At first, the Romans thought that the war could be quickly brought to an end; they built strong forts in the _Ager Veientanus_, (which the Greeks call ἐπιτειχίζειν) as Agis did in the second half of the Peloponnesian war; and from thence they hindered the Veientines from tilling their fields, or they set fire to the ripe corn, so that famine and distress soon made their appearance in the town. This system of warfare is designated here by the term _obsessio_. Once only the Romans undertook a siege in the simple fashion of that age. Between two redoubts, and parallel with the wall of the town, a line of rubbish, sand bags, and fascines was thrown up; wooden scaffoldings (_plutei_) were then erected on both sides, in order to give the rubbish firmness; and, what was the chief difficulty, they were pushed further and further in advance. These wooden works were raised to about the height of the wall; bridges and scaling ladders were laid on it (_aggerem muro injungebant_); and then the machines were brought up, first the battering rams, in aftertimes the catapults and ballistæ,--for these, which in that age were yet unknown at Rome, were invented at Syracuse for Dionysius. The people of the town tried on their side to countermine. Yet the neighbouring nations defeated the Romans, and destroyed their works. Since then, several years passed without any camp being again pitched before Veii. The war of Veii was for the ancients a parallel to that of Troy. They pictured to themselves another ten years’ siege, and a conquest quite as marvellous as that of Troy by the wooden horse. Yet not the whole of the war is poetical fiction; but the old lays were linked to detached historical points which they embellished, differing in this from the epics of the earliest history. By the side of these, there is an old annalistic narrative which is by no means incredible. The defeat of the tribunes Virginius and Sergius is historical; but the particulars concerning the Alban lake, and such like things, belong to the old poem. Whether this was written in prose or in verse is all the same to me. The account given was as follows.