ding or
suffering the demolition of their towns and the devastation of their
lands, which they had formerly suffered in the reign of Ancus, and
afterward in the reign of his own father. The Latins were easily
persuaded, though in that treaty the advantage lay on the side of
Rome: however, they both saw that the chiefs of the Latin nation sided
with and supported the king, and Turnus was a warning example, still
fresh in their recollections, of the danger that threatened each
individually, if he should make any opposition. Thus the treaty was
renewed, and notice was given to the young men of the Latins that,
according to the treaty, they should attend in considerable numbers
in arms, on a certain day, at the grove of Ferentina. And when they
assembled from all the states according to the edict of the Roman
king, in order that they should have neither a general of their own,
nor a separate command, nor standards of their own, he formed mixed
companies of Latins and Romans so as out of a pair of companies to
make single companies, and out of single companies to make a pair: and
when the companies had thus been doubled, he appointed centurions over
them.

Nor was Tarquin, though a tyrannical prince in time of peace,
an incompetent general in war; nay, he would have equalled his
predecessors in that art, had not his degeneracy in other ways
likewise detracted from his merit in this respect. He first began the
war against the Volsci, which was to last two hundred years after his
time, and took Suessa Pometia from them by storm; and when by the sale
of the spoils he had realized forty talents of silver, he conceived
the idea of building a temple to Jupiter on such a magnificent scale
that it should be worthy of the king of gods and men, of the Roman
Empire, and of the dignity of the place itself: for the building of
this temple he set apart the money realized by the sale of the spoils.
Soon after a war claimed his attention, which proved more protracted
than he had expected, in which, having in vain attempted to storm
Gabii,[48] a city in the neighbourhood, when, after suffering a
repulse from the walls, he was deprived also of all hope of taking it
by siege, he assailed it by fraud and stratagem, a method by no means
natural to the Romans. For when, as if the war had been abandoned,
he pretended to be busily engaged in laying the foundations of the
temple, and with other works in the city, Sextus, the youngest of his
three