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But what happened after Numa's reign, and under the other kings,
when the Albans were provoked into war, with sad results not to
themselves alone, but also to the Romans? The long peace of Numa
had become tedious; and with what endless slaughter and detriment of
both states did the Roman and Alban armies bring it to an end! For
Alba, which had been rounded by Ascanius, son of Æneas, and which
was more properly the mother of Rome than Troy herself, was provoked
to battle by Tullus Hostilius, king of Rome, and in the conflict
both inflicted and received such damage, that at length both parties
wearied of the struggle. It was then devised that the war should be
decided by the combat of three twin-brothers from each army: from the
Romans the three Horatii stood forward, from the Albans the three
Curiatii. Two of the Horatii were overcome and disposed of by the
Curiatii; but by the remaining Horatius the three Curiatii were
slain. Thus Rome remained victorious, but with such a sacrifice that
only one survivor returned to his home. Whose was the loss on both
sides? Whose the grief, but of the offspring of Æneas, the
descendants of Ascanius, the progeny of Venus, the grandsons of
Jupiter? For this, too, was a "worse than civil" war, in which
the belligerent states were mother and daughter. And to this combat of
the three twin-brothers there was added another atrocious and horrible
catastrophe. For as the two nations had formerly been friendly (being
related and neighbors), the sister of the Horatii had been betrothed
to one of the Curiatii; and she, when she saw her brother wearing the
spoils of her betrothed, burst into tears, and was slain by her own
brother in his anger. To me, this one girl seems to have been more
humane than the Whole Roman people. I cannot think her to blame for
lamenting the man to whom already she had plighted her troth, or, as
perhaps she was doing, for grieving that her brother should have slain
him to whom he had promised his sister. For why do we praise the grief
of Æneas (in Virgil) over the enemy cut down even by his own hand?
Why did Marcellus shed tears over the city of Syracuse, when he
recollected, just before he destroyed, its magnificence and meridian
glory, and thought upon the common lot of all things? I demand, in
the name of humanity, that if men are praised for tears shed over
enemies conquered by themselves, a weak girl should not be counted
criminal for bewailing her lover slaughtered by the hand of her
brother. While, then, that maiden was weeping for the death of her
betrothed inflicted by her brother's hand, Rome was rejoicing that
such devastation had been wrought on her mother state, and that she had
purchased a victory with such an expenditure of the common blood of
herself and the Albans.
Why allege to me the mere names and words of "glory" and
"victory?" Tear off the disguise of wild delusion, and look at the
naked deeds: weigh them naked, judge them naked. Let the charge be
brought against Alba, as Troy was charged with adultery. There is
no such charge, none like it found: the war was kindled only in order
that there "Might sound in languid ears the cry Of Tullus and of
victory."
This vice of restless ambition was the sole motive to that social and
parricidal war, a vice which Sallust brands in passing; for when he
has spoken with brief but hearty commendation of those primitive times
in which life was spent without covetousness, and every one was
sufficiently satisfied with what he had, he goes on: "But after
Cyrus in Asia, and the Lacedemonians and Athenians in Greece,
began to subdue cities and nations, and to account the lust of
sovereignty a sufficient ground for war, and to reckon that the
greatest glory consisted in the greatest empire;" and so on, as I
need not now quote. This lust of sovereignty disturbs and consumes the
human race with frightful ills. By this lust Rome was overcome when
she triumphed over Alba, and praising her own crime, called it
glory. For, as our Scriptures say, "the wicked boasteth of his
heart's desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the Lord
abhorreth." Away, then, with these deceitful masks, these deluding
whitewashes, that things may be truthfully seen and scrutinized. Let
no man tell me that this and the other was a "great" man, because he
fought and conquered so and so. Gladiators fight and conquer, and
this barbarism has its meed of praise; but I think it were better to
take the consequences of any sloth, than to seek the glory won by such
arms. And if two gladiators entered the arena to fight, one being
father, the other his son, who would endure such a spectacle? who
would not be revolted by it? How, then, could that be a glorious war
which a daughter-state waged against its mother? Or did it constitute
a difference, that the battlefield was not an arena, and that the wide
plains were filled with the carcasses not of two gladiators, but of
many of the flower of two nations; and that those contests were viewed
not by the amphitheatre, but by the whole world, and furnished a
profane spectacle both to those alive at the time, and to their
posterity, so long as the fame of it is handed down?
Yet those gods, guardians of the Roman empire, and, as it were,
theatric spectators of such contests as these, were not satisfied until
the sister of the Horatii was added by her brother's sword as a third
victim from the Roman side, so that Rome herself, though she won the
day, should have as many deaths to mourn. Afterwards, as a fruit of
the victory, Alba was destroyed, though it was there the Trojan gods
had formed a third asylum after Ilium had been sacked by the Greeks,
and after they had left Lavinium, where Æneas had founded a kingdom
in a land of banishment. But probably Alba was destroyed because from
it too the gods had migrated, in their usual fashion, as Virgil
says: "Gone from each fane, each sacred shrine, Are those who made
this realm divine."
Gone, indeed, and from now their third asylum, that Rome might seem
all the wiser m committing herself to them after they had deserted three
other cities. Alba, whose king Amulius had banished his brother,
displeased them; Rome, whose king Romulus had slain his brother,
pleased them. But before Alba was destroyed, its population, they
say, was amalgamated with the inhabitants of Rome so that the two
cities were one. Well, admitting it was so, yet the fact remains
that the city of Ascanius, the third retreat of the Trojan gods, was
destroyed by the daughter-city. Besides, to effect this pitiful
conglomerate of the war's leavings, much blood was spilt on both
sides. And how shall I speak in detail of the same wars, so often
renewed in subsequent reigns, though they seemed to have been finished
by great victories; and of wars that time after time were brought to an
end by great slaughters, and which yet time after time were renewed by
the posterity of those who had made peace and struck treaties? Of this
calamitous history we have no small proof, in the fact that no
subsequent king closed the gates of war; and therefore with all their
tutelar gods, no one of them reigned in peace.
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