At this juncture ambassadors arrived
from the town of Velitrae, who delivered up their city to the Romans,
desiring that they would send some new inhabitants to people it, as a
pestilence had made such havoc among the citizens that there was
scarcely a tenth part of them remaining alive.
The wiser Romans thought that this demand of the people of Velitrae
would confer a most seasonable relief on themselves, and would put an
end to their domestic troubles, if they could only transfer the more
violent partizans of the popular party thither, and so purge the State
of its more disorderly elements. The consuls accordingly chose out all
these men and sent them to colonize Velitrae, and enrolled the rest for
a campaign against the Volsci, that they might not have leisure for
revolutionary plottings, but that when they were all gathered together,
rich and poor, patrician and plebeian alike, to share in the common
dangers of a camp, they might learn to regard one another with less
hatred and illwill.
XIII. But Sicinnius and Brutus, the tribunes of the people, now
interposed, crying aloud that the consuls were veiling a most barbarous
action under the specious name of sending out colonists. They were
despatching many poor men to certain destruction by transporting them to
a city whose air was full of pestilence and the stench from unburied
corpses, where they were to dwell under the auspices of a god who was
not only not their own, but angry with them.
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