Not all the elders, or senators, took this view. It really never had been decided how far a general who took command in a war had a right to dictate in the outcome of it. Generally speaking, in a war, the men who fought took whatever they could lay their hands on. They plundered a city when they took it, and each man had what he could carry away. In this case the city of the Veientines had not been plundered, because the rulers surrendered and asked for peace before Romulus had a chance to take it. The land which had been given up was a kind of plunder, and the general had a right to divide it. This was the view of Caius Cossus and Marcus Colonus and his brother, and some of the others in the senate. But Naso—who never had enough land—and some of his friends, who never were satisfied unless they had their own way, had a great deal to say about the high-handed methods of the veteran general, the founder of the city. They said that he treated them all as if they were under the yoke, and that this was insulting to free-born Romans. In short, the time had come when all of the men who wished for more power than they had were ready to declare that Romulus was a tyrant. It was quite true that he was the only man strong enough to stand in their way if he chose. It was also true that he was the only [pg 250]man who was disposed to consider the rights of the plebs and the outsiders who were not citizens, and had according to ancient custom no right to share in the governing of the city at all.
XXII
THE GOAT’S MARSH
Public opinion in Rome was like a whirlpool. The currents that battled in it circled round and round, but got nowhere. Calvo, the last of the older men who had been fathers of the people when Romulus founded the city, began to wonder if at last the downfall of the chief was near. He could not see how one man could make peace between the factions, or how he could dominate them by his single will. But it was never the way of the veteran pontiff to talk, when talk would do no good, and he waited to learn what Romulus would do.
What Romulus did was to visit him one night at his villa, alone and in secret. He had sent his servant beforehand to ask that Calvo would arrange this, and when some hours later a tall man in the dress of a shepherd appeared at the gate, the old porter admitted him without question, and there was no one in the way. The two sat [pg 252]and talked in the solar chamber, with no witnesses but the stars.
“They do not understand,” Romulus said thoughtfully, when they had been all over the struggle between the two parties, from beginning to end. “They do not see that the thing which must be done is the thing which is right, whether it be by my will or another’s.”
“They are ready, some of them, to declare that a thing is wrong because you saw it before they did,” said Calvo dryly.
“The people are with me—I believe,” said Romulus, “the soldiers, and the common folk—but they have no voice in the government. Yet are they men, Tertius Calvo,—many of them children of Mars as we are. Am I not bound to do what is right for them, as well as for the dwellers within the palaces?”