City of God 3.16–3.24

Chapter 16. On the first consuls among the Romans, of whom one drove the other from the country, and soon himself, after most atrocious murders of his kin, perished wounded by a wounded enemy.

To this time let us add also the time during which, Sallust says, “things were conducted with fair and moderate justice, while the fear of Tarquin and the heavy war with Etruria lasted.” For as long as the Etruscans helped Tarquin in his attempt to return to the kingship, Rome was shaken by a heavy war. That is why he says the state was run with fair and moderate justice under the pressure of fear, not at the persuasion of justice. In this very short time, how deadly was that year in which the first consuls were created after the royal power was expelled! For they did not complete their year. For Junius Brutus disgraced his colleague Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus and threw him out of the City; then soon he himself fell in battle, exchanging wounds with an enemy, after he had first killed his own sons and his wife's brothers, because he had learned that they had conspired to restore Tarquin. Virgil, after recording this deed with praise, at once shuddered at it with compassion. For when he had said: “And the father will call his sons, stirring up new wars, to punishment for fair liberty's sake,” he soon cried out and said: “Unhappy man, however later generations regard those deeds.” However posterity regards those deeds, he says, that is, exalts and extols them, the man who killed his sons is unhappy. And as if to console the unhappy man he adds: “Love of country conquers, and boundless desire for praise.” In this Brutus, who both killed his sons and, struck in return by the enemy he struck, Tarquin's son, could not survive him, while Tarquin himself rather survived Brutus, does not the innocence of his colleague Collatinus seem to have been avenged, who, a good citizen, suffered when Tarquin was driven out what the tyrant Tarquin himself suffered? For this same Brutus is said to have been a blood relative of Tarquin; but Collatinus, no doubt, was oppressed by the likeness of his name, because he too was called Tarquinius. Then he should have been forced to change his name, not his country; in short, this word would have been lacking in his name, and he would have been called simply L. Collatinus. But he was not made to lose what he could have lost without any harm, so that he was ordered, first consul as he was, to lose his honor, and, good citizen as he was, to lose his citizenship. Is this too a glory, this detestable iniquity of Junius Brutus, and of no use at all to the state? Did “love of country and boundless desire for praise” conquer for committing this too? When the tyrant Tarquin had already been expelled, Lucretia's husband L. Tarquinius Collatinus was created consul with Brutus. How justly the people looked at the morals in a citizen, not the name! How ungodly was Brutus, who deprived his colleague in that first and new office of both his country and his honor, when he could have deprived him only of his name, if that offended him! These evils were done, these adversities happened, when in that state “things were conducted with fair and moderate justice.” Lucretius too, who had been appointed in place of Brutus, was carried off by disease before the same year ended. So P. Valerius, who had succeeded Collatinus, and M. Horatius, who had been appointed in place of the dead Lucretius, completed that funereal and hellish year, which had five consuls, the year in which the Roman state inaugurated the new honor and power of the consulship itself.

Chapter 17. By what evils the Roman state was troubled after the beginnings of consular rule, while the gods it worshipped did not help.

