[122] As an artist, by working in the presence of his pupil, improves his eye, and thus gives him the best practice, so is it also in literary pursuits. He who has studied for the whole of his life, certainly does a service to his hearers, when he shows them how he has got on, and how also he has sometimes gone back.
[123] Mirabeau said at Marseilles in the year 1789, that C. Gracchus had called on heaven to requite the shedding of his blood, and that from this blood Marius had sprung. But Gracchus was a pure-minded, guiltless man; Marius, a tyrant.
[124] Συμφωνεῖται σχεδὸν ὑπὸ πάντων, says Dionysius; this σχεδὸν shows, that all were not unanimous. I believe that the excellent Cincius had placed it in a different year, perhaps Ol. 99, 1. or 2.
[125] The chronology is very unsettled here on account of the uncertain change of the magistrates. It was not till after the Punic wars, that the consuls entered regularly into office in spring; and it was only in the last years of the republic that they did so on the first of January.
[126] I have, in the neighbourhood of Tivoli, still found vestiges of several places of which nothing is generally known, and which may have been then destroyed. These are square enclosures of walls on the tops of hills, without any traces of surrounding ramparts. We may see from thence how small those towns were, which lay scattered through Italy; they may have contained about fifty houses each.
[127] Probably VII, 12. and VIII, 6. or 8.; yet it is alluded to in other places besides.—Germ. Editor.
[128] The triumph on the Alban mount, which is first mentioned of Papirius Maso after the Punic war, is generally looked upon as a discretionary act of the generals, when they were refused a triumph in Rome; but it is undoubtedly a reminiscence of the ancient custom. Formerly, the Latin general triumphed on the Alban mount, as the Roman in Rome. When there was now no more a Latin general, the imperator, as general of the allies, took his triumph on the Alban mount, if it was denied him at Rome.
[129] Monte Sasso di Castro, above Mugello, is, according to a surmise of the editor of the R. H. III, note 144, the name to which N. here alludes.
[130] By this remark the difficulty is obviated, which otherwise arises as to how in an assembly wherein those only voted who happened to be present, it could have been the majority of the votes which decided. Applying this to Rome, how could the members of the Tribus Velina, the residence of which was very far off, not have felt grievously prejudiced in comparison with those of the Palatina? But all this is explained by the fact, that each tribe had only one vote; so that in important discussions the distant ones sent their most able men to town, and thus arose de facto a representative government.
[131] The war of the Samnites with the Sidicines shows, that the territory of the Samnites at that time reached to the upper Liris, so that its limits are drawn too narrowly by d’Anville.