Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/282

 276 THE CITY. BOOK III. cut down trees; the liarvest of the enemy was almost always devoted to the internal gods, and consequently burned. They exterminated the cattle; they even de- stroyed the seed Avhich might produce a crop the fol- lowing year. A war might cause the name and race of an entire people to disappear at a single blow, and change a fertile country into a desert. It was by virtue of this law of war that the Romans extended a solitude around their city; of the teriitory where the Volscians had twenty-three cities, it made the Pontine marshes ; the fifty-three cities of Latium have dis- appeared; in Samnium, the places where the Roman armies had passed could long be recognized, less by the vestiges of their camps than by the solitude which reigned in the neighborhood. When the conquerors did not exterminate the van- quished, they had a right to suppress their city — that is to say, to break up their religious and political asso- ciation. The worship then ceased, and the gods were forgotten. The religion of the city being destroyed, the religion of every family disappeared at the same time. The sacred fires were extinguished. With the worship fell the laws, civil rights, the family, property, everything that depended upon religion.* Let us listen to the prisoner wliose life is spared ; he is made to pro- nounce the following formula : "I give my person, my city, my land, the water that flows over it, my boundary gods, my temples, my movable property, everything which j^ertains to the gods, — these I give to the Ro- man people."" From tliis moment the gods, the tem- ples, the houses, the lands, and the peo})le belonged to cydides, III. 50 and 6S.
 * Cicero, in Verr., II. 3, 6. Siculus Flaccus, pansim. Thu-
 * Livy, I. 38. Plautus, Amphitr., 100-105.