The Etruscans advised the Veientines to try by all means to maintain the peace with the Romans: the demands of the latter may, however, have been too high,--perhaps they wanted the sovereignty over Veii, so that the Veientines were obliged to choose war as unavoidable. If we compare the account of the first Veientine war, seventy years before, the Veientines were then supported by the whole power of the Etruscans; but now their only remaining champions are the Capenates[114] and the Faliscans: in one single campaign indeed the people of Tarquinii come to their help. The Cærites were friends with the Romans, and therefore kept neutral: the Etruscans, it is true, were in the ascendant there; yet in the main the population may still have been Tyrrhenian. Rome was obliged to make the strongest efforts when arming herself for this struggle, and was supported in it by the Latins and Hernicans. The derision with which Florus speaks of the _bella suburbana_, when saying, _De Verulis et Bovillis pudet dicere, sed triumphavimus_, is the sneer of a rhetorician, and we cannot find fault with him for finding these events rather uninteresting. Wars indeed which were fought within a narrow field, have not the same claims to our interest as one like that of Hannibal; still it was in these that the powers of Rome developed themselves. We will not treat this Veientine war with contempt, nor yet will we describe it with as much prolixity as Livy does; but we shall give a sketch of it in very brief outlines. To us, the spirit is of importance with which the Romans began it; inasmuch as they undertook it amid difficulties, which under the circumstances were not less than those of the first Punic war, for instance, and it was only by long perseverance that they could hope to bring matters to an issue. A city like Veii, which lay so near, and was so strong, could not be taken but by a blockade or a siege: when the Veientines were too weak in the field, they withdrew within their walls, against which the Romans could do nothing. One was now obliged, either to invest the town and force it to yield by hunger, or if needs be, by works, by mines; or else to try and reduce it by distress, fortifying a place in the neighbourhood (ἐπιτείχισις), as Decelea near Athens, and from thence devastating the country far and wide, and preventing its cultivation, so that the enemy are brought into such a strait of misery that they must strive by every possible means to get out of it. But to do this, inasmuch as they had to fear the neighbouring places, as Capena, Falerii, the Romans had to change their former mode of war. They had until then only undertaken short expeditions during a few of the summer months,--not unseldom but ten to twelve, nay even five to six days, especially in the times of the republic: under the kings it must have been different. There were from the earliest ages certain months of war, in which they mutually ravaged each other’s