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Obliged to be content with this, the friends of Virginia conducted her home, and Icilius sent messengers in all haste to the camp, to bid Virginius come without an hour's delay to Rome. Surety was given that the maiden should appear before Appius the next day. It was fortunate that the army in which Virginius was a centurion had been obliged to retreat, and then lay not many miles from Rome.
Wherefore call together all the lictors even of your colleagues; order the rods and axes to be had in readiness; the betrothed wife of Icilius shall not remain without her father's house.
For this my own lictors shall suffice." So much time being thus gained, it seemed good to the friends of the maiden that the son of Numitorius and the brother of Icilius, young men both of them and active, should hasten with all speed to the camp, and bring Virginius thence as quickly as might be.
I could not avoid meeting him, and besides, I was glad enough to see him again, especially in such a place. His majesty came up with his friend Icilius, examined everything, and saw me, but did not honour me with a word. I was elegantly dressed, and wore my cross set with brilliants.
They then set out with clamorous threats to take possession of the Aventine. The home that Icilius had won for the Plebs was to be the scene of another struggle for freedom. It was in later times pretended that Fulvius had taken the step, from which even Catilina shrank, of calling the slaves to arms on a promise of freedom.
A revolution was fermenting in men's minds; and its outbreak was hastened by the unjust sentence pronounced by Appius in the process as to the freedom of the daughter of the centurion Lucius Verginius, the bride of the former tribune of the people Lucius Icilius a sentence which wrested the maiden from her relatives with a view to make her non-free and beyond the pale of the law, and induced her father himself to plunge his knife into the heart of his daughter in the open Forum, to rescue her from certain shame.
Virginius had set out from the camp with Icilius before the messengers of Appius had reached the general with orders to stop him, and he came to the Forum leading his daughter by the hand, weeping, and attended by a great many ladies.
Then said Appius, "I have sure proof, and this not from the violence only of Icilius, but from what is told to me of gatherings by night in the city, that there is a purpose in certain men to stir up sedition. Knowing this I have come hither with armed men; not to trouble quiet citizens, but to punish such as would break the peace of the State.
Appius first ordered Icilius to be summoned before him, then, when he refused to come, to be seized: finally, when the officers were not allowed an opportunity of approaching him, he himself, proceeding through the crowd with a body of young patricians, ordered him to be led away to prison.
Here they held an assembly according to their tribes, in which the pontifex Maximus presided; and they now, for the first time, elected ten tribunes first Virginius, Numitorius, and Icilius, then Duillius and six others: so full were their minds of the wrong done to the daughter of Virginius; so entirely was it the blood of young Virginia that overthrew the decemvirs, even as that of Lucretia had driven out the Tarquins.
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