Then, when fear had lessened a little, not because the wars had ceased but because they pressed with less heavy weight, the time, that is, when things were conducted with fair and moderate justice having ended, there followed what the same Sallust briefly explains: “Then the patricians began to treat the plebs as slaves, to dispose of their lives and backs in the manner of kings, to drive them from their land, and to rule alone, with the rest shut out. Oppressed by these cruelties, and above all by debt, the plebs, since it had to bear both taxes and military service in continual wars, took up arms and occupied the Sacred Mount and the Aventine, and then obtained for itself tribunes of the plebs and other rights. The end of discords and strife on both sides was the second Punic war.” Why, then, should I either endure such delays in writing or impose them on my readers? How wretched that state was for so long a time, through so many years up to the second Punic war, with wars from outside never ceasing to disturb it and within civil discords and seditions, Sallust has briefly indicated. So those victories were not the solid joys of the happy, but the empty consolations of the wretched and the alluring incitements of the restless to undergo one fruitless evil after another. Let not good and wise Romans be angry with us for saying this; though on this matter they need neither be asked nor warned, since it is quite certain that they will not be angry. For we do not say things more serious, or more serious things, than their authors, whom we are far from equaling in style and leisure; yet they themselves labored to learn these authors by heart and compel their sons to labor at it. And those who are angry, how would they bear me if I said what Sallust says? “Very many disturbances, seditions, and finally civil wars arose, while a few powerful men, to whose favor most had yielded, sought domination under the honorable name of the senate or the people; and citizens were called good and bad, not for their merits toward the state, all being equally corrupt; but whoever was richest and strongest in doing wrong was held to be good, because he defended the present state of things.” Further, if those writers of history thought it belonged to honorable freedom not to keep silent about the evils of their own city, which in many places they were compelled to praise loudly, since they had no other, truer city from which its citizens are chosen for eternity, what is fitting for us to do, whose freedom must be the greater the better and surer our hope in God is, when they blame the present evils on our Christ, so that weaker and more ignorant minds may be alienated from that city in which alone one may live forever and happily? Nor do we say more horrible things against their gods than their own authors say again and again, whom they read and extol, since we have taken from them what we would say, and are by no means able to say either such things or all of them. Where, then, were those gods, who are thought worthy of worship for the sake of the slight and deceitful happiness of this world, when the Romans, to whom they sold themselves as worthy of worship by most lying cunning, were troubled by such calamities? Where were they when the consul Valerius was killed while defending the Capitol, which had been set on fire by exiles and slaves, and he himself could more easily help the temple of Jupiter than that crowd of so many deities with their greatest and best king, whose temple he had freed, could help him? Where were they when the city, exhausted by the evils of very frequent seditions, while it was waiting, briefly at peace, for the envoys sent to Athens to borrow laws, was devastated by grievous famine and pestilence? Where were they when the people, again suffering from famine, created the first prefect of the grain supply, and, as that famine grew worse, Spurius Maelius, because he had distributed grain to the hungry multitude, incurred the charge of aiming at the kingship, and at the insistence of that same prefect, through the dictator L. Quintius, a decrepit old man, was killed by Quintus Servilius, master of the horse, with a very great and dangerous uproar in the city? Where were they when a very great pestilence broke out, and the people, long and greatly wearied by useless gods, thought new lectisternia should be offered, which it had never done before? Couches (lecti) were spread in honor of the gods, from which this rite, or rather sacrilege, took its name. Where were they when for ten continuous years, fighting badly, the Roman army suffered frequent and great disasters at Veii, until help came at last through Furius Camillus, whom the ungrateful city later condemned? Where were they when the Gauls took Rome, plundered it, burned it, and filled it with slaughter? Where were they when that notable pestilence caused such immense slaughter, in which that Furius Camillus too died, who had first defended the ungrateful state against the Veians and afterwards avenged it on the Gauls? In this pestilence they brought in the stage plays, another new plague, not on the bodies of the Romans, but, what is much more pernicious, on their morals. Where were they when another grievous pestilence was believed to have arisen from the poisonings of matrons, the morals of many noble women among whom, beyond belief, were found to be more grievous than any pestilence? Or when both consuls, besieged with their army by the Samnites at the Caudine Forks, were forced to make a shameful treaty with them, so that, six hundred Roman knights having been given as hostages, the rest, having lost their arms and been stripped of their other belongings and clothing, were sent under the enemy's yoke in single garments? Or when, while others suffered from a grievous pestilence, many in the army too died struck by lightning? Or when, likewise, in another intolerable pestilence, Rome was compelled to summon Aesculapius from Epidaurus as a physician god and to make use of him, since perhaps the many debaucheries with which Jupiter, king of all, who had long been sitting on the Capitol, had occupied himself in his youth had not allowed him to learn medicine? Or when, as the Lucanians, Bruttians, Samnites, Etruscans, and Senonian Gauls conspired against them at one time, first their envoys were killed by them, and then an army was crushed with its praetor, seven tribunes perishing with him and thirteen thousand soldiers? Or when, after long and grievous seditions at Rome, in which finally the plebs had seceded to the Janiculum in hostile separation, the calamity of this evil was so dire that for this reason, as was usually done in extreme dangers, Hortensius was created dictator, who, having recalled the plebs, died in that same office, which had happened to no dictator before, and which was a graver charge against those gods now that Aesculapius was present? Then indeed so many wars sprang up everywhere that for lack of soldiers those proletarians were enrolled for military service, who had received this name because, unable to serve for poverty, they were free for producing offspring (proles). Pyrrhus too, king of Greece, then celebrated with immense glory, summoned by the Tarentines, became an enemy of the Romans. When he consulted Apollo about the future outcome of events, Apollo quite wittily gave so ambiguous an oracle that, whichever of the two happened, he himself would be thought divine (for he said: “I say that you, Pyrrhus, the Romans can conquer”); and so, whether Pyrrhus was conquered by the Romans or the Romans by Pyrrhus, the soothsayer could await either outcome without worry. What a horrible slaughter of both armies then! In which Pyrrhus emerged superior, so that he could now proclaim Apollo divine by his own interpretation, had not the Romans come off superior in another battle soon after. And amid such slaughter of wars a grievous pestilence also arose among women. For pregnant women were dying before they could bring their offspring to term. Here, I suppose, Aesculapius excused himself on the ground that he professed to be a chief physician, not a midwife. Cattle too were dying in the same way, so that it was believed that the race of animals would fail. What of that memorable winter, raging with such incredible severity that snow of horrible depth remained even in the forum for forty days and the Tiber too was frozen hard? If it had happened in our times, what things, and how great, these people would have said! What of that likewise immense pestilence, how many it killed while it raged! When it stretched into another year much more severely, Aesculapius being present in vain, recourse was had to the Sibylline books. In this kind of oracle, as Cicero recalls in his books On Divination, belief is usually given rather to the interpreters as they conjecture doubtful meanings as they can or will. Then, therefore, it was said that the cause of the pestilence was that many were holding a great many temples privately occupied; so for the time being Aesculapius was freed from the great charge of ignorance or laziness. But why had those temples been occupied by many with no one forbidding it, unless because supplication had long been made in vain to such a crowd of deities, and so the places were gradually deserted by worshippers, so that, as if empty, they could be claimed at least for human uses without offending anyone? For if, having been carefully recovered and restored at that time as if to allay the pestilence, they had not afterwards been neglected and usurped in the same way and lain hidden, it would certainly not be attributed to Varro's great learning that, writing about temples, he recalls so many that were unknown. But for the time being an elegant excuse, not for the pestilence, but for the gods, was procured.

