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By Root 21793 0

Sometime also they give surnames derived of some mark or misfortune of the body: as Sylla, to say, crook-nosed: Niger, black: Rufus, red: Caecus, blind: Claudus, lame. They did wisely in this thing to accustom men to think, that neither the loss of their sight, nor other such misfortunes as may chance to men, are any shame or disgrace unto them; but the manner was to answer boldly to such names, as if they were called by their proper names. Howbeit these matters would be better amplified in other stories than this.

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Sedition at Rome, by reason of famine.

Now when this war was ended, the flatterers of the people began to stir up sedition again, without any new occasion, or just matter offered of complaint. For they did ground this second insurrection against the Nobility and Patricians upon the people's misery and misfortune, that could not but fall out , by reason of the former discord and sedition between them and the Nobility. Because the most part of the arable land, within the territory of Rome, was become heathy and barren for lack of ploughing, for that they had no time nor mean to cause corn to be brought them out of other countries to sow, by reason of their wars; which made the extreme dearth they had among them. Now those busy prattlers that sought the people's goodwill by such flattering words, perceiving great scarcity of corn to be within the city: and though there had been plenty enough, yet the common people had no money to buy it: they spread abroad false tales and rumours against the Nobility, that they, in revenge of the people, had practised and procured the extreme dearth among them. Furthermore, in the midst of this stir, there came ambassadors to Rome from the city of Velitres, that offered up their city to the Romans, and prayed them they would send new inhabitants to replenish the same: because the plague had been so extreme among them, and had killed such a number of them, as there was not left alive the tenth person of the people that had been there before. So the wise men of Rome began to think, that the necessity of the Velitrians fell out in a most happy hour; and how, by this occasion , it was very meet, in so great a scarcity of victuals, to disburden Rome of a great number of citizens: and by this means as well to take away this new sedition, and utterly to rid it out of the city, as also to clear the same of many mutinous and seditious persons, being the superfluous ill humours that grievously fed this disease.

Velitres made a colony to Rome.

Hereupon the Consuls pricked out all those by a bill , whom they intended to send to Velitres, to go dwell there as in form of a colony: and they levied out all the rest that remained in the city of Rome, a great number to go against the Volsces, hoping, by the mean of foreign war, to pacify their sedition at home.

Two practices to remove the sedition at Rome.

Moreover they imagined, when the poor with the rich. and the mean sort with the Nobility, should by this device be abroad in the wars, and in one camp, and in one service, and in one like danger: that then they would be more quiet and loving together.

Sicinius and Brutus, Tribunes of the people, against both those devices.

But Sicinius and Brutus, two seditious Tribunes, spake against either of these devices, and cried out upon the noble men, that under the gentle name of a Colony, they would cloak and colour the most cruel and unnatural fact as might be: because they sent their poor citizens into a sore infected city and pestilent air, full of dead bodies unburied, and there also to dwell under the tuition of a strange god, that had so cruelly persecuted his people. " This were (said they) even as much, as if the Senate should headlong cast down the people into a most bottomless pit; and are not yet contented to have famished some of the poor citizens heretofore to death, and to put other of them even to the mercy of the plague: but afresh they have procured a voluntary war, to the end they would leave behind no kind of misery and ill, wherewith the poor silly people should not be