BOOK II.

(CONTINUED.)

CHAPTER VIII.

DEVELOPMENT OF STRENGTH AND CHARACTER.

"The comparison is never to be made with an ideal standard, or even with one which a purer religion and a more liberal organization of society may have rendered effectual." — HALLAM, Middle Ages, Supp. Notes, 220.

THE young philosopher, questioned respecting his new acquirements at the school from which he had just returned, answered, that, if he had made any, they would soon show themselves. According to the same rule, we may believe, that, if the liberty communicated by the Licinian laws to the Plebeians be of any real superiority over that which the Patricians had previously engrossed, it will soon appear in the period subsequent to its extension.

The story of the Manlii, father and son, will serve to introduce and partially to illustrate the present portion of our history. It opens two or three years after the election of the Tribune Sextius to the consulship, when a cruel pestilence arrived to increase the troubles not yet put to rest. In consequence of

1 The story is told of a pupil of Zeno in Ælian, Var. Historia, IX. 33.

its ravages, Lucius Manlius Capitolinus was solemnly appointed Dictator, to fulfil the religious ceremony 2 in which, it was believed, lay the only hope of checking their fearful progress. The remedy proved nearly as bad as the disease; and the name of Imperiosus, the Imperious, which Manlius bore or then acquired, was well deserved by his arbitrary attempts to retain and enforce his authority beyond the occasion for which it had been conferred. His violence went so far as to furnish the grounds of a prosecution instituted the next year by Marcus Pomponius, a Tribune, who, in the course of his suit, insisted not only upon the public misconduct of the Dictator, but more particularly upon the cruelty of which Manlius was guilty in private, towards his own son Titus, whom he kept removed from the opportunities and honors proper to his rank and age. The younger Manlius, then in the country, no sooner heard of the accusation brought against his father, than he hastened to Rome, and, obtaining access to Pomponius, extorted from him, under threat of instant death, the promise of dropping the charges he had made. It was not behaving, as the historian declares, much like a peaceable cit

2 Which was nothing more than driving the Yearly Nail, usually driven by some other magistrate or priest, into the wall of the temple of Jupiter. Liv., VII. 3.

Livy (VII. 6) also assigns the legend of Marcus Curtius to the same period of the plague. His plunge into the yawning gulf, for the sake of Rome, was but an imaginary instance of the actual and active patriotism of his countrymen. Val. Max., V. 6. 2. Plin.,

A festival, at which stage-plays, ludi scenici, were for the first time introduced, was a part of the means employed to appease the gods. Nat. Hist., XV. 20. Liv., VII. 2.