HKB
tribunes, after their usual manner, attempted to obstruct the levy, and probably would have eventually succeeded in doing so, had not a new and additional cause of alarm suddenly arisen.
A large force of Sabines, committing dreadful devastation advanced almost up to the walls of the city. The fields were laid waste, the city was smitten with terror. Then the commons cheerfully took up arms; two large armies were raised, the remonstrance of the tribunes being of no avail. Nautius led one against the Sabines, and, having pitched his camp at Eretum,[36] by trifling incursions, mostly by night, he so desolated the Sabine territory that, in comparison with it, the Roman borders seemed almost undamaged by the war. Minucius neither had the same good fortune nor displayed the same energy in conducting his operations: for after he had pitched his camp at no great distance from the enemy, without having experienced any reverse of importance, he kept himself through fear within the camp. When the enemy perceived this, their boldness increased, as usually happens, from the fears of others; and, having attacked his camp by night, when open force availed little, they drew lines of circumvallation around it on the following day. Before these could close the means of egress, by a rampart thrown up on all sides, five horsemen, despatched between the enemies' posts, brought news to Rome, that the consul and his army were besieged. Nothing could have happened so unexpected nor so unlooked-for. Accordingly, the panic and the alarm were as great as if the enemy were besieging the city, not the camp. They summoned the consul Nautius; and when there seemed to be but insufficient protection in him, and it was determined that a dictator should be appointed to retrieve their shattered fortunes, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was appointed by universal consent.
It is worth while for those persons who despise all things human in comparison with riches, and who suppose that there is no room either for exalted honour, or for virtue, except where riches abound in great profusion, to listen to the following: Lucius Quinctius, the sole hope of the empire of the Roman people, cultivated a farm of four acres on the other side of the Tiber, which is called the Quinctian meadows, exactly opposite the place where the dock-yard now is. There, whether leaning on a stake while digging a trench, or while ploughing, at any rate, as is certain, while engaged on some work in the fields, after mutual exchange of salutations had taken place, being requested by the ambassadors to put on his toga, and listen to the commands of the senate (with wishes that it might turn out well both for him and the commonwealth), he was astonished, and, asking whether all was well, bade his wife Racilia immediately bring his toga from the hut. As soon as he had put it on and come forward, after having first wiped off the dust and sweat, the ambassadors congratulating him, united in saluting him as dictator: they summoned him into the city, and told him what terror prevailed in the army. A vessel was prepared for Quinctius by order of the government, and his three sons, having come out to meet him, received him on landing at the other side; then his other relatives and his friends: then the greater part of the patricians. Accompanied by this numerous attendance, the lictors going before him, he was conducted to his residence.[37] There was a numerous concourse of the commons also: but they by no means looked on Quinctius with the same satisfaction, as they considered both that he was vested with excessive authority, and was likely to prove still more arbitrary by the exercise of that same authority. During that night, however, nothing was done except that guards were posted in the city.