more credible accounts of the annals.  The narrative is full of detailed pictures of battles; of inwoven anecdotes, such as that of the praetor of Setia, who breaks his neck on the steps of the senate-house because he had been audacious enough to solicit the consulship, and the various anecdotes concocted out of the surname of Titus Manlius; and of prolix and in part suspicious archaeological digressions.  In this class we include the history of the legion—­of which the notice, most probably apocryphal, in Liv. i. 52, regarding the maniples of Romans and Latins intermingled formed by the second Tarquin, is evidently a second fragment, the erroneous view given of the treaty between Capua and Rome (see my Rom.  Munzwesen, p. 334, n. 122); the formularies of self-devotion, the Campanian -denarius-, the Laurentine alliance, and the -bina jugera- in the assignation (p. 450, note).  Under such circumstances it appears a fact of great weight that Diodorus, who follows other and often older accounts, knows absolutely nothing of any of these events except the last battle at Trifanum; a battle in fact that ill accords with the rest of the narrative, which, in accordance with the rules of poetical justice, ought to have concluded with the death of Decius.

21.  II.  V. Isolation of the Later Latin Cities as Respected Private Rights

22.  II.  V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League

23.  II.  IV.  South Etruria Roman

CHAPTER VI

Struggle of the Italians against Rome

Wars between the Sabellians and Tarentines—­
Archidamus—­
Alexander the Molossian—­

While the Romans were fighting on the Liris and Volturnus, other conflicts agitated the south-east of the peninsula.  The wealthy merchant-republic of Tarentum, daily exposed to more serious peril from the Lucanian and Messapian bands and justly distrusting its own sword, gained by good words and better coin the help of -condottieri-from the mother-country.  The Spartan king, Archidamus, who with a strong band had come to the assistance of his fellow-Dorians, succumbed to the Lucanians on the same day on which Philip conquered at Chaeronea (416); a retribution, in the belief of the pious Greeks, for the share which nineteen years previously he and his people had taken in pillaging the sanctuary of Delphi.  His place was taken by an abler commander, Alexander the Molossian, brother of Olympias the mother of Alexander the Great.  In addition to the troops which he had brought along with him he united under his banner the contingents of the Greek cities, especially those of the Tarentines and Metapontines; the Poediculi (around Rubi, now Ruvo), who like the Greeks found themselves in danger from the Sabellian nation; and lastly, even the Lucanian exiles themselves, whose considerable numbers point to the existence of violent internal troubles in that confederacy.  Thus he