principal gate on the right, he suddenly attacks them with the
triarii: and a panic being thus struck into them there was less
slaughter, because they were fewer, but their flight was no less
disorderly than it had been on the field of battle.

20. Matters being managed successfully in every direction, the dictator,
by a decree of the senate and order of the people, returned to the city
in triumph. By far the most remarkable object in the triumph was Cossus,
bearing the _spolia opima_ of the king he had slain. The soldiers
chaunted their uncouth verses on him, extolling him as equal to Romulus.
With the usual form of dedication, he presented, as an offering, the
spoils in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, near the spoils of Romulus,
which, having been the first called _opima_, were the only ones at that
time; and he attracted the eyes of all the citizens from the dictator's
chariot to himself, and enjoyed almost solely the honour of that day's
solemnity. The dictator offered up to Jupiter in the Capitol a golden
crown a pound in weight, at the public expense, by order of the people.
Following all the Roman writers, I have represented Aulus Cornelius
Cossus as a military tribune, when he carried the second _spolia opima_
to the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. But besides that those spoils are
rightly considered _opima_, which one general has taken from another;
and we know no general but the person under whose auspices the war is
conducted, the inscription itself written on the spoils proves, against
both me and them, that Cossus was consul when he took them. Having once
heard Augustus Caesar, the founder or restorer of all our temples, on
entering the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, which being dilapidated by
time he rebuilt, aver that he himself had read the said inscription on
the linen breastplate, I thought it would be next to sacrilege to rob
Cossus of such a testimony respecting his spoils as that of Caesar, the
renovator of the temple itself. Whether the mistake is chargeable on the
very ancient annals and the linen books of the magistrates, deposited in
the temple of Moneta, and which Licinius Macer occasionally cites as
authorities, which have Aulus Cornelius Cossus consul with Titus
Quintius Pennus, in the ninth year after this, every person may form his
own opinion. For there is this additional proof, that a battle so
celebrated could not be transferred to that year; that the three years
before and after the consuls