[7.1] 7  Then came the consulship of Lucius Genucius [Aventinensis] and Quintus Servilius [Ahala] [365 BCE]. There was neither party strife nor war to disturb the peace, but lest there should ever be freedom from fear and danger, a great pestilence broke out. 8  It is stated that a censor, a curule aedile, and three plebeian tribunes died, with a correspondingly large number from the rest of the population. But what chiefly made this pestilence noteworthy was the death of Marcus Furius [Camillus], who, though ripe in years, was bitterly regretted. 9  For he was truly a man of singular excellence whether in good or evil fortune; foremost in peace and in war before his banishment, and in exile even more distinguished, whether one thinks of the yearning of his countrymen who called on him in his absence to save their captured City, or of the success with which on being restored to his country he restored the country itself at the same time; 10  after this for five and twenty years—for he survived so long—he maintained his glorious reputation, and was deemed worthy of being named next after Romulus, as Rome’s second Founder.

7.2. The pestilence lasted during both this and the following year, the consulship of Gaius Sulpicius Peticus and Gaius Licinius Stolo. 2  In the latter year nothing memorable occurred, except that with the object of appeasing the divine displeasure they made a lectisternium, or banquet to the gods, being the third in the history of the City; 3  and when neither human wisdom nor the help of Heaven was found to mitigate the scourge, men gave way to superstitious fears, and, amongst other efforts to disarm the wrath of the gods, are said also to have instituted scenic entertainments. 4  This was a new departure for a warlike people, whose only exhibitions had been those of the circus; but indeed it began in a small way, as most things do, and even so was imported from abroad. Without any singing, without imitating the action of singers, players who had been brought in from Etruria danced to the strains of the flautist and performed not ungraceful evolutions in the Tuscan fashion. 5  Next the young Romans began to imitate them, at the same time exchanging jests in uncouth verses, and bringing their movements into a certain harmony with the words. 6  And so the amusement was adopted, and frequent use kept it alive. The native professional actors were called histriones, from ister, the Tuscan word for player; they no longer—as before—alternately 7  threw off rude lines hastily improvised, like the Fescennines, but performed medleys, full of musical measures, to melodies which were now written out to go with the flute, and with appropriate gesticulation. …

7.3. However, the plays thus for the first time introduced by way of expiation neither freed men’s minds of religious fears nor their bodies of disease. 2  Indeed, it fell out quite otherwise; for the games were in full swing when an inundation of the Tiber flooded the circus and put a stop to them, an accident which—as though the gods had already turned away, rejecting the proffered appeasement of their anger—filled the people with fear. 3  And so when Gnaeus Genucius [Aventinensis] and Lucius Aemilius Mamercus (for the second time) were consuls [363 BCE], and men’s minds were more troubled by the search for means of propitiation than were their bodies by disease, it is said that the elders recollected that a pestilence had once been allayed by the dictator’s driving a nail [into the wall of a temple]. 4  Induced thereto by this superstition, the senate ordered the appointment of a dictator for the purpose of driving the nail. 5  Lucius Manlius Imperiosus was appointed, and named Lucius Pinarius master of the horse.

There is an ancient law, recorded in archaic words and letters, that the highest-ranking magistrate shall on the thirteenth of September drive a nail; the tablet was formerly affixed to the right side of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where Minerva’s chapel is. 6  This nail served, they say, in those days of little writing, to mark the number of years, and the law was confided to the chapel of Minerva, for the reason that number was an invention of that goddess. 7  (Cincius, a careful student of such memorials, asserts that at Volsinii [an Etruscan town], too, nails may be seen in the temple of Nortia, an Etruscan goddess [of Fortune], driven in to indicate the number of years.) 8  Marcus Horatius the consul dedicated had the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in accordance with this law, in the year after the expulsion of the kings [508 BCE]; later the ceremony of driving the nail was transferred from consuls to dictators, because theirs was the higher authority. Then, after the custom had been allowed to lapse, it was thought to be of sufficient importance to warrant the appointment of a dictator for that very purpose. 9  It was for this reason that Manlius was now designated; who, however, as though appointed to wage war and not to discharge a religious obligation, [after driving the nail also] aspired to conduct the war with the Hernici, and hunted down the men of military age in a rigorous levy; but in the upshot, opposed by the united efforts of all the tribunes of the plebs, he yielded either to force or to a sense of shame, and resigned his dictatorship.