History of Rome

​At the end of the year, the consular elections disrupted the struggle between the patricians and the plebs, with the tribunes declaring that they would not allow the elections to be held unless they were conducted according to the Licinian law, while the dictator was obstinately resolved to abolish the consulship entirely from the state rather than make it shared between the patricians and the plebs.

​Therefore, because the elections were postponed, when the dictator left office, the government returned to an interregnum. When the interreges received the plebs hostile to the patricians, they contended with seditions until the eleventh interrex.

​The tribunes boasted of their patronage of the Licinian law; but more immediate to the plebs was the pain of their worsening debt, and private anxieties broke out in public struggles.

​Out of weariness of these things, the patricians, for the sake of concord, ordered the interrex Lucius Cornelius Scipio to observe the Licinian law at the consular elections. To Publius Valerius Publicola was given a colleague from the plebs, Gaius Marcius Rutilus.

​Once minds were inclined toward concord, the new consuls, attempting to alleviate also the debt situation, which alone seemed to keep minds divided, turned the payment of debt into a public care by electing a commission of five, whom they called “bankers” from their dispensation of money.

​They deserved, by their equity and care, to be famous by name through the monuments of all the annals; they were Gaius Duillius, Publius Decius Mus, Marcus Papirius, Quintus Publilius, and Titus Aemilius.

​They sustained this matter, which was extremely difficult to handle and usually heavy for both sides, and certainly always for one, with other moderation and especially with public expenditure rather than loss.

​For the treasury either discharged the debts which were slow and delayed more by the inertia of the debtors than by their means, with tables set up in the forum with money, so that security was first given to the state, or an appraisal of property at fair prices released them, so that not only without injury but even without complaints of either party, a vast amount of debt was cleared. After that, a groundless terror of an Etruscan war, ​when there was a rumor that twelve peoples had conspired, forced the naming of a dictator; Gaius Julius was named in the camp—for the decree of the senate was sent there to the consuls—to whom Lucius Aemilius was added as master of the horse. However, everything remained peaceful abroad.