Another of the same family was named Celer (the Swift), because of the wonderful quickness with which he provided a show of gladiators on the occasion of his father’s funeral.  Some even to the present day derive their names from the circumstances of their birth, as for instance a child is named Proculus if his father be abroad when he is born, and Postumus if he be dead.  If one of twins survive, he is named Vopiscus.  Of names taken from bodily peculiarities they use not only Sulla (the Pimply), Niger (the Swarthy), Rufus (the Red-haired), but even such as Caecus (the Blind), and Claudus (the Lame), wisely endeavouring to accustom men to consider neither blindness nor any other bodily defect to be any disgrace or matter of reproach, but to answer to these names as if they were their own.  However, this belongs to a different branch of study.

XII.  When the war was over, the popular orators renewed the party-quarrels, not that they had any new cause of complaint or any just grievance to proceed upon; but the evil result which had necessarily been produced by their former riotous contests were now made the ground of attacks on the patricians.  A great part of the country was left unsown and untilled, while the war gave no opportunities for importation from other countries.  The demagogues, therefore, seeing that there was no corn in the market, and that even if there had been any, the people were not able to buy it, spread malicious accusations against the rich, saying that they had purposely produced this famine in order to pay off an old grudge against the people.  At this juncture ambassadors arrived from the town of Velitrae, who delivered up their city to the Romans, desiring that they would send some new inhabitants to people it, as a pestilence had made such havoc among the citizens that there was scarcely a tenth part of them remaining alive.

The wiser Romans thought that this demand of the people of Velitrae would confer a most seasonable relief on themselves, and would put an end to their domestic troubles, if they could only transfer the more violent partizans of the popular party thither, and so purge the State of its more disorderly elements.  The consuls accordingly chose out all these men and sent them to colonize Velitrae, and enrolled the rest for a campaign against the Volsci, that they might not have leisure for revolutionary plottings, but that when they were all gathered together, rich and poor, patrician and plebeian alike, to share in the common dangers of a camp, they might learn to regard one another with less hatred and illwill.

XIII.  But Sicinnius and Brutus, the tribunes of the people, now interposed, crying aloud that the consuls were veiling a most barbarous action under the specious name of sending out colonists.  They were despatching many poor men to certain destruction by transporting them to a city whose air was full of pestilence and the stench from unburied corpses, where they were to dwell under the auspices of a god