when consul.  He pleaded his cause only once, and in the same haughty style of an accuser which he had been accustomed to adopt on all occasions:  and he so astounded both the tribunes and the commons by his intrepidity, that, of their own accord, they postponed the day of trial, and then allowed the matter to die out.  No long interval elapsed:  before, however, the appointed day came, he died of some disease; and when the tribunes of the people endeavoured to put a stop to his funeral panegyric, the commons would not allow the burial day of so great a man to be defrauded of the customary honours:  and they listened to his eulogy when dead as patiently as they had listened to the charges brought against him when living, and attended his obsequies in vast numbers.

In the same year the consul Valerius, having marched with an army against the Aequans, and being unable to draw out the enemy to an engagement, proceeded to attack their camp.  A dreadful storm coming down from heaven accompanied by thunder and hail prevented him.  Then, on a signal for a retreat being given, their surprise was excited by the return of such fair weather, that they felt scruples about attacking a second time a camp which was defended as it were by some divine power:  all the violence of the war was directed to plundering the country.  The other consul, Aemilius, conducted the war in Sabine territory.  There also, because the enemy confined themselves within their walls, the lands were laid waste.  Then the Sabines, roused by the burning not only of the farms, but of the villages also, which were thickly inhabited, after they had fallen in with the raiders retired from an engagement the issue of which was left undecided, and on the following day removed their camp into a safer situation.  This seemed a sufficient reason to the consul why he should leave the enemy as conquered, and depart thence, although the war was as yet unfinished.

During these wars, while dissensions still continued at home, Titus Numicius Priscus and Aulus Verginius were elected consuls.  The commons appeared determined no longer to brook the delay in accepting the agrarian law, and extreme violence was on the point of being resorted to, when it became known by the smoke from the burning farms and the flight of the peasants that the Volscians were at hand; this circumstance checked the sedition that was now ripe and on the point of breaking out.  The consuls, under the immediate compulsion of the senate, led forth the youth from the city to war, and thereby rendered the rest of the commons more quiet.  And the enemy indeed, having merely filled the Romans with fear that proved groundless, departed in great haste.  Numicius marched to Antium against the Volscians, Verginius against the Aequans.  There, after they had nearly met with a great disaster in an attack from an ambuscade, the bravery of the soldiers restored their fortunes, which had been endangered through the carelessness