History of Rome

​In the following year, when Numerius Fabius Vibulanus and Titus Quinctius Capitolinus, the son of Capitolinus, were consuls, under the leadership of Fabius, to whom that province had fallen by lot, nothing worthy of mention was done.

​Since the Aequi had shown only a trembling battle-line, they were routed in shameful flight, with no great glory to the consul. And so a triumph was denied; however, because the ignominy of the Sempronian disaster had been lightened, it was granted that he should enter the city celebrating an ovation.

​Just as the war had been finished with less conflict than they had feared, so in the city, out of tranquility, an unexpected mass of discord arose between the plebs and the patricians, starting from the doubling of the number of quaestors. This matter—

—that besides the two city quaestors, two others should be elected to be at hand for the consuls for the duties of war—when it was brought forward by the consuls and the patricians had approved it with the greatest zeal, the tribunes of the plebs introduced a conflict, demanding that a part of the quaestors—for up to that time only patricians had been elected—should be chosen from the plebs.

​Against this proposal, at first both the consuls and the patricians strove with all their might; later, by conceding that, just as they had ordered equality to be established in the election of military tribunes with consular power, so in the case of the quaestors the choice of the people should be free, when they made little progress, they abandoned the whole matter of increasing the number of quaestors.

​The tribunes took up the abandoned issue, and immediately other seditious actions arose, among which was also that of the agrarian law. On account of these disturbances, since the senate preferred consuls to be elected rather than tribunes, and a decree of the senate could not be passed because of the vetoes of the tribunes of the plebs, ​the state passed from the consuls to an interregnum, and not even this very transition—for the tribunes prevented the patricians from assembling—was accomplished without a huge struggle.

​When the greater part of the following year had been dragged out in conflicts by the new tribunes of the plebs and several interreges, now with the tribunes preventing the patricians from assembling to declare an interrex, now interrupting the interrex so that he should not pass a decree of the senate concerning the consular elections, ​Finally, Lucius Papirius Mugillanus, having been declared interrex, by chastising now the patricians, now the tribunes of the plebs, reminded them that the republic, deserted and abandoned by men, had been taken up by the providence and care of the gods, and was sustained by the Veientine truce and the hesitation of the Aequi.

​If some terror should strike from that quarter, did they wish the republic to be overwhelmed without any patrician magistrate?

​Did they have neither an army nor a general for enrolling an army? Or were they going to ward off a foreign war by means of a domestic war? If these should combine, it could scarcely be resisted even by the power of the gods to prevent the Roman state from being overwhelmed. Why did they not rather, by each relaxing somewhat from the full extent of his right, join in harmony by middle terms— ​the patricians by permitting military tribunes to be elected instead of consuls, and the tribunes of the plebs by not vetoing to prevent four quaestors from being chosen indiscriminately from both plebeians and patricians by the free vote of the people.