ey had been attacked
by the enemy, which was believed, till a party went out to bury the
dead, and found there were only Roman corpses all lying round the
crushed body of Sicinius, and that none were stripped of their armor or
clothes. Then the true history was found out, but the Decemvirs
sheltered the commanders, and would believe nothing against them.

Appius Claudius soon after did what horrified all honest men even more
than this treachery to the brave old soldier. The Forum was not only the
place of public assembly for state affairs, but the regular
market-place, where there were stalls and booths for all the wares that
Romans dealt in--meat stalls, wool shops, stalls where wine was sold in
earthenware jars or leathern bottles, and even booths where reading and
writing was taught to boys and girls, who would learn by tracing letters
in the sand, and then by writing them with an iron pen on a waxen table
in a frame, or with a reed upon parchment. The children of each family
came escorted by a slave--the girls by their nurse, the boys by one
called a pedagogue.

[Illustration: DEATH OF VIRGINIA.]

Appius, when going to his judgment-seat across the Forum, saw at one of
these schools a girl of fifteen reading her lesson. She was so lovely
that he asked her nurse who she was, and heard that her name was
Virginia, and that she was the daughter of an honorable plebeian and
brave centurion named Virginius, who was absent with the army fighting
with the AEqui, and that she was to marry a young man named Icilius as
soon as the campaign was over. Appius would gladly have married her
himself, but there was a patrician law against wedding plebeians, and he
wickedly determined that if he could not have her for his wife he would
have her for his slave.

There was one of his clients named Marcus Claudius, whom he paid to get
up a story that Virginius' wife Numitoria, who was dead, had never had
any child at all, but had bought a baby of one of his slaves and had
deceived her husband with it, and thus that poor Virginia was really his
slave. As the maiden was reading at her school, this wretch and a band
of fellows like him seized upon her, declaring that she was his
property, and that he would carry her off. There was a great uproar, and
she was dragged as far as Appius' judgment-seat; but by that time her
faithful nurse had called the poor girl's uncle Numitorius, who could
answer for it that she was really his sister's chil