Chapter 18. What great disasters wore down the Romans in the Punic wars, while the protection of the gods was sought in vain.

Then in the Punic wars, when victory hung long doubtful and uncertain between the two empires, and two very powerful peoples drove their strongest and richest attacks against each other, how many smaller kingdoms were crushed! What great and famous cities were destroyed, how many states afflicted, how many ruined! How far and wide so many regions and lands were laid waste! How often the conquered on this side and that were conquerors! How many human lives were consumed, whether of soldiers fighting or of peoples not under arms! What a great force of ships was crushed even in sea battles and sunk by the variety of different storms! If we tried to recount or recall these things, we too would be nothing but writers of history. Then the Roman state, thrown into confusion by great fear, ran to empty and ridiculous remedies. By the authority of the Sibylline books the Secular Games were revived, whose celebration had been established once every hundred years, and which in happier times had lapsed through forgetful neglect. The pontiffs also renewed the sacred games for the gods of the underworld, which likewise had been abolished in the better years before. No wonder, then, that when they were renewed, the underworld, enriched by such an abundance of the dying, delighted even to play; since surely wretched men, by those raging wars and bloody hatreds and deadly victories on both sides, were putting on great games for the demons and rich banquets for the underworld. Nothing more pitiable happened in the first Punic war than that the Romans were so defeated that even that Regulus was captured whom we mentioned in the first and second books, a truly great man, previously victor and conqueror of the Carthaginians, who would even have finished the first Punic war itself had he not, from excessive greed for praise and glory, imposed harsher conditions on the exhausted Carthaginians than they could bear. If that man's most unexpected captivity and most unworthy slavery, his most faithful oath and most cruel death, do not force those gods to blush, it is true that they are made of bronze and have no blood. Nor were most grievous evils lacking within the walls at that time. For the river Tiber overflowed far beyond its custom, and almost all the low parts of the city were overthrown, some struck by the force of what was like a torrent, others soaked as by a long-standing pool and collapsing. Then a more destructive fire followed that plague, which, seizing all the higher buildings around the forum, did not spare even the temple of Vesta, its own most intimate place, where virgins, not so much honored as condemned, were accustomed to give it a kind of perpetual life by most careful replacement of wood. Then indeed the fire there was not only living but raging. When the virgins, terrified by its onslaught, could not rescue from that burning those fateful sacred objects which had already crushed three cities in which they had been, the pontiff Metellus, in a way forgetful of his own safety, rushed in and snatched them out, half burned. For the fire did not recognize even him, nor was there any divinity there which would not also have fled, if it had been there. So a man could be of more use to the sacred objects of Vesta than they to a man. And if they could not keep the fire away from themselves, what could they do to help the city, whose safety they were thought to protect, against those waters and flames? As the event itself plainly showed that they could do nothing at all. We would by no means bring these things against them if they said that those sacred objects were instituted not to protect these temporal goods but to signify eternal ones, and that therefore, when it happened that they perished, being bodily and visible, nothing was lessened of the things for which they had been instituted, and they could be restored again for the same uses. But as it is, with astonishing blindness they think that by means of sacred objects that could perish it could have been brought about that the earthly safety and temporal happiness of the city could not perish. So when it is shown that, even while those sacred objects remained, destruction of safety or misfortune broke in, they are ashamed to change the opinion they cannot defend.

