Ab urbe condita

A triumph was celebrated over them, and warned by their example the Marrucini, the Marsi, the Paeligni, and the Feretrani sent spokesmen to Rome to sue for peace and friendship. These tribes obtained a treaty with Rome.

It[*](The Aedileship of Cnaeus Flavius.) was during this year that Cn. Flavius, the son of a freedman, born in a humble station of life, but a clever plausible man, became curule aedile.

I find in some annalists the statement that at the time of the election of aediles he was acting as apparitor to the aediles, and when he found that the first vote was given in his favour, and was disallowed on the ground that he was a clerk, he laid aside his writing tablet and took an oath that he would not follow that profession.

Licinius Macer, however, attempts to show that he had given up the clerk's business for some time as he had been a tribune of the plebs, and had also twice held office as a triumvir, the first time as a triumvir nocturnus,[*]( “At a very remote age the direction of the police was entrusted to three magistrates called triumviri nocturni, because their principal duty was to watch over the safety of the City at night. Valerius Maximus speaks of one of them, P. Villius, being fined because “he had not kept with diligence his nocturnal watch,” and of other triumviri who were punished because they had not run with proper speed to extinguish a fire which had broken out in a jeweller's shop on the Via Sacra.” —Lanciani (p. 221).) and afterwards as one of the three commissioners for settling a

colony. However this may be, there is no question that he maintained a defiant attitude towards the nobles, who regarded his lowly origin with

contempt. He made public the legal forms and processes which had been hidden away in the closets of the pontiffs; he exhibited a calendar written on whitened boards in the Forum, on which were marked the days on which legal proceedings were allowed; to the intense disgust of the nobility he dedicated the temple of Concord on the

Vulcanal. At this function the Pontifex Maximus, Cornelius Barbatus, was compelled by the unanimous voice of the people to recite the usual form of devotion in spite of his insistence that in accordance with ancestral usage none but a consul or a commander-in-chief could dedicate a

temple. It was in consequence of this that the senate authorised a measure to be submitted to the people providing that no one should presume to dedicate a

temple or an altar without being ordered to do so by the senate or by a majority of the tribunes of the plebs. I will relate an incident, trivial enough in itself, but affording a striking proof of the way in which the liberties of the plebs were asserted against the insolent presumption of the

nobility. Flavius went to visit his colleague, who was ill. Several young nobles who were sitting in the room had agreed not to rise when he entered, on which he ordered his curule chair to be brought, and from that seat of dignity calmly surveyed his enemies, who were filled with unutterable

disgust. The elevation of Flavius to the aedileship was, however, the work of a party in the Forum who had gained their power during the censorship of Appius

Claudius. For Appius had been the first to pollute the senate by electing into it the sons of freedmen, and when no one recognised the validity of these elections and he failed to secure in the Senate-house the influence which he had sought to gain in the City, he corrupted both the Assembly of Tribes and the Assembly of Centuries by distributing the dregs of the populace amongst all the