History of Rome

​Before the new consuls entered upon their office, a triumph over the Gauls was celebrated by Popilius with great favor of the plebeians; and whispering among themselves, they asked whether anyone regretted having a plebeian consul.

​At the same time they reproached the dictator, because he had accepted the reward of flouting the Licinian law—more shameful through private greed than through public injury—in order that he, as dictator, might create himself consul. The year was distinguished by many and various disturbances.

​The Gauls from the Alban mountains, because they had been unable to endure the severity of the winter, were plundering, wandering through the plains and maritime districts;

​the sea was infested by the fleets of the Greeks, as well as the coast of the Antiate territory, the Laurens district, and the mouths of the Tiber, so that the pirates of the sea, having clashed with those of the land, fought on one occasion a doubtful battle and parted uncertain whether they should consider themselves vanquished or victors, the Gauls returning to their camp and the Greeks back to their ships.

​Among these, by far the greatest terror arose from the councils of the Latin peoples held at the grove of Ferentina, and from the reply , by no means ambiguous, given to the Romans when they demanded soldiers, that they should cease to command those whose assistance they needed;

​that the Latins would bear arms for their own liberty rather than for the dominion of others.

​Worried at once by two foreign wars and also by the defection of their allies, when the senate saw that those whom loyalty had not held must be kept in check by fear, they ordered the consuls to exert all the power of the empire by holding a levy; for they had to rely on a citizen army, since the allied force was deserting them.

​From all sides, not only from the urban but also from the rural youth, ten legions are said to have been enrolled, each consisting of four thousand two hundred infantry and three hundred cavalry, a novel army which now, ​if any foreign force should threaten, these resources of the Roman people, which the world can scarcely contain, even if contracted into one, could not easily manage to raise; so much have we grown only in those things for which we suffer, riches and luxury.

​Among the other misfortunes of that year, the other consul, Appius Claudius, died in the very midst of the preparations for war, and the control of affairs returned to Camillus. ​To him, as sole consul, the patricians did not think it sufficiently seemly that a dictator should be added, either because his extraordinary dignity should not be subjected to a dictatorship, or on account of the auspicious omen of his cognomen for a Gallic uprising.

​The consul, having assigned two legions to protect the city and divided eight with the praetor Lucius Pinarius, mindful of his father’s valor, took upon himself the Gallic war without casting lots, and ordered the praetor to guard the maritime coast and keep the Greeks away from the shores.

​And when he had descended into the Pomptine territory, because he neither wished to engage in the plains unless some necessity compelled him, and believed that the enemy, whom necessity forced to live by plunder, could be sufficiently subdued by preventing their depredations, he chose a suitable site for a permanent camp.