Chapter 19. On the affliction of the second Punic war, by which the strength of both sides was consumed.

In the second Punic war it would take too long to recount the disasters of two peoples fighting each other so far and wide, so that, as even those admit who set out not so much to narrate Rome's wars as to praise Rome's empire, the one who conquered was more like the conquered. For when Hannibal rose from Spain, crossed the Pyrenees, ran through Gaul, broke through the Alps, and, his strength increased by so long a circuit, laying waste or subduing everything, burst like a torrent into the jaws of Italy, what bloody battles were fought, how often the Romans were beaten! How many towns went over to the enemy, how many were taken and crushed! What dreadful battles, so often glorious for Hannibal by Roman disaster! And what shall I say of the astonishingly horrible disaster of Cannae, where Hannibal, most cruel as he was, is said to have ordered his men to spare the enemy, sated by so great a slaughter of his most bitter enemies? From there he sent three pecks of gold rings to Carthage, so that they would understand that so much Roman rank had fallen in that battle that it could be grasped more easily by measure than by number, and that from this the slaughter of the rest of the crowd, the more numerous for being the lower, which lay without rings, was to be guessed rather than reported. Then such a shortage of soldiers followed that the Romans collected men accused of crimes by offering them impunity, gave slaves their freedom, and with them did not so much replenish as create a shameful army. So these slaves, or rather, not to do them wrong, these freedmen now, who were to fight for the Roman state, lacked arms. They were taken from the temples, as if the Romans were saying to their gods: Put down what you have held so long in vain, so that perhaps our slaves may be able to do something useful with what our deities could not. Then too, when the treasury was insufficient to pay the soldiers, private wealth came into public use, each contributing what he had to such an extent that, apart from single rings and single amulets, pitiful badges of rank, the senate itself, and how much more the other orders and tribes, kept no gold for themselves. Who would bear these people if they were forced to such poverty in our times, when we scarcely bear them now, when more is given to actors for superfluous pleasure than was then contributed to the legions for their ultimate safety?

Chapter 20. On the destruction of the Saguntines, to whom the Roman gods brought no help when they perished for their friendship with the Romans.

