thers for exclusive power and wealth, the plebeians for freedom,
first, and then for office in the state; a time of fighting abroad for
land, and of contention at home about its division. In fifty years the
poor had their Tribunes, but it took them nearly three times as long,
after that, to make themselves almost the fathers' equals in power.

Once they tried a new kind of government by a board of ten, and it held
for a while, till again a woman's life turned the tide of Roman history,
and fair young Virginia, stabbed by her father in the Forum, left a name
as lasting as any of that day.

Romance again, but the true romance, above doubt, at last; not at all
mythical, but full of fate's unanswerable logic, which makes dim stories
clear to living eyes. You may see the actors in the Forum, where it all
happened,--the lovely girl with frightened, wondering eyes; the father,
desperate, white-lipped, shaking with the thing not yet done; Appius
Claudius smiling among his friends and clients; the sullen crowd of
strong plebeians, and the something in the chill autumn air that was a
warning of fate and fateful change. Then the deed. A shriek at the edge
of the throng; a long, thin knife, high in air, trembling before a
thousand eyes; a harsh, heartbroken, vengeful voice; a confusion and a
swaying of the multitude, and then the rising yell of men overlaid,
ringing high in the air from the Capitol right across the Forum to the
Palatine, and echoing back the doom of the Ten.

The deed is vivid still, and then there is sudden darkness. One thinks
of how that man lived afterwards. Had Virginius a home, a wife, other
children to mourn the dead one? Or was he a lonely man, ten times alone
after that day, with the memory of one flashing moment always undimmed
in a bright horror? Who knows? Did anyone care? Rome's story changed its
course, turning aside at the river of Virginia's blood, and going on
swiftly in another way.

To defeat this time, straight to Rome's first and greatest humiliation;
to the coming of the Gauls, sweeping everything before them, Etruscans,
Italians, Romans, up to the gates of the city and over the great moat
and wall of Servius, burning, destroying, killing everything, to the
foot of the central rock; baffled at the last stronghold on a dark night
by a flock of cackling geese, but not caring for so small a thing when
they had swallowed up the rest, or not liking the Latin land, perhaps,
and so, taking ransom