_Lectures_, chapter xxiv.]

Tarquin had been foiled in his attempts to regain his throne, but still
he tried again, the last time having the aid of his son-in-law,
Mamilius of Tusculum. It was a momentous juncture. The weakened Romans
were to encounter the combined powers of the thirty Latin cities that
had formerly been in league with them. They needed the guidance of one
strong man; but they had decreed that there should never be a king
again, and so they appointed a "dictator" with unlimited power, for a
limited time. We shall find them resorting to this expedient on other
occasions of sudden and great trouble. A fierce struggle followed at
Lake Regillus, in which the Latins were turned to flight through the
intervention of Castor and Pollux, who fought at the head of the Roman
knights on foaming white steeds. There was no other quarter to which
Tarquinius could turn for help, and he therefore fled to Cumæ, where he
died after a wretched old age. A temple was erected on the field of the
battle of Lake Regillus in honor of Castor and Pollux, and thither
annually on the fifteenth of July the Roman knights were wont to pass
in solemn procession, in memory of the fact that the twins had fought
at the head of their columns in the day of distress when fortune seemed
to be about to desert the national cause. At this battle Caius Marcius,
a stripling descended from Ancus Marcius, afterwards known as
Coriolanus, received the oaken crown awarded to the man who should save
the life of a Roman citizen, because he struck down one of the Latins,
in the presence of the commander, just as he was about to kill a Roman
soldier.

In the year 504 B.C., there was in the town of Regillum, a man of
wealth and importance, who, at the time of the war with the Sabines,
had advocated peace, and as his fellow-citizens were firmly opposed to