But among all these evils of the second Punic war, nothing was more pitiable and more worthy of pitiful complaint than the destruction of the Saguntines. For this city of Spain, a very close friend of the Roman people, was overthrown while keeping faith with that same people. For it was here that Hannibal, breaking the treaty with the Romans, sought pretexts to provoke them to war. So he besieged Saguntum fiercely. When this was heard at Rome, envoys were sent to Hannibal to tell him to withdraw from the siege. Despised, they went on to Carthage, lodged a complaint about the broken treaty, and returned to Rome without accomplishing anything. While these delays were going on, that wretched and very wealthy city, most dear to its own state and to Rome's, was destroyed by the Carthaginians in the eighth or ninth month. To read of its end, how much more to write of it, is horrifying. Yet I will recall it briefly; for it is very relevant to the matter in hand. First it wasted away from hunger; for it is said that some even fed on the corpses of their own people. Then, exhausted in everything, so as not at least to come into Hannibal's hands as captives, it publicly built a huge pyre, and when it was burning they threw themselves and their families into it, all of them having also been slaughtered with the sword. Here those gluttonous and worthless gods, gaping after the fat of sacrifices and deceiving with the fog of false divinations, should have done something; here they should have done something, helped the city most friendly to the Roman people, not allowed it to perish for keeping faith. They themselves certainly presided as mediators when it was joined to the Roman state by the treaty made between them. So, while it kept what it had joined by agreement with those gods presiding, bound by faith, and sealed by oath, it was besieged, crushed, and consumed by a faithless man. If these gods afterwards terrified Hannibal with storm and lightning when he was near the walls of Rome and drove him far off, then was the time to do something of the kind for the first time. For I dare say it would have been more honorable for them to rage with a storm for the friends of the Romans, who were in danger precisely so as not to break faith with the Romans and who then had no help, than for the Romans themselves, who were fighting for themselves and were well supplied against Hannibal. If, then, they were guardians of Roman happiness and glory, they would have turned away from it so grave a charge as the calamity of Saguntum; but as it is, how foolishly it is believed that Rome did not perish when Hannibal was victorious because those gods defended it, when they could not help the city of Saguntum so that it would not perish for its friendship with Rome! If the people of Saguntum had been Christian and had suffered anything of this kind for the faith of the gospel (although it would not have destroyed itself with sword or fire), yet if it had suffered destruction for the faith of the gospel, it would have suffered it in the hope with which it had believed in Christ, not for a reward of the briefest time, but of unending eternity. But on behalf of these gods, who are said to be worshipped and are demanded to be worshipped precisely so that the happiness of these fleeting and passing things may be secure, what will their defenders and excusers answer us about the perishing Saguntines, except what they answered about the death of that Regulus? The difference is only that he was one man, this was a whole city; yet the cause of the death of both was the keeping of faith. For because of this he chose to return to the enemy, and it refused to go over to them. Does faith kept, then, provoke the anger of the gods? Or can not only individual men but whole cities perish even while the gods are favorable? Let them choose which they like. For if those gods are angry at faith kept, let them look for faithless people to worship them; but if, even while they are favorable, men and cities can perish afflicted by many grievous torments, they are worshipped for no fruit of this happiness. So let those stop being angry who think they have been made unhappy because the rites of their gods have been lost. For with those rites not only remaining but even favoring them, they could have not merely murmured about misery, as now, but, like Regulus and the Saguntines then, been horribly tortured and perished utterly.

Chapter 21. How ungrateful the Roman state was to Scipio, its deliverer, and in what morals it lived when Sallust describes it as at its best.

Further, between the second and the last Carthaginian war, when, as Sallust said, the Romans lived with the best morals and the greatest concord (for I pass over many things, mindful of the limits of the work I have undertaken), in that very time, then, of the best morals and greatest concord, that Scipio, the deliverer of Rome and Italy and the famous and wonderful finisher of that second Punic war, so horrible, so destructive, so dangerous, the conqueror of Hannibal and tamer of Carthage, whose life from his youth is described as devoted to the gods and nourished in the temples, gave way to the accusations of his enemies, and, deprived of the country which he had made safe and free by his courage, spent and ended the rest of his life in the town of Liternum, after his famous triumph, gripped by no longing for that city, so that he is said to have ordered that not even his funeral should be held in his ungrateful country when he died. Then for the first time, through the proconsul Gnaeus Manlius, triumphing over the Galatians, Asiatic luxury crept into Rome, worse than any enemy. For then for the first time, it is said, bronze couches and costly coverlets were seen; then women lute-players were brought into banquets, and other licentious wickedness. But I have set out to speak now of the evils which men suffer unwillingly, not of those which they do gladly. Hence what I recalled about Scipio, that he died outside the country he freed, yielding to his enemies, is more relevant to the present argument, since the Roman deities, from whose temples he turned Hannibal away, did not repay him, though they are worshipped only for this happiness. But because Sallust said that morals were at their best at that time, I thought I should recall this about Asiatic luxury, so that it may be understood that this too was said by Sallust in comparison with other times, in which morals were certainly worse, amid most grievous discords. For then, that is, between the second and the last Carthaginian war, the Voconian law was also passed, that no one should make a woman his heir, not even an only daughter. I do not know what could be said or thought more unjust than that law. Yet throughout that interval between the two Punic wars the unhappiness was more tolerable. The army was worn down by wars only abroad, but consoled by victories; at home no discords raged, as at other times. But in the last Punic war, at one stroke of the other Scipio, who for this reason also himself received the surname Africanus, Rome's rival for empire was destroyed root and branch; and then the Roman state was crushed by such heaps of evils that, through the prosperity and security of things from which, morals being excessively corrupted, those evils were piled up, Carthage is shown to have done more harm by being overthrown so quickly than it had done before by being an adversary so long. Throughout this whole time up to Caesar Augustus, who seems to have wrested from the Romans in every way a liberty no longer glorious even in their own opinion, but contentious, destructive, and plainly now enervated and feeble, and to have recalled everything to royal decision, and as it were to have restored and renewed the state, collapsed with diseased old age; throughout this whole time, then, I pass over the disasters of war again and again from one cause after another, and the treaty of Numantia, stained with horrible disgrace; for the chickens had flown out of their cage and, they say, had given the consul Mancinus a bad omen; as if, through so many years in which that little city, besieged, had afflicted the Roman army and had already begun to be a terror to the Roman state itself, others had marched against it under a different omen.

