to expect consulships and triumphs, all rewards, all honours from them.  As they passed the Capitol and the citadel, and the other sacred edifices, they offered up prayers to all the gods that presented themselves to their sight, or to their mind, that they would send forward that band with prosperity and success, and soon send them back safe into their country to their parents.  In vain were these prayers uttered.  Having set out on their luckless road by the right-hand arch of the Carmental gate,[61] they arrived at the river Cremera:[62] this appeared a favourable situation for fortifying an outpost.

Lucius Aemilius and Gaius Servilius were then created consuls.  And as long as there was nothing else to occupy them but mutual devastations, the Fabii were not only able to protect their garrison, but through the entire tract, where the Tuscan territory adjoins the Roman, they protected all their own districts and ravaged those of the enemy, spreading their forces along both frontiers.  There was afterward a cessation, though not for long, of these depredations:  while both the Veientines, having sent for an army from Etruria,[63] assaulted the outpost at the Cremera, and the Roman troops, brought up by the consul Lucius Aemilius, came to a close engagement in the field with the Etruscans; the Veientines, however, had scarcely time to draw up their line:  for, during the first alarm, while they were entering the lines behind their colours, and they were stationing their reserves, a brigade of Roman cavalry, charging them suddenly in flank, deprived them of all opportunity not only of opening the fight, but even of standing their ground.  Thus being driven back to the Red Rocks [64]. (where they had pitched their camp), as suppliants they sued for peace; and, after it was granted, owing to the natural inconsistency of their minds, they regretted it even before the Roman garrison was withdrawn from the Cremera.

Again the Veientine state had to contend with the Fabii without any additional military armament:  and not merely did they make raids into each other’s territories, or sudden attacks upon those carrying on the raids, but they fought repeatedly on level ground, and in pitched battles:  and one family of the Roman people oftentimes gained the victory over an entire Etruscan state, and a most powerful one for those times.  This at first appeared mortifying and humiliating to the Veientines:  then they conceived the design, suggested by the state of affairs, of surprising their daring enemy by an ambuscade; they were even glad that the confidence of the Fabii was increasing owing to their great success.  Wherefore cattle were frequently driven in the path of the plundering parties, as if they had fallen in their way by accident, and tracts of land left abandoned by the flight of the peasants:  and reserve bodies of armed men, sent to prevent the devastations, retreated more frequently in pretended than in real alarm.  By this time