History of Rome

​I deemed it not irrelevant to record these things, even in the very words as they have been handed down and pronounced, although the memory of all divine and human custom has perished by the preference of all new and foreign things over the ancient and ancestral ones.

​I find in certain authors that the Samnites, having awaited the outcome of the battle, came to the aid of the Romans only after the battle had already been fought.

​To the Latins also, help from Lavinium, while they were wasting time in deliberating, began to be brought only after they had already been defeated;

​and, when the first standards and a part of the army had already gone out from the gates, upon the arrival of the news of the slaughter of the Latins, as they were returning back into the city with reversed standards, it is said that their praetor, Milionius by name, said that a great price would have to be paid to the Romans for a very short journey.

​Those of the Latins who had survived the battle, scattered along many routes, when they had gathered together into one body, found the city of Vescia to be a refuge for them.

​There, in the councils, Numisius, their general, was stirring up the chiefs to renew the war by asserting that the Mars of war was truly common and had laid low both armies with equal slaughter, and that the name of victory alone belonged to the Romans, while in the rest of their fortune they too behaved like the vanquished;

​that both consular headquarters were cursed, the one by the execution of a son, the other by the slaughter of the devoted consul; that the entire army had been butchered, the hastati and principes slain, and slaughter made both before and behind the standards, and that the triarii had finally restored the situation;

​that although the forces of the Latins were equally cut down, yet either Latium or the Volscians were nearer for reinforcement than Rome; that, therefore, if it seemed good to them, he himself, having quickly called out the youth from the Latin and Volscian peoples, would return with a hostile army to Capua and strike with an unexpected arrival the Romans, who at that time were expecting nothing less than a battle.

​Deceptive letters having been sent around the Latin and Volscian name, because those who had not been present at the battle were more ready to believe blindly, a tumultuary army was quickly enrolled from all sides and assembled.

​The consul Torquatus met this army at Trifanum—this place is between Sinuessa and Minturnae. Before a place for a camp was taken, the baggage on both sides was thrown into a heap, and they fought and ended the war.

​For their affairs were so ruined that all the Latins surrendered themselves to the consul, who was leading his victorious army to lay waste to their fields, and the Campanians followed that surrender. Latium and Capua were punished by the loss of their land.

​The Latin land, with the addition of the Privernate territory, and the Falernian, which had belonged to the Campanian people, as far as the river Vulturnus, was distributed to the Roman plebs.

​Two iugera each were given in the Latin territory, in such a way that they completed them with three-fourths from the Privernate land; three each in the Falernian, with fourths also added on account of the distance.

​Outside of punishment were the Laurentes among the Latins and the horsemen of the Campanians, because they had not revolted. With the Laurentes, the treaty was ordered to be renewed, and from that time it is renewed every year, ten days after the Latin Festival.

​To the Campanian horsemen, Roman citizenship was given, and so that it might be a monument, they fixed a bronze tablet in the temple of Castor at Rome. The Campanian people were also ordered to pay them a tax every year, four hundred and fifty coins to each individual—and there were one thousand six hundred of them.