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Regarding the Pomptine land the matter was pressed by Lucius Sicinius, plebeian tribune, on the people, who now attended in greater numbers, and more readily aroused to the desire of land than they had been.
Apprehending a famine for the agriculturists, they sent into Etruria, and the Pomptine district, and to Cumæ, and at last to Sicily also to procure corn. No mention was made of electing consuls. Military tribunes with consular authority were appointed, all patricians, Lucius Pinarius Mamercinus, Lucius Furius Medullinus, Spurius Postumius Albus.
An instance of this may be found in the Gallic marshes surrounding Altino, Ravenna, Aquileia, and other towns in places of the kind, close by marshes. They are marvellously healthy, for the reasons which I have given. But marshes that are stagnant and have no outlets either by rivers or ditches, like the Pomptine marshes, merely putrefy as they stand, emitting heavy, unhealthy vapours.
The port of Ostia was bad, and in reality little better than a mere roadstead, so that great ships could not come up the river. Accordingly it is said that Cæsar intended to dig a canal for sea-ships, from the Tiber, above or below Rome, through the Pomptine marshes as far as Terracina. He further contemplated to cut through the Isthmus of Corinth.
After the fall of Veii and the conquest of the Pomptine territory, Rome evidently felt herself powerful enough to tighten the reins of her hegemony and to reduce the whole of the Latin cities to a position so dependent that they became in fact completely subject.
For many weeks he lived alone at Astura, on the edge of the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all friends, forbidding even his young wife and her mother to come near him; brooding, as it would seem, on the survival of the godlike element in his daughter.
A sketch of the physical character of this district, and of the various attempts to drain it, is also given in the 'Penny Cyclopædia, art. Pomptine Marshes. The present Ostia is somewhat farther inland, and was built in the ninth century by Pope Gregory the Fourth. There are extensive remains of the old town, but they are in a very decayed condition.
After the death of his daughter in 45 he seems to have sold this house to Lepidus, and, unable to stay at Tusculum, where she died, he bought a small villa on a little islet called Astura, on the very edge of the Pomptine marshes, and in that melancholy and unwholesome neighbourhood he passed whole days in the woods giving way to his grief.
The open breach between the Latins and Hernici on the one hand and the Romans on the other was more immediately occasioned partly by the capture of Rome by the Celts and the momentary weakness which it produced, partly by the definitive occupation and distribution of the Pomptine territory. The former allies soon stood opposed in the field.
The old burgess-domain had hitherto been enlarged chiefly by individual assignation in such a way that southern Etruria as far as towards Caere and Falerii, the districts taken from the Hernici on the Sacco and on the Anio the largest part of the Sabine country and large tracts of the territory formerly Volscian, especially the Pomptine plain were converted into land for Roman farmers, and new burgess-districts were instituted mostly for their inhabitants.
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