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33While all this was going on, portents of no small moment again occurred, significant both for the city and for the consul himself, who was Vibius. Thus, in the last assembly before he set out for the war a man with the disease called the sacred disease fell down while Vibius was speaking. 2Also a bronze statue of him which stood in the vestibule of his house turned around of itself on the day and at the hour that he set out on the campaign, and the sacrifices customary before war could not be interpreted by the seers by reason of the quantity of blood. Likewise a man who was just then bringing him a palm slipped in the blood which had been shed, fell, and defiled the palm. These were the portents in his case. 3Now if they had befallen him when a private citizen, they would have pertained to him alone, but since he was consul, they had a bearing on all alike. So, too, these portents: the statue of the Mother of the Gods on the Palatine, which had formerly faced the east, turned around of itself toward the west; 4that of Minerva worshipped near Mutina, where the heaviest fighting occurred, sent forth a quantity of blood and afterwards of milk also; furthermore, the consuls took their departure just before the Feriae Latinae, and there is no instance where this has happened and the Romans have fared well. 5At any rate, on this occasion also, a vast multitude of the people, including the two consuls, perished, some immediately and some later, and also many of the knights and senators, including the most prominent. 6For in the first place the battles, and in the second place the murders at home which occurred again as in the Sullan régime, destroyed all the flower of the citizens except those who perpetrated the murders.
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