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Will you do less to save all that makes life dear to an honourable man? Be gone, be gone, I entreat you. 'Whither? 'To Picenum, which is not yet subject to the Goths. There gather your capable men and arm them, and send to the King Totila, offering to serve him where he will, and how he will.
Of the praetors, Fulvius Flaccus was to have the legions which were in Luceria under Aemilius the praetor, Nero Claudius those in Picenum under Caius Terentius, each raising recruits for himself to fill up the number of his troops. To Marcus Junius the city legions of the former year were assigned, to be employed against the Tuscans.
Piso having crossed the sea of Dalmatia, and left his ships at Ancona, took first the road of Picenum and then the Flaminian way, following the legion which was going from Pannonia to Rome, and thence to garrison in Africa.
So completely had the state of affairs changed in Picenum, that the Italians now found themselves confined to Asculum as the Romans were previously to Firmum, and the war was thus once more converted into a siege. Umbro-Etruscan Conflicts Lastly, there was added in the course of the year to the two difficult and straggling wars in southern and central Italy a third in the north.
By a wise and humane regulation, the eight provinces which had been the most deeply injured, Campania, Tuscany, Picenum, Samnium, Apulia, Calabria, Bruttium, and Lucania, obtained an indulgence of five years: the ordinary tribute was reduced to one fifth, and even that fifth was destined to restore and support the useful institution of the public posts.
Crassus took his station on the frontiers of Picenum, with the view of waiting for Spartacus, who was moving in that direction; and he sent Mummius, his legatus, at the head of two legions, to make a circuit, and with orders to follow the enemy, but not to engage with them, nor come to close quarters.
In Flaminia Rimini, which till now had been a part of the same province as Ravenna, was detached and became the capital of a new government in which a part of the Picenum, Ancona, and Osimo were involved.
At the same time, John the Sanguinary, the nephew of Vitalian, was detached with two thousand chosen horse, first to Alba, on the Fucine Lake, and afterwards to the frontiers of Picenum, on the Hadriatic Sea. "In the province," said Belisarius, "the Goths have deposited their families and treasures, without a guard or the suspicion of danger.
Hannibal marched past the fortress of Spoletium, which he attempted in vain to surprise, through Umbria, fearfully devastated the territory of Picenum which was covered all over with Roman farmhouses, and halted on the shores of the Adriatic.
Salutary as was the distribution of the public land, and doubly blameable as was the senate accordingly for omitting to cut off this most dangerous of all weapons of agitation by voluntarily distributing the occupied lands, yet Gaius Flaminius, when he came to the burgesses in 522 with the proposal to distribute the domains of Picenum, undoubtedly injured the commonwealth more by the means than he benefited it by the end.
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