the
wrath of heaven, and induce the gods to relieve man from the evil of the
plague.

And now, in the midst of the Forum, there yawned open a fearful gulf, so
wide and deep that the superstitious Romans viewed it with awe and
affright. Whether it was due to an earthquake or the wrath of the gods
is not for us to say. The Romans believed the latter; those who prefer
may believe the former. But, so we are told, it seemed bottomless.
Throw what they would in it, it stood unfilled, and the feeling grew
that no power of man could ever fill its yawning depths.

Man being powerless, the oracles of the gods were consulted. Must this
gaping wound always stand open in the soil of Rome? or could it in any
way be filled and the offended deities who had caused it be propitiated?
From the oracle came the reply that it must stand open till that which
constituted the best and true strength of the Roman commonwealth was
cast as an offering into the gulf. Then only would it close, and
thereafter forever would the state live and flourish.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE ROMAN AQUEDUCTS.]

The true strength of Rome! In what did this consist? This question men
asked each other anxiously and none seemed able to answer. But there was
one man