History of Rome

​After that, Quintus Fabius and Gaius Iulius became consuls. In this year, discord at home was no less active, and war abroad was more severe. Arms were taken up by the Aequians; the Veientes also entered Roman territory, plundering as they went. While the anxiety about these wars was growing, Kaeso Fabius and Spurius Furius became consuls. The Aequians were besieging Ortona, a Latin city;

​the Veientes, now sated with plunder, were threatening to besiege Rome itself. Although these terrors ought to have restrained them, ​they increased moreover the spirits of the plebs; and the custom of refusing military service was returning to the plebs, not of its own accord, but because Spurius Licinius, a tribune of the plebs, thinking that the time had come to force the agrarian law upon the patricians through extreme necessity, had undertaken to obstruct the military operations.

​However, all the odium directed at the tribunician power was turned against its author, and the consuls did not rise up against him more fiercely than did his own colleagues, by whose aid the consuls held the levy.

​An army was enrolled for two wars at the same time; one to be led by Fabius against the Veientes, the other was given to Furius against the Aequians. And indeed, against the Aequians, nothing worthy of memory was achieved;

​Fabius had considerably more trouble with his citizens than with the enemy. That single man, the consul himself, sustained the republic, which the army, out of hatred for the consul, was betraying as far as lay in its power. For when the consul, besides other generalic skills, ​which he displayed in great abundance in preparing and waging war, had so drawn up his line of battle that, by sending out the cavalry alone, he routed the enemy’s army, the infantry refused to pursue those who were routed;

​and not even their own shame and present public disgrace, and later the danger if courage should return to the enemy, could compel them to quicken their pace, even if the exhortation of the hated leader could not, or, if nothing else, to stand drawn up in order.

​Without orders, they turned back the standards, and sorrowful—you would have believed them defeated—cursing now the commander, now the service rendered by the cavalry, they returned to the camp.

​Nor were any remedies for so pestilential an example sought by the commander; to such an extent, for men of excellent talent, the art of ruling a citizen would sooner be lacking than that of overcoming an enemy.

​The consul returned to Rome, with the glory of the war not so much increased as with the hatred of the soldiers against him stirred up and exacerbated. Nevertheless, the patricians succeeded in keeping the consulship in the Fabian family; they elected Marcus Fabius consul, and Gnaeus Manlius was given to Fabius as a colleague.