Ab urbe condita

It was the tyranny and violence of kings that men detested. If these were insupportable in a king or a king's son, who would endure them in ten private citizens?

They should see to it that they did not, by forbidding freedom of speech in the House, compel them to speak outside its walls. He could not see how it was less permissible for him as a private citizen to convene an Assembly of the people than for them to summon the senate.

They might find out whenever they chose how much more powerful a sense of wrong is to vindicate liberty than greedy ambition is to support tyranny.

They were bringing up the question of the Sabine war as if the Roman people had any more serious war to wage than one against men who, appointed to draw up laws, left no vestige of law or justice in the State; who had abolished the elections, the annual magistrates, the regular succession of rulers, which formed the sole guarantee of equal liberty for all; who, though simple citizens, still retained the fasces and the power of despotic monarchs.

After the expulsion of the kings, the magistrates were patricians; after the secession of the plebs, plebeian magistrates were appointed. “What party did these men belong to?”he asked. “The popular party? Why, what have they ever done in conjunction with the people? The nobility? What! these men, who have not held a meeting of the senate for nearly a year, and now that they are holding one, forbid any speaking on the political situation?

Do not place too much reliance on the fears of others. The ills that men are actually suffering from seem to them much more grievous than any they may fear in the future.”

Whilst Horatius was delivering this impassioned speech, and the decemvirs were in doubt how far they ought to go, whether in the direction of angry resistance

or in that of concession, and unable to see what the issue would be, C. Claudius, the uncle of the decemvir Appius, made a speech more in the nature of entreaty than of censure.

He implored him by the shade of his father to think rather of the social order under which he had been born than of the nefarious compact made with his colleagues.

It was much more, he said, for the sake of Appius than of the State that he made this appeal, for the State would assert its rights in spite of them, if it could not do so with their consent. But great controversies generally kindle great and bitter passions, and it was what these might lead to that he dreaded.