Ab urbe condita

Although there may be some exaggeration, there certainly was a great slaughter. The consul, after securing enormous booty, returned victorious to his camp. The two consuls then united their camps; the Volscians and Aequi also concentrated their shattered forces. A third battle took place that year; again fortune gave the victory to the Romans, the enemy were routed and their camp taken.

[*](The Terentilian Law.)Matters at home drifted back to their old state; the successes in the war forthwith evoked disorders in the City. Gaius Terentilius Harsa was a tribune of the plebs that year.

Thinking that the absence of the consuls afforded a good opportunity for tribunitian agitation, he spent several days in haranguing the plebeians on the overbearing arrogance of the patricians.

In particular he inveighed against the authority of the consuls as excessive and intolerable in a free commonwealth, for whilst in name it was less invidious, in reality it was almost more harsh and oppressive than that of the kings had been, for now, he said, they

had two masters instead of one, with uncontrolled, unlimited powers, who, with nothing to curb their licence, directed all the threats and penalties of the laws against the plebeians.

To prevent this unfettered tyranny from lasting for ever, he said he would propose an enactment that a commission of five should be appointed to draw up in writing the laws which regulated the power of the consuls. Whatever jurisdiction over themselves the people gave the consul, that and that only was he to exercise; he was not to regard his own licence and caprice as law.

When this measure was promulgated, the patricians were apprehensive lest in the absence of the consuls they might have to accept the yoke. A meeting of the senate was convened by Q. Fabius, the prefect of the City. He made such a violent attack upon the proposed law and its author, that the threats and intimidation could not have been greater even if the two consuls had been standing by the tribune, threatening his life.

He accused him of plotting treason, of seizing a favourable moment for compassing the ruin of the commonwealth. “Had the gods,” he continued, “given us a tribune like him last year, during the pestilence and the war, nothing could have stopped him.

After the death of the two consuls, whilst the State was lying prostrate, he would have passed laws, amid the universal confusion, to deprive the commonwealth of the power of the consuls, he would have led the Volscians and Aequi in an attack on the City.