being elected consuls, enter on their office on the calends of August,
which was then considered as the commencement of the year.[109] This was
a distressing time, and it so happened that the season was pestilential
to the city and country, and not more to men than to cattle; and they
increased the malignity of the distemper, by admitting[110] the cattle
and the peasants into the city through dread of devastation. This
collection of animals of every kind mixed together, distressed both the
citizens by the unusual stench, and the peasants crowded together into
their close apartments, with heat, want of sleep, and their attendance
on each other, and contact itself propagated the disease. Whilst with
difficulty sustaining these calamities, ambassadors from the Hernicians
suddenly bring word that the AEquans and Volscians, having united their
forces, had pitched their camp in their territory, that from thence they
were depopulating their frontiers with an immense army. Besides that the
thinness of the senate was a proof to the allies that the state was
prostrated by the pestilence, they further received this melancholy
answer: "That the Hernicians, with the Latins, must now defend their
possessions by their own exertions. That the Roman city, through the
sudden anger of the gods, was now depopulated by disease. If any respite
from that calamity should come, that they would afford aid to their
allies, as they had done the year before, and always on other
occasions." The allies departed, carrying home, instead of the
melancholy news (they had brought), news still more melancholy, as being
persons who were now obliged to sustain by their own means a war, which
they had sustained with difficulty when backed by the power of Rome. The
enemy did not confine themselves any longer to the Hernician territory.
They proceed thence with determined hostility into the Roman
territories, which were already devastated without the injuries of war.
Where, when there was no one to meet them, not even an unarmed person,
and they passed through every place destitute not only of troops, but
even of the cultivation of the husbandman, they reached as far as the
third stone on the Gabinian road. AEbutius, the Roman consul, was dead;
his colleague, Servilius, was dragging out life with slender hope of
recovery; most of the leading men, the chief part of the patricians, all
of the military age, were lying sick, so that strength was wanting not
only fo