ch. 382.38As they were going along in an almost continuous
stream, Tullius, who had gone on in advance, waited for them
at the Ferentine Fountain. Accosting their chief men as they
came up in tones of complaint and indignation, he led them,
eagerly listening to words which accorded with their own
angry feelings, and through them the multitude, down to the
plain which stretched below the road. There he began a
speech:
Even though you should forget the wrongs that Rome has
inflicted and the defeats which the Volscian nation has
suffered, though you should forget everything else, with what
temper, I should like to know, do you brook this insult of
yesterday, when they commenced their Games by treating us
with ignominy? Have you not felt that they have won a triumph
over you today, that as you departed you were a spectacle to
the townsfolk, to the strangers, to all those neighbouring
populations; that your wives, your children, were paraded as
a gazing-stock before men's eyes? What do you suppose were
the thoughts of those who heard the voice of the criers,
those who watched us depart, those who met this ignominious
cavalcade? What could they have thought but that there was
some awful guilt cleaving to us, so that if we had been
present at the Games we should have profaned them and made an
expiation necessary, and that this was the reason why we were
driven away from the abodes of these good and religious
people and from
all intercourse and association with them? Does it not occur
to you that we owe our lives to the haste with which we
departed if we may call it a departure and not a flight? And
do you count this City as anything else than the City of your
enemies where had you lingered a single day you would all
have been put to death? War has been declared against you to
the great misery of those who have declared it if you are
really men.
So they dispersed to their homes, with their feelings of
resentment embittered by this harangue. They so worked upon
the feelings of their fellow-countrymen, each in his own
city, that the whole Volscian nation revolted.
