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Updated: June 17, 2025
They bid the Etrurians now to cast their reproaches; they severally require that the enemy, once so ready with the tongue, should now stand before them armed as they were.
The first recited a decree of the Etrurians, which owned them for kinsmen: "for that Tyrrhenus and Lydus, sons of King Atys, having between them divided their people, because of their multitude, Lydus re-settled in his native country; and it became the lot of Tyrrhenus to find out a fresh residence; and by the names of these chiefs the parted people came afterwards to be called, Lydians in Asia, Tyrrhenians in Italy.
These successes were not only important in themselves to the Roman people, but peculiarly seasonable; for it happened, that at the same time intelligence was brought that the Etrurians were again in arms.
Several councils were then held by the enemy, and their plan of operations was thus settled: that they should not encamp together, nor go out together to battle; the Gauls were united to the Samnites, the Umbrians to the Etrurians. The day of battle was fixed.
The fertile plain of Lombardy was not in those days regarded as belonging to Italy, but was known as Cisalpine Gaul. The south of Italy, as we have seen, was mainly inhabited by Greek colonists, and was called Great Greece. Between these tracts of country the Italian territory was inhabited by three sets of federate tribes the Etrurians, the Samnites, and the Latins.
If the Etrurians possessed the same spirit which formerly Porsena and their ancestors once had, there was nothing to prevent their obliging the Romans, driven from all the lands on this side of the Tiber, to fight for their own existence, and not for the intolerable dominion which they assumed over Italy.
With these words they persuaded King Porsenna, who judging it well for the Etrurians that there should be a king at Rome, and that king an Etrurian by birth, gathered together a great army and came up against Rome. But when men heard of his coming, so mighty a city was Clusium in those days, and so great the fame of King Porsenna, there was such fear as had never been before.
At first the shout that was raised terrified them; then weapons assailed them from every side; and, the Etrurians closing, they also were compelled, hemmed in as they now were by a compact body of soldiers, to contract their own circle within a narrower compass; which circumstance rendered striking both their own paucity of numbers, and the superior numbers of the enemy, the ranks being crowded in a narrow space.
On the right wing of the enemy were the Gauls, and on the left the Samnites, Quintus Fabius being set to fight against these, and Decius Mus against the Gauls. At the first when the battle was begun the strength on either side was so equal that, if only the Etrurians or the men of Umbria had been there, the Romans had doubtless suffered some great loss either in the field or in the camp.
They who regard only the etymology of the word, will have the pomœrium to be a space of ground without the walls; but it is rather a space on each side the wall, which the Etrurians in building cities consecrated by augury, reaching to a certain extent both within and without in the direction they intended to raise the wall; so that the houses might not be joined to it on the inside, as they commonly are now, and also that there might be some space without left free from human occupation.
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