Then they went back with a story that they had been attacked by the enemy, which was believed, till a party went out to bury the dead, and found there were only Roman corpses all lying round the crushed body of Sicinius, and that none were stripped of their armor or clothes.

Then the true history was found out, but the Decemvirs sheltered the commanders, and would believe nothing against them.
Appius Claudius soon after did what horrified all honest men even more than this treachery to the brave old soldier.

The Forum was not only the place of public assembly for state affairs, but the regular market-place, where there were stalls and booths for all the wares that Romans dealt in--meat stalls, wool shops, stalls where wine was sold in earthenware jars or leathern bottles, and even booths where reading and writing was taught to boys and girls, who would learn by tracing letters in the sand, and then by writing them with an iron pen on a waxen table in a frame, or with a reed upon parchment.

The children of each family came escorted by a slave--the girls by their nurse, the boys by one called a pedagogue.
[Illustration: DEATH OF VIRGINIA.] Appius, when going to his judgment-seat across the Forum, saw at one of these schools a girl of fifteen reading her lesson.

She was so lovely that he asked her nurse who she was, and heard that her name was Virginia, and that she was the daughter of an honorable plebeian and brave centurion named Virginius, who was absent with the army fighting with the AEqui, and that she was to marry a young man named Icilius as soon as the campaign was over.