Ab urbe condita

Titus Livius (Livy)

Livy. History of Rome, Volumes 1-2. Roberts, Canon, Rev, translator. London, New York: J. M. Dent and Sons; E. P. Dutton and Co., 1912.

The next day, after posting guards at different points, he came down to the Forum. The novelty and mystery of the thing drew the attention of the plebs towards him.

Maelius and his confederates recognised that this tremendous power was directed against them, whilst those who knew nothing of the plot asked what disturbance or sudden outbreak of war called for the supreme authority of a Dictator or required Quinctius, after reaching his eightieth year, to assume the government of the republic.

Servilius, the Master of the Horse, was despatched by the Dictator to Maelius with the message: “The Dictator summons you.” Alarmed at the summons, he inquired what it meant. Servilius explained that he had to stand his trial and clear himself of the charge brought against him by Minucius in the senate.

On this Maelius retreated amongst his troop of adherents, and looking round at them began to slink away, when an officer by order of the Master of the Horse seized him and began to drag him away. The bystanders rescued him, and as he fled he implored “the protection of the Roman plebs,” and said that he was the victim of a conspiracy amongst the patricians, because he had acted generously towards the plebs.

He entreated them to come to his help in this terrible crisis, and not suffer him to be butchered before their eyes.

Whilst he was making these appeals, Servilius overtook him and slew him. Besprinkled with the dead man's blood, and surrounded by a troop of young patricians, he returned to the Dictator and reported that Maelius after being summoned to appear before him had driven away his officer and incited the populace to riot, and had now met with the punishment he deserved.

“Well done!” said the Dictator, “C. Servilius, you have delivered the republic.”

The populace did not know what to make of the deed and were becoming excited. The Dictator ordered them to be summoned to an Assembly. He declared that Maelius had been lawfully slain, even if he were guiltless of treason, because he had refused to come to the Dictator when summoned by the Master of the Horse.

He, Cincinnatus, had sat to investigate the case, after it had been investigated Maelius would have been treated in accordance with the result.

He was not to be dealt with like an ordinary citizen. For, though born amongst a free people under laws and settled rights, in a City from which he knew that royalty had been expelled, and in the very same year, the sons of the king's sister, children of the consul who liberated his country, had, on the discovery of a conspiracy for restoring royalty, been beheaded by their own father-a City from which Collatinus

Tarquin the consul had been ordered to lay down his office and go into exile, because the very name of Tarquin was detested-a City in which some years later Spurius Cassius had been punished for entertaining designs of sovereignty-a City in which recently the decemvirs had been punished by confiscation, exile, and death because of a tyranny as despotic as that of kings-in that City Maelius had conceived hopes of sovereignty!

And who was this man? Although no nobility of birth, no honours, no services to the State paved the way for any man to sovereign power, still it was their consulships, their decemvirates, the honours achieved by them and their ancestors and the splendour of their families that raised the ambitions of the Claudii and the Cassii to an impious height.

But Spurius Maelius, to whom the tribuneship of the plebs was a thing to be wished for rather than hoped for, a wealthy corn-factor, hoped to buy the liberty of his fellow-citizens for a couple of pounds of spelt, and imagined that by throwing a little corn to

them he could reduce to slavery the men who had conquered all the neighbouring States, and that he whom the State could hardly stomach as a senator would be tolerated as a king, possessing the power and insignia of Romulus, who had sprung from the gods and been carried back to the gods!