As a contention had arisen, Duillius sent for the consuls and asked them what they intended to do about the consular elections. They replied that they should elect fresh consuls. Having thus gained popular supporters for a measure by no means popular, he proceeded in company with them into the Assembly.
Here the consuls were brought forward to the people and the question was put to them, “If the Roman people, remembering how you have recovered their liberty for them at home, remembering, too, your services and achievements in war, should make you consuls a second time, what do you intend to do?”
They declared their resolution unchanged, and Duillius, applauding the consuls for maintaining to the last an attitude totally unlike that of the decemvirs, proceeded to hold the election. Only five tribunes were elected, for owing to the efforts of the nine tribunes in openly pushing their canvass, the other candidates could not get the requisite majority of votes.
He dismissed the Assembly and did not hold a second election, on the ground that he had satisfied the requirements of the law, which nowhere fixed the number of tribunes, but merely enacted that the office of tribune should not be left vacant.
He ordered those who had been elected to co-opt colleagues, and recited the formula which governed the case as follows: “If I require you to elect ten tribunes of the plebs; if on this day you have elected less than ten, then those whom they co-opt shall be lawful tribunes of the plebs by the same law, in like manner as those whom you have this day made tribunes of the plebs.”
Duillius persisted in asserting to the last that the commonwealth could not possibly have fifteen tribunes, and he resigned office, after having won the goodwill of patricians and plebeians alike by his frustration of the ambitious designs of his colleagues.
The new consuls were Spurius Herminius and T. Verginius Caelimontanus, who were not violent partisans of either the patricians or the plebeians. They maintained peace both at home and abroad.