allowed on this charge to find bail. According to the general account, he now betook himself to the Volscians. This is true;--I believe every thing as far as here,--yet his presenting himself to Attius Tullius at Antium is apocryphal, and entirely copied from the visit of Themistocles to Admetus, the king of the Molossians. It is then stated, that he induced the Volscians, who had been quite disheartened, to hazard a war once more. This is Roman exaggeration, intended to disguise the distress which had been brought on by the Volscian arms. It is related, how he conquered the towns one by one, first Circeri, then those lying to the south of the Appian Way, then those on the Latin road; and how at last he advanced against Rome itself. This does not agree with what follows. Coriolanus now appears on the Roman frontier near the Marrana, the canal which carries the water of the low ground at Grotta Ferrara into the Tiber, five miles from Rome. Here the Romans send an embassy to him: first of all, ten senators; he grants them thirty days, and then three, as the Fetiales did whenever a war was not yet declared; afterwards they send the priests, and at length the matrons also. These last move his heart, and prevail upon him to turn back. This is all very pretty, but, if we look a little closer to it, impossible. Livy makes on this occasion a most remarkable assertion. He says that one would not indeed have known that the consuls of that year had waged war with the Volscians, had it not been evident from the league of Sp. Cassius with the Latins that one of them, Postumus Cominius, had been absent; for Sp. Cassius had concluded that treaty alone. To account for this, Livy alleges the eclipsing fame of Coriolanus. This is a most valuable notice. The old traditions then do not mention at all that the consul had taken Corioli, but merely that Coriolanus had. Now, as we have seen before, it is not true that he received his cognomen from the conquest of the town, as such surnames do not occur before Scipio Africanus; moreover, Corioli was at that time not a Volscian, but a Latin town, which first became Volscian in the great Volscian war which we call that of Coriolanus, and was destroyed only later. That it was Latin, is plain from the list of the thirty towns which shared in the fight at the Regillus; and yet indeed that list in all likelihood was not originally made out with reference to this, but to the league of Sp. Cassius. Thus the name of Coriolanus meant no more than that of Regillensis, Vibulanus, Mugillanus, and others, whether it was that Corioli stood in a relation of proxeny or clientship to his family, or from any other reason. We have therefore nothing historical concerning Coriolanus, but that he wished to break the treaty with the plebeians, and was therefore condemned. It is the same with all the rest of his story. Coriolanus was condemned as one who had transgressed against the sworn rights (_leges sacratæ_, the German _Frohnenrechte_).