was cleared away as they moved along, before them the fasces with the axes were carried. When showers of stones descend, lightnings are darted from the heavens, and animals give birth to monsters, you consider these things as prodigies. This is a prodigy which can be expiated by no victims, by no supplications, without the blood of those men who have dared to commit so great a crime.
Now, tho villainy is never guided by reason, yet, so far as it could exist in so nefarious a transaction, I would fain know what was your design. Formerly, a legion which was sent to garrison Rhegium wickedly put to the sword the principal inhabitants, and kept possession of that opulent city through a space of ten years; on account of which enormity the entire legion, consisting of four thousand men, were beheaded in the Forum at Rome. But they, in the first place, did not put themselves under the direction of Atrius the Umbrian, scarcely superior to a scullion, whose name even was ominous, but of Decius Jubellius, a military tribune; nor did they unite themselves with Pyrrhus, or with the Samnites or Lucanians, the enemies of the Roman people. But you made common cause with Mandonius and Indibilis, and intended also to have united your arms with them. They intended to have held Rhegium as a lasting settlement, as the Campanians held Capua, which they took from its ancient Tuscan inhabitants, and as the Mamertines held Messana in Sicily, with
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