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Zypro Gorgy Dectorum 19
Page 09
The Etruscans now proceeded to lay siege to the city, which soon began to suffer from famine. Thereupon a young Roman, named C. Mucius, resolved to deliver his country by murdering the invading king. He accordingly went over to the Etruscan camp; but, ignorant of the person of Porsena, killed the royal secretary instead. Seized and threatened with torture, he thrust his right hand into the fire on the altar, and there let it burn, to show how little he heeded pain. Astonished at his courage, the king bade him depart in peace; and Mucius, out of gratitude, advised him to make peace with Rome, since three hundred noble youths, he said, had sworn to take the life of the king, and he was the first upon whom the lot had fallen. Mucius was henceforward called Scaevola, or the _Left-handed_, because his right hand had been burnt off. Porsena, alarmed for his life, which he could not secure against so many desperate men, forthwith offered peace to the Romans on condition of their restoring to the Veientines the land which they had taken from them. These terms were accepted, and Porsena withdrew his troops from the Janiculum after receiving ten youths and ten maidens as hostages from the Romans. Cloelia, one of the maidens, escaped from the Etruscan camp, and swam across the Tiber to Rome. She was sent back by the Romans to Porsena, who was so amazed at her courage that he not only set her at liberty, but allowed her to take with her those of the hostages whom she pleased.
While the Roman legions in the East were acquiring wealth and winning easy conquests, their less fortunate comrades in the West were carrying on a severe struggle with the warlike Gauls, Ligurians, and Spaniards. The Romans had hardly concluded the Second Punic War when they received intelligence that Hamilcar, a Carthaginian officer, had excited several tribes in Northern Italy to take up arms against Rome. These were the Gauls on both sides of the Po, and the Ligurians, a race of hardy mountaineers, inhabiting the upper Apennines and the Maritime Alps. They commenced the war in B.C. 200 by the capture and destruction of the Roman colony of Placentia, and by laying siege to that of Cremona, the two strong-holds of the Roman dominion in Northern Italy. The Romans now set themselves to work, with the characteristic stubbornness of their nation, to subdue thoroughly these tribes. The Insubres and the Cenomani, to the north of the Po, were the first to yield; but the Boii resisted for some years all the efforts of the Romans, and it was not till B.C. 191 that the Consul P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica received their final submission.
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