should select Veii or Fidenae as
the seat of war. Fidenae appeared the more convenient. Accordingly,
having crossed the Tiber, the Veientians transferred the war thither.
There was great consternation at Rome. The army being recalled from
Veii, and that same army dispirited in consequence of their defeat, the
camp is pitched before the Colline gate, and armed soldiers are posted
along the walls, and a suspension of all civil business is proclaimed in
the forum, and the shops were closed; and every place becomes more like
to a camp than a city.

32. Then the dictator, having sent criers through the streets, and
having summoned the alarmed citizens to an assembly, began to chide them
"that they allowed their minds to depend on such slight impulses of
fortune, that, on the receipt of a trifling loss, which itself was
sustained not by the bravery of the enemy, nor by the cowardice of the
Roman army, but by the disagreement of the generals, they now dreaded
the Veientian enemy, six times vanquished, and Fidenae, which was almost
taken oftener than attacked. That both the Romans and the enemies were
the same as they were for so many ages: that they retained the same
spirits, the same bodily strength, the same arms. That he himself,
Mamercus AEmilius, was also the same dictator, who formerly defeated the
armies of the Veientians and Fidenatians, with the additional support of
the Faliscians, at Nomentum. That his master of the horse, Aulus
Cornelius, would be the same in the field, he who, as military tribune
in a former war, slew Lar Tolumnius, king of the Veientians, in the
sight of both armies, and brought the _spolia opima_ into the temple of
Jupiter Feretrius. Wherefore that they should take up arms, mindful that
with them were triumphs, with them spoils, with them victory; with the
enemy the guilt of murdering the ambassadors contrary to the law of
nations, the massacre of the Fidenatian colonists in time of peace, the
infraction of truces, a seventh unsuccessful revolt. As soon as they
should bring their camp near them, he was fully confident that the joy
of these most impious enemies at the disgrace of the Roman army would
not be of long continuance, and that the Roman people would be convinced
how much better those persons deserved of the republic, who nominated
him dictator for the third time, than those who, in consequence of his
abolishing the despotism of the censorship, would cast a slur on his
second dictatorshi