Aulus Verginius and Spurius Servilius were next chosen consuls.  After the defeat sustained in the last battle, the Veientines declined an engagement.[67] Ravages were committed, and they made repeated attacks in every direction upon the Roman territory from the Janiculum, as if from a fortress:  nowhere were cattle or husbandmen safe.  They were afterward entrapped by the same stratagem as that by which they had entrapped the Fabii:  having pursued cattle which had been intentionally driven on in all directions to decoy them, they fell into an ambuscade; in proportion as they were more numerous,[68] the slaughter was greater.  The violent resentment resulting from this disaster was the cause and beginning of one still greater:  for having crossed the Tiber by night, they attempted to assault the camp of the consul Servilius; being repulsed from thence with great slaughter, they with difficulty made good their retreat to the Janiculum.  The consul himself also immediately crossed the Tiber, and fortified his camp at the foot of the Janiculum:  at daybreak on the following morning, being both somewhat elated by the success of the battle of the day before, more, however, because the scarcity of corn forced him to adopt measures, however dangerous, provided only they were more expeditious, he rashly marched his army up the steep of the Janiculum to the camp of the enemy, and, being repulsed from thence with more disgrace than when he had repulsed them on the preceding day, he was saved, both himself and his army, by the intervention of his colleague.  The Etruscans, hemmed in between the two armies, and presenting their rear to the one and the other by turns, were completely destroyed.  Thus the Veientine war was crushed by a successful piece of audacity. [69]

Together with peace, provisions came in to the city in greater abundance, both by reason of corn having been brought in from Campania, and, as soon as the fear of want, which every one felt was likely to befall himself, left them, by the corn being brought out, which had been stored.  Then their minds once more became wanton from plenty and ease, and they sought at home their former subjects of complaint, now that there was none abroad; the tribunes began to excite the commons by their poisonous charm, the agrarian law:  they roused them against the senators who opposed it, and not only against them as a body, but against particular individuals.  Quintus Considius and Titus Genucius, the proposers of the agrarian law, appointed a day of trial for Titus Menenius:  the loss of the fort of Cremera, while the consul had his standing camp at no great distance from thence, was the cause of his unpopularity.  This crushed him, though both the senators had exerted themselves in his behalf with no less earnestness than in behalf of Coriolanus, and the popularity of his father Agrippa was not yet forgotten.  The tribunes, however, acted leniently in the matter of the fine:  though they had arraigned him for a capital offence, they