guilty or not. Dionysius believes him guilty; Dio Cassius holds him to have been innocent; the all-seeing God alone can decide on it. What he did was done with the clearest right; yet the same act may have sprung from the best or from the most perverse intentions, and he may either have wished to further the welfare of the state, or he may have aspired to the royal dignity. To suspect such a design twenty-five years after the expulsion of the kings, was by no means so absurd as when, seventy years later, Sp. Mælius was charged with it. Cassius was no common man, otherwise he would not in those times have been thrice consul, which was then a thing quite unheard of: no one besides had been invested so often with that dignity but P. Valerius Poplicola, and with regard to him also the Fasti are very indistinct. The manner in which Cassius concluded his leagues betokens a great soul. It is therefore quite possible that he entertained the purest intentions of wisdom and justice; for Rome’s position in consequence of the spread of the Volscians was not free from danger, and it was necessary to keep together, and to concentrate all her forces. Guilty or innocent, a great man he was, and detestable the faction which condemned him. With him his clan disappears from among the patricians. Very strange is what Dionysius says about his having had children, and that a question thereupon had risen of executing them also; but that they were spared, and ever since the children of criminals likewise. This looks like a quotation from the law books relative to the establishment of a new juridical institution; yet it may be something quite different. We shall afterwards find a son of Sp. Cassius, and in a place where we should certainly have least expected to have met with him. In all likelihood, the stern judge, L. Cassius Longinus, 640, as also the murderer of Julius Cæsar, are sprung from his stock: it is no wonder that this family went over to the _Plebes_. The condemnation of Sp. Cassius by a Fabius lays the foundation of that greatness of the Fabian house, of which no other instance is to be discovered in the Roman Fasti. During seven years (269-275), we always find a Fabius consul; as in the beginning of the republic the Valerii were for five years. The conclusion therefore is quite natural, that the Fabii were at that time in possession of a rightful claim, and that the second tribe, that of the Tities, was represented by them.