The Æquians, who at that time must have been a great people (Cicero also calls them _gens magna_), seem until then to have taken little share in the war: yet by the loss of Antium, not only the Volscians of Ecetræ were roused to vigorous exertions, but also the Æquians. Over the disasters of the Romans which followed, a veil has been drawn. The enemy appear to have advanced to the confines of the Roman borders; in another place, we find the Volscians in the neighbourhood of Velitræ; and now they are every year on the Algidus, and get possession of the Arx of Tusculum, which is only with difficulty wrested from them. Several Latin towns utterly disappear: Corioli is destroyed; Lavici becomes an Æquian town; Gabii was as late as in Dionysius’ times devastated within its walls; Præneste is no more spoken of, and, when after a hundred years it is mentioned again, it is hostile to Rome; the nearest places only, as Tusculum and Lavinium, remain with the Romans; Rome’s boundary is on the other side of the hills of Tusculum, Circeii, Velitræ, Norba, and other places farther to the east, are lost. Thus it is certain that more than half of Latium is conquered; by the Æquians, from the Anio, and by the Volscians, from the sea shore. We find some sort of allusion to this in the story of Coriolanus; for the Romans tried to console themselves by attributing these victories to one of their own countrymen, as indeed is so natural. Yet the whole story of Coriolanus is for all that neither more nor less than a poem, in which on one man and into one period events are concentrated which are spread over several years; and besides this, it is dated too early. However hard pressed the Romans may have been, it is not to be supposed that whilst the enemy were marching victorious from one town to the other, there should have been nothing said either of consuls or of armies sent against them. Only in the enumeration of the places which were destroyed, have we the intimation of those, which after the breaking up of Latium became Volscian.