History of Rome

​The senate was informed by both consuls that there was little hope of peace with the Samnites: Publilius had written to Rome that two thousand Nola soldiers and four thousand Samnites, more through the compulsion of the Nolans than by the will of the Greeks, had been admitted into Palaepolis; Cornelius wrote:

​that he had discovered that a levy had been declared by the magistrates, that the whole of Samnium was aroused, and that the neighboring peoples of Privernum, Fundi, and Formiae were being openly solicited.

​On this account, although it had been decided that ambassadors should be sent to the Samnites before war was made, a fierce answer was returned by the Samnites.

​They went so far as to accuse the Romans of injustices; nor did they on that account defend themselves any more carelessly against the charges brought against them, saying that the Greeks were not assisted by any public counsel or aid;

​nor had Fundi or Formiae been solicited by them; for indeed they were far from regretting their own strength, if war was desired.

​For the rest, they could not disguise that the state of the Samnites took it ill that the Roman people had restored Fregellae, which had been taken from the Volsci and destroyed by themselves, and had established a colony in the territory of the Samnites, which their colonists called Fregellae;

​that unless this insult and injury were removed from them by those who had committed it, they themselves would repel it with all their might.

​When the Roman envoy called them to a conference before their common allies and friends, “Why do we act evasively?” he said; “our struggles, Romans, will be decided not by the words of envoys nor by any human arbitrator, but by the Campanian plain, in which we must meet, and by arms, and by the common fortune of war.

​Therefore, let us pitch camp opposite camp between Capua and Suessula, and decide whether the Samnite or the Roman shall rule Italy with sovereign power.”

​The Roman envoys, having replied that they would go not where the enemy had summoned them, but where their own generals led them, returned home. Already Publilius, having seized an opportune position between Palaepolis and Neapolis, had cut off from the enemy the alliance of mutual aid which they had used with each other as each place was pressed.

​And so, since both the day of the elections was at hand and it was not to the advantage of the state that Publilius, who was threatening the walls of the enemy, should be called away from the daily expectation of taking the city, ​negotiations were opened with the tribunes to propose to the people that, when Quintus Publilius Philo should have retired from the consulship, he should act as proconsul until the war with the Greeks was finished.

​To Lucius Cornelius, since it was not pleasing that he either, having now entered Samnium, should be recalled from the impulse of the war, letters were sent that he should name a dictator for the sake of the elections.

​He named Marcus Claudius Marcellus; by him Spurius Postumius was named master of the horse. Yet the elections were not held by the dictator, because it came into question whether he had been created with some flaw. The augurs, being consulted, declared that the dictator appeared to have been created with a flaw.

​The tribunes made this matter suspicious and disreputable by accusing them: for neither was it easy for that flaw to be known, since the consul named the dictator rising in the silence of the night, nor had anything been written about that matter by the consul to anyone publicly or privately, ​nor did any mortal exist who said that he had seen or heard anything that would break the auspice, nor could the augurs, sitting at Rome, divine what flaw had occurred to the consul in his camp. To whom did it not appear that because the dictator was a plebeian, that flaw had seemed so to the augurs?

​These and other things were in vain bandied about by the tribunes; at length the matter returned to an interregnum, and the elections having been delayed for one reason or another, the fourteenth interrex, Lucius Aemilius, finally created Gaius Poetelius and Lucius Papirius Mugillanus consuls; in other annals I find Cursor.