e: for
this reason the Claudian tribe is added to the former number, which
by this means are increased to twenty-one. A. Posthumius the
dictator defeats at the lake Regillus Tarquin the Proud, making war
upon the Romans with an army of Latins. Secession of the commons to
the Sacred Mount; brought back by Menenius Agrippa. Five tribunes
of the people created. Corioli taken by C. Martius; from that he is
surnamed Coriolanus. Banishment and subsequent conduct of C. M.
Coriolanus. The Agrarian law first made. Sp. Cassius condemned and
put to death. Oppia, a vestal virgin, buried alive for
incontinence. The Fabian family undertake to carry on that war at
their own cost and hazard, against the Veientians, and for that
purpose send out three hundred and six men in arms, who were all
cut off. Ap. Claudius the consul decimates his army because he had
been unsuccessful in the war with the Veientians, by their refusing
to obey orders. An account of the wars with the Volscians, AEquians,
and Veientians, and the contests of the fathers with the commons._

1. The affairs, civil and military, of the Roman people, henceforward
free, their annual magistrates, and the sovereignty of the laws, more
powerful than that of men, I shall now detail.--The haughty insolence of
the late king had caused this liberty to be the more welcome: for the
former kings reigned in such a manner that they all in succession might
be not undeservedly set down as founders of the parts, at least of the
city, which they added as new residences for the population augmented by
themselves. Nor is there a doubt but that the very same Brutus who
earned so much glory for expelling this haughty monarch, would have done
so to the greatest injury of the public weal, if, through an over-hasty
desire of liberty, he had wrested the kingdom from any of the preceding
kings. For what would have been the consequence if that rabble of
shepherds and strangers, fugitives from their own countries, having,
under the protection of an inviolable asylum, found liberty, or at least
impunity, uncontrolled by the dread of regal authority, had begun to be
distracted by tribunician storms, and to engage in contests with the
fathers in a strange city, before the pledges of wives and children, and
love of the very soil, to which it requires a length of time to become
habituated, had united their affections. Their