nated the dictator while every thing was still;[172] nor
had the said consul in any of his letters, either public or private,
made any mention of such a thing to any one; nor did any person whatever
come forward who said that he saw or heard any thing which could vitiate
the auspices. Neither could the augurs sitting at Rome divine what
inauspicious circumstance had occurred to the consul in the camp. Who
did not plainly perceive, that the dictator's being a plebeian, was the
defect which the augurs had discovered?" These and other arguments were
urged in vain by the tribunes: the affair however ended in an
interregnum. At last, after the elections had been adjourned repeatedly
on one pretext or another, the fourteenth interrex, Lucius AEmilius,
elected consuls Caius Paetelius, and Lucius Papirius Mugillanus, or
Cursor, as I find him named in some annals.

[Footnote 172: Any noise happening during the taking of the auspices was
reckoned inauspicious; hence _silentium_ signified among the augurs,
every circumstance being favourable.]

24. It has been recorded, that in this year Alexandria in Egypt was
founded; and that Alexander, king of Epirus, being slain by a Lucanian
exile, verified in the circumstances of his death the prediction of
Jupiter of Dodona. At the time when he was invited into Italy by the
Tarentines, a caution had been given him, "to beware of the Acherusian
waters and the city Pandosia, for there were fixed the limits of his
destiny." For that reason he made the greater haste to pass over to
Italy, in order to be at as great a distance as possible from the city
Pandosia in Epirus, and the river Acheron, which, after flowing through
Molossis, runs into the lakes called Infernal, and is received into the
Thesprotian gulf. But, (as it frequently happens, that men, by
endeavouring to shun their fate, run directly upon it,) after having
often defeated the armies of Bruttium and Lucania, and taken Heraclea, a
colony of the Tarentines, Consentia and Metapontum from the Lucanians,
Terina from the Bruttians, and several other cities of the Messapians
and Lucanians; and having sent into Epirus three hundred illustrious
families, whom he intended to keep as hostages, he posted his troops on
three hills, which stood at a small distance from each other, not far
from the city Pandosia, and close to the frontiers of the Bruttians and
Lucanians, in order that he might thence make incursions into every part
of the enem