No truce, even though it was for a long series of years, could remove the causes of war, like a treaty of peace and alliance: when that concluded with Veii after the taking of Fidenæ had expired, the Romans demanded satisfaction for the crime of Tolumnius. The Veientines were afraid of war. Even seventy years before this it was only after they had collected succours from the whole of Etruria, and so long as these remained with them, that they carried it on with success, at a time when the confederates of Rome had to exert all their strength in their own defense. At present though many of these confederate towns had been destroyed or alienated from Rome, the cohorts of the rest were bound to accompany the legions whenever the senate commanded them to do so; while in more than one congress at the temple of Voltumna the Etruscans refused to send any aid. They cannot have failed to perceive that the town they were thus abandoning to its fate was the bulwark of their whole nation: and though unfortunately in the history of ill-connected confederacies there never was, nor ever will be, a want of examples where one of them, on the preservation of which the prosperity of all the rest depends, is abandoned to destruction by their envy and jealousy, still at all events the election of a king at Veii cannot possibly have excited any senseless ill humour among the other Etruscans: for Tolumnius had also been king: and indeed we have no ground whatever to suppose that any city of the whole nation ever had a chief magistrate of any other kind.