Summary of book IX
TITUS VETURIUS and Spurius Postumius, the consuls,
having led their army into a narrow place at the Caudine
Forks, when there was no hope of escaping, made a
treaty with the Samnites, and having given six hundred
Roman knights as hostages, got their army off, on condition that all should be sent under the yoke. and these
same men having been delivered up to the Samnites,
together with two tribunes of the plebs and all those who
had guaranteed the treaty—on the suggestion of Spurius
Postumius the consul, who had advised the senate that the
pledge of the State should be redeemed by the surrender of
those by whose fault so disgraceful a treaty had been made
—were by them rejected. not long after, the Samnites
were routed by Papirus Cursor and sent beneath the yoke,
and the six hundred Roman knights who had been given
as hostages were recovered, thus wiping out the shame
of the earlier disgrace. two tribes were added, the
Oufentina and the Falerna. colonies were planted at
Suessa and Pontia. Appius Claudius the censor completed
an aqueduct; paved the road which was called the Appian
Way; and admitted the sons of freedmen to the senate,
for which reason, since that order appeared to have been
polluted with unworthy members, the consuls of the
following year kept the senate as it had been before the
last censors. The book also contains successful campaigns
against the Apulians, the Etruscans, the Umbrians, the
Marsi, the Paeligni, the Aequi, and the Samnites, to
whom their treaty was restored. Gnaeus Flavius, a
government clerk and a freedman's son, was elected curule
aedile by the faction of the market—place, which since it
threw into confusion the comitia and the Campus Martius,
which it dominated by its overweening strength, was by
Quintus Fabius the censor divided up into four tribes
[p. 357]
which he called “urban”; and this circumstance procured Fabius his surname of Maximus. in this book the
author mentions Alexander, who lived in those times, and,
after appraising the strength of the Roman people in that
age, gathers that if Alexander had crossed into Italy, he
would not have gained the victory over the Roman People,
as he had done over those races which he subjugated in the
Orient.
[p. 361]
