a Roman general or Roman auxiliaries, by their own efforts, stripped them of their camp.  Besides recovering their own effects, they obtained immense booty.  The consul Gaius Nautius, however, was sent against the Volscians from Rome.  The custom, I suppose, was not approved of, that the allies should carry on wars with their own forces and according to their own plans without a Roman general and troops.  There was no kind of injury and petty annoyance that was not practised against the Volscians; they could not, however, be prevailed on to come to an engagement in the field.

Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius were the next consuls.  The Veientines fell to Manlius as his province.  No war, however, followed:  a truce for forty years was granted them at their request, but they were ordered to provide corn and pay for the soldiers.  Disturbance at home immediately followed in close succession on peace abroad:  the commons were goaded by the spur employed by the tribunes in the shape of the agrarian law.  The consuls, no whit intimidated by the condemnation of Menenius, nor by the danger of Servilius, resisted with their utmost might; Gnaeus Genucius, a tribune of the people, dragged the consuls before the court on their going out of office.  Lucius AEmilius and Opiter Verginius entered upon the consulate.  Instead of Verginius I find Vopiscus Julius given as consul in some annals.  In this year (whoever were the consuls) Furius and Manlius, being summoned to trial before the people, in sordid garb solicited the aid of the younger patricians as much as that of the commons:  they advised, they cautioned them to keep themselves from public offices and the administration of public affairs, and indeed to consider the consular fasces, the toga praetexta and curule chair, as nothing else but a funeral parade:  that when decked with these splendid insignia, as with fillets, [70] they were doomed to death.  But if the charms of the consulate were so great they should even now rest satisfied that the consulate was held in captivity and crushed by the tribunician power; that everything had to be done by the consul, at the beck and command of the tribune, as if he were a tribune’s beadle.  If he stirred, if he regarded the patricians at all, if he thought that there existed any other party in the state but the commons, let him set before his eyes the banishment of Gnaeeus Marcius, the condemnation and death of Menenius.  Fired by these words, the patricians from that time held their consultations not in public, but in private houses, and remote from the knowledge of the majority, at which, when this one point only was agreed on, that the accused must be rescued either by fair means or foul, the most desperate proposals were most approved; nor did any deed, however daring, lack a supporter.[71] Accordingly, on the day of trial, when the people stood in the forum on tiptoe of expectation, they at first began to feel surprised that the tribune did not come down;