Mamilius,--evidently a device to account for Rome’s being beleaguered and suffering from famine. Of the hostility of the Latins there is no question at all until their grand war. In fact the Etruscans had not occupied the Janiculum only; that the famine was raging, is acknowledged by the Romans. In this distress, the poem makes Mucius Scævola undertake to kill the king; but he stabbed instead of him his secretary, as the latter was clothed in purple, a mistake which indeed is inconceivable in real history, and only pardonable in poetry. He then tells him that three hundred patrician youths (one of each gens) were like himself resolved to slay him; whereupon Porsena concludes peace, keeping the seven Veientine _pagi_, and leaving a garrison on the Janiculum. If we enquire into the details, whether a Mucius Scævola had existed at all, we come to the question which Beaufort before now has correctly stated; for on the whole this war of Porsena and the time of Camillus are beautifully handled by him, and they seem to have been the chief occasion, as well as the pith and substance, of his work. How is it that Mucius is called in Livy and Dionysius a patrician, or _juvenis nobilis_, when on the contrary the Scævolæ were plebeians? Probably the family of the Mucii Scævolæ appropriated to themselves this Mucius: in the old poems he was certainly called Caius. As late as in the seventh century two names are mentioned, and afterwards Scævola (the left-handed one); whereas the family of the Scævolæ had got this cognomen from quite a different circumstance. Scævola in the latter instance means an amulet. It is impossible to make out how much or how little is true concerning the existence of the old Scævola. The story as we have it is evidently poetical.