Chapter 22. On the edict of Mithridates, by which he ordered all Roman citizens found in Asia to be killed.

But these things, I say, I pass over; though I would by no means keep silent about the fact that Mithridates, king of Asia, ordered all Roman citizens traveling anywhere in Asia, and an innumerable number engaged in their business, to be killed on one day; and it was done. How pitiable was the sight, that each person, wherever he was found, in the field, on the road, in the town, at home, in the village, in the forum, in the temple, in bed, at a banquet, was suddenly and ungodlily slaughtered! What groans of the dying, what tears of the onlookers, perhaps even of the killers! How hard the necessity for hosts not only of seeing those wicked murders in their own homes but also of committing them, their faces suddenly changed from that gentle kindness of humanity to carry out a hostile business in peacetime, with wounds, I would say, on both sides, since the one struck was wounded in body and the striker in mind! Had all these too despised the auguries? Did they not have gods, both household and public, to consult when they set out from their homes on that journey from which there was no return? If so, these people have no reason to complain about our times in this matter; the Romans despised these vain things long ago. But if they did consult them, let it be answered what use these consultations were, when they were still permitted, at least by human laws, with no one forbidding them.

Chapter 23. On the internal evils by which the Roman state was troubled, preceded by a portent: the madness of all the animals that serve men.

But now let us recall briefly, as far as we can, those evils which were the more wretched the more internal they were: civil, or rather uncivil, discords; no longer seditions, but actual wars within the city, where so much blood was shed, where the zeal of the parties raged no longer by disagreements in assemblies and various shouts against each other, but plainly by sword and arms. The Social wars, the Servile wars, the Civil wars, how much Roman blood they shed, what devastation and depopulation of Italy they caused! For before allied Latium rose against Rome, all the animals subject to human use, dogs, horses, asses, oxen, and whatever other beasts were under men's control, suddenly became wild, forgot their domestic gentleness, left their shelters, roamed free, and shunned all approach not only of others but even of their masters, not without death or danger to anyone who dared press on them from close by. Of how great an evil was this a sign, if it was a sign; how great an evil it was, even if it was not a sign! If this had happened in our times, we would have to endure these people more rabid than their animals were then.

Chapter 24. On the civil discord which the seditions of the Gracchi stirred up.

The beginning of the civil evils was the seditions of the Gracchi, stirred up by the agrarian laws. For they wanted to divide among the people the lands which the nobility wrongly possessed. But to dare to uproot an iniquity already old was most dangerous, or rather, as the event itself taught, most destructive. What deaths there were when the elder Gracchus was killed! What deaths too when his other brother was killed not long after! For nobles and commoners were killed not by laws and the order of authorities, but by mobs and clashes of arms. After the killing of the second Gracchus, the consul L. Opimius, who had taken up arms against him within the City and, having crushed and killed him with his associates, had made a huge slaughter of citizens, when he held an inquiry, pursuing the rest now by judicial investigation, is said to have put three thousand men to death. From this it can be understood how great a multitude of deaths the turbulent clash of arms could have produced, when the supposedly examined procedure of the courts produced so many. The killer of Gracchus himself sold his head to the consul for its weight in gold; for this bargain had preceded the killing. In this the ex-consul M. Fulvius was also killed with his children.