2.
As the Roman generals hoped more from a siege than from an assault, they even began the erection of winter quarters —a new thing to the Roman soldier —and planned to carry the campaign on, straight through the winter.
[
2]
When news of this came to Rome, to the plebeian tribunes, who had now for a long time been unable to
[
3??]
hit upon any pretext for agitation, they hurried before the assembly and set to work upon the passions of the commons: So this was the reason that the soldiers had been granted pay!
[
4]
They had not been mistaken in thinking that this gift of their opponents would be smeared with poison. The liberty of the
[p. 7]commons had been sold; the young men, having
1 been permanently removed and banished from the City and from the state, were no longer free, even in winter and the stormy season, to see to their homes and their affairs.
[
5]
What, they asked, did their hearers suppose to be the reason for making the service continuous? They would assuredly find no other motive than this:
[
6]
lest, through the presence in large numbers of the young men in whom lay all the vigour of the commons, something might be accomplished for the people's good. Moreover, they were far more ruthlessly abused and trodden down than
[
7??]
were the Veientes, who, for their part, spent the winter in their houses, safeguarding their city by means of strong walls and natural defences, whilst the Roman soldiers were enduring toil and danger, overwhelmed with snows and frosts, in tents, not even laying aside their weapons in the winter time, a season of respite from all wars both by land and by sea.
[
8]
Such slavery as this neither kings, nor the proud consuls who came before the establishment of the tribunician power, nor the stern authority of a dictator, nor harsh decemvirs, had laid upon them, — that they should wage perennial war.
[
9]
Pray what would those men do if they should become consuls or dictators, who had made the semblance of consular authority so savage and truculent? But the commons were only getting their deserts. There had been no room even amongst eight military tribunes for a single plebeian.
[
10]
Heretofore the patricians had been wont with the utmost exertion to fill three places in a year: now they were advancing eight abreast to make good their authority, and there was never a commoner hanging on to the crowd, were it
[p. 9]only to remind his colleagues that their soldiers were
2 not slaves but freemen and fellow citizens;
[
11]
whom, at least in winter, they were bound to bring back to the shelter of their houses, and to leave them some portion of the year to
[
12??]
look after their parents, their children, and their wives, and to use their liberty and elect magistrates.
[13]
As they shouted forth these and suchlike arguments, they found an opponent not unequal to them in Appius Claudius, whom his colleagues had left behind to repress sedition on the part of the tribunes.
[14]
He was a man experienced from his youth up in contentions with the plebs, and I have related how, some years before, he had advised that the intervention of their colleagues be used to break the power of the tribunes.3
