History of Rome

​The opinion seemed too harsh even to the senate, and it almost armed the plebs with anger: they complained that they were now being attacked by famine like enemies, defrauded of food and sustenance; that foreign corn, the only nourishment which fortune had unexpectedly given them, was being snatched from their mouths, unless the tribunes were delivered up in chains to Gnaeus Marcius, and unless satisfaction was made upon the backs of the Roman plebeians; and that he had arisen as a new executioner for them, who ordered them either to die or to be slaves.

​An attack would have been made upon him as he was leaving the senate house, had not the tribunes very opportunely appointed a day for his trial. Thereupon their anger was suppressed: each man saw himself made a judge, each the master of the life and death of his enemy.

​At first Marcius heard the tribunician threats with contempt: he argued that the right of aid, not of punishment, had been given to that power, and that they were tribunes of the plebs, not of the patricians. But the plebs had risen up in such hostile fashion that the patricians had to get off by the punishment of one man.

​They nevertheless resisted the adverse hatred and used, now the strength of each individual, now that of the whole order. And first the attempt was made to see if, by posting their clients, they could break up the matter by frightening individuals away from gatherings and councils.

​Then they went forth in a body — you would have called all the patricians there defendants — entreating the plebs with prayers that, if they would not acquit him as innocent, they would grant them one citizen, one senator, even as a guilty person.

​When he himself did not appear on the appointed day, the anger persisted. Condemned in his absence, he went into exile to the Volscians, threatening his country and even then bearing a hostile spirit. The Volscians received him kindly as he came, and treated him more kindly day by day, the more his greater anger against his own people shone forth, and now frequent complaints, now threats were perceived. He enjoyed the hospitality of Attius Tullus.

​He was at that time by far the chief man of the Volscian name and always hostile to the Romans. Thus, since an old hatred stimulated the one, and a recent anger the other, they conferred plans about a Roman war.

​They did not easily believe that their own plebs could be induced to take up arms which had been so often unsuccessfully tried: that their spirits were broken by many frequent wars and finally by the loss of their youth through pestilence; they thought that they must act with artifice upon a hatred now faded by age, so that their minds might be exacerbated by some recent anger.