of Rome, and even laid violent hands upon the Capitol.  As for Sabinus himself, the messenger was to say, he was only a civilian, a mere member of the senate.  While the issue was being decided between Vespasian and Vitellius by the engagement of legions, the capture of towns, the capitulation of cohorts; even when the provinces of Spain, of Germany, of Britain, had risen in revolt; he, though Vespasian’s brother, had still remained faithful to his allegiance, until Vitellius, unasked, began to invite him to a conference.  Peace and union, he was to remind him, serve the interest of the losers, and only the reputation of the winners.  If Vitellius regretted their compact, he ought not to take arms against Sabinus, whom he had treacherously deceived, and against Vespasian’s son, who was still a mere boy.  What was the good of killing one youth and one old man?  He ought rather to march out against the legions and fight for the empire on the field.  The result of the battle would decide all other questions.

Greatly alarmed, Vitellius replied with a few words in which he tried to excuse himself and throw the blame on his soldiers.  ’I am too unassuming,’ he said, ‘to cope with their overpowering impatience.’  He then warned Martialis to make his way out of the house by a secret passage, for fear that the soldiers should kill him as an ambassador of the peace to which they were so hostile.  Vitellius himself was not in a position to issue orders or prohibitions; no longer an emperor, merely an excuse for war.

Martialis had hardly returned to the Capitol when the furious 71 soldiery arrived.  They had no general to lead them:  each was a law to himself.  Their column marched at full speed through the Forum and past the temples overlooking it.  Then in battle order they advanced up the steep hill in front of them, until they reached the lowest gates of the fortress on the Capitol.  In old days there was a series of colonnades at the side of this slope, on the right as you go up.  Emerging on to the roof of these, the besieged overwhelmed the Vitellians with showers of stones and tiles.  The attacking party carried nothing but swords, and it seemed a long business to send for siege-engines and missiles.  So they flung torches into the nearest[188] colonnade and, following in the wake of the flames, would have burst through the burnt gates of the Capitol, if Sabinus had not torn down all the available statues—­the monuments of our ancestors’ glory—­and built a sort of barricade on the very threshold.  They then tried to attack the Capitol by two opposite approaches, one near the ’Grove of Refuge’[189] and the other by the hundred steps which lead up to the Tarpeian Rock.  This double assault came as a surprise.  That by the Refuge was the closer and more vigorous.  Nothing could stop the Vitellians, who climbed up by some contiguous houses built on to the side of the hill, which in the days of prolonged peace had been raised to such a height that their