herefore, having
recalled the consul Valerius, who was opposed to the Volscians, and who
had his camp on the frontiers of Tusculum, ordered him to nominate a
dictator. He nominated Titus Manlius, son of Lucius. He, after he had
appointed Aulus Cornelius Cossus his master of the horse, content with
the consular army, declared war against the Caeritians by order of the
people, with the sanction of the senate.

20. Then for the first time were the Caeritians seized with a real dread
of war, as if there was greater power in the words of the enemy to
indicate war than in their own acts, who had provoked the Romans by
devastation; and they perceived how ill suited the contest was to their
strength. They repented of their depredations, and cursed the
Tarquinians as the instigators of the revolt. Nor did any one think of
preparing arms and hostilities; but each strenuously urged the necessity
of sending ambassadors to sue for pardon for their error. When their
ambassadors applied to the senate, being referred by the senate to the
people, they implored the gods, whose sacred utensils they had received
in the Gallic war and treated with all due ceremony, that the same
compassion for them might influence the Romans now in a flourishing
condition, which had formerly influenced themselves when the state of
the Roman people was distressed; and turning to the temple of Vesta,
they invoked the bonds of hospitality subsisting [between themselves]
and the flamens and vestals entered into by them with holy and religious
zeal: "Would any one believe that persons, who possessed such merits,
had suddenly become enemies without cause? or if they had committed any
act in a hostile manner, that they had, through design rather than under
the influence of error from frenzy, so acted, as to cancel their former
acts of kindness by recent injuries, more especially when conferred on
persons so grateful, and that they would choose to themselves as enemies
the Roman people, now in the most flourishing state and most successful
in war, whose friendship they had cultivated when they were distressed?
That they should not call it design, which should rather be called force
and necessity. That the Tarquinians, passing through their territory
with a hostile army, after they had asked for nothing but a passage,
forced with them some of their peasants, to accompany them in that
depredation, which was charged on them as a crime. That they were
prepared to deliv