Disastrous battle with the Gauls.
The first battle with these terrible foes resulted disastrously to the Romans, who regarded them as half-disciplined barbarians, and underrated their strength. Their defeat was complete, and their losses immense. The flower of the Roman youth perished, B.C. 390.
The fall of Rome.
The victors entered Rome without resistance, while the Romans retreated to their citadel, such as were capable of bearing arms. The rest of the population dispersed. The fathers of the city, aged citizens, and priests, seated themselves in the porches of their patrician houses, and awaited the enemy. At first, they were mistaken for gods, so venerable and calm their appearance; but the profanation of the sacred person of Papirius dissolved the charm, and they were massacred.
M. Manlius.
The Gauls then attempted to assault the capital, but failed. But a youth, Pontius Cominius, having climbed the hill in the night with safety, and opened communication with the Romans at Veii, the marks of his passage suggested to the Gauls the means of taking the citadel. In the dead of the following night a party of Gauls scaled the cliff, and were about to surprise the citadel, when some geese, sacred to Juno, cried out and flapped their wings, which noise awakened M. Manlius, who rushed to the cliff and overpowered the foremost Gaul. A panic seized the rest, and the capitol was saved. At length, when the siege had lasted [pg 420] seven months, and famine pressed, the invaders were bought off by a ransom of one thousand pounds weight of gold. “The iron of the barbarians had conquered; but they sold their victory, and by selling, lost it.” They were subsequently defeated by Camillus, and Manlius, surnamed Torquatus, from the gold collar he took from a gigantic Gaul, and also by other generals.
The destruction of Rome was not a permanent calamity; it was a misfortune. The period which followed was one of distress, but the energy of Camillus reorganized the military force, and new alliances were made with the Latin cities. Etruria, humbled and restricted within narrower limits, and moreover enervated by luxury, was in no condition to oppose a people inured to danger and sobered by adversity.
His services and fall. The Lincinian rogation.
The subsequent fate of Manlius, who saved the city, suggests the fickleness and ingratitude of a republican State. The distress of the lower classes, in consequence of the Gaulish invasion, became intolerable. They became involved in debt, and thus were in the power of their creditors. Manlius undertook to be their defender, but the envy of the patricians caused him to be accused of aspiring to the supreme power, and he was, in spite of his great services, sentenced to death and hurled from the Tarpeian rock. His error was in premature reform. But, in the year 367 B.C., the tribunes Licinius and L. Sextius secured the passage of three memorable laws in the Curiata Tributa—the abolition of the military tribunate, which had increased the power of the patricians, and the restoration of the consulate, on the condition that one of the consuls should be a plebeian; the second, that no citizen should possess more than five hundred jugera of the public lands; and the third, that all interest thus paid on loans should be deducted from the principal. These were called the Licinian Rogations. But a new curule magistracy was created, as a sort of compensation to the patricians, that of prætors, to be held by them, exclusively. These political changes were made peaceably, and with them the old gentile aristocracy ceased [pg 421] to be a political institution. The remaining patrician offices were not long withheld from the plebeians. But these political changes did not much ameliorate the social condition of the poorer classes. The strictness of the Licinian laws, the oppression of the rich, the high rate of interest, and the existence of slavery, made the poor poorer, and the rich richer, and prevented the expansion of industry. The plebeians had gained political privileges, but not till great plebeian families had arisen. Power was virtually in the hands of nobles, whether patrician or plebeian, and aristocratic distinctions still remained. The plebeian noble sympathized with patricians rather than with the poorer classes. Debt, usury, and slavery began to bear fruits before the conquest of Italy.