History of Rome

​L. Furius and C. Manlius were the next consuls. The Veientes fell to Manlius as his province. Yet no war was waged; a truce for forty years was granted to them at their request, after corn and pay had been requisitioned.

​To foreign peace domestic discord immediately succeeded. The plebs were raging with the tribunician incitements regarding the agrarian law. The consuls, deterred not at all by the condemnation of Menenius, nor at all by the danger of Servilius, resisted with the greatest force. As they were leaving office, Gnaeus Genucius, tribune of the plebs, impeached them. L. Aemilius and Opiter Verginius entered upon the consulship;

​in some annals I find Vopiscus Iulius as consul instead of Verginius. In this year — whoever the consuls were — Furius and Manlius, as defendants before the people, went about in mourning garb, addressing not more the plebs than the younger of the patricians. They urged them, ​they warned them to abstain from honors and the administration of the commonwealth; and to think that the consular fasces, the praetexta, and the curule chair were nothing other than the pomp of a funeral;

​that those covered with famous insignia, as if with fillets, were destined for death. But if there were such sweetness in the consulship, they should even now make up their minds that the consulship had been captured and oppressed by the tribunician power;

​that the consul, like a tribunician apparitor, had to do everything at the beck and command of the tribune; if he stirred, if he looked back at the patricians, if he believed that there was anything else in the state besides the plebs, let him set before his eyes the exile of Gnaeus Marcius, and the condemnation and death of Menenius.

​Incensed by these words, the patricians from then on held councils, not public, but in private and removed from the knowledge of the many. When it was agreed there only upon this, that the defendants must be rescued, whether by right or wrong, every most atrocious opinion was most pleasing, nor was there wanting an author for however bold a deed.

​Therefore, on the day of the trial, when the plebs stood in the forum on tiptoe with expectation, they wondered at first why the tribune did not come down; then, when the delay became more suspicious, they believed he had been deterred by the leading men, and complained that the public cause was deserted and betrayed;

​at last, those who had been waiting at the vestibule of the tribune reported that he had been found dead at home. When the rumor carried this to the whole assembly, just as an army is routed when its general is slain, so they dispersed in all directions, some one way, some another. A peculiar terror had seized the tribunes, warned by the death of their colleague how little protection the sacred laws possessed. Nor did the patricians contain their joy with sufficient moderation;

​and so little did anyone repent of the crime, that even the innocent wished to seem to have done it, and it was openly declared that the tribunician power must be tamed by adversity.