Being discharged from the forum, he went the following night into exile among the Tuscans.  When on the day of trial it was pleaded that he had withdrawn into voluntary exile, nevertheless, at a meeting of the comitia under the presidency of Verginius, his colleagues, when appealed to, dismissed the assembly:  [23] the fine was rigorously exacted from his father, so that, having sold all his effects, he lived for a considerable time in an out-of-the-way cottage on the other side of the Tiber, as if in exile.

This trial and the proposal of the law gave full employment to the state:  in regard to foreign wars there was peace.  When the tribunes, as if victorious, imagined that the law was all but passed owing to the dismay of the patricians at the banishment of Caeso, and in fact, as far as regarded the seniors of the patricians, they had relinquished all share in the administration of the commonwealth, the juniors, more especially those who were the intimate friends of Caeso, redoubled their resentful feelings against the commons, and did not allow their spirits to fail; but the greatest improvement was made in this particular, that they tempered their animosity by a certain degree of moderation.  The first time when, after Cseso’s banishment, the law began to be brought forward, these, arrayed and well prepared, with a numerous body of clients, so attacked the tribunes, as soon as they afforded a pretext for it by attempting to remove them, that no one individual carried home from thence a greater share than another, either of glory or ill-will, but the people complained that in place of one Caeso a thousand had arisen.  During the days that intervened, when the tribunes took no proceedings regarding the law, nothing could be more mild or peaceable than those same persons; they saluted the plebeians courteously, entered into conversation with them, and invited them home:  they attended them in the forum,[24] and suffered the tribunes themselves to hold the rest of their meetings without interruption:  they were never discourteous to any one either in public or in private, except on occasions when the matter of the law began to be agitated.  In other respects the young men were popular.  And not only did the tribunes transact all their other affairs without disturbance, but they were even re-elected or the following year.  Without even an offensive expression, much less any violence being employed, but by soothing and carefully managing the commons the young patricians gradually rendered them tractable.  By these artifices the law was evaded through the entire year.

The consuls Gaius Claudius, the son of Appius, and Publius Valerius Publicola, took over the government from their predecessors in a more tranquil condition.  The next year had brought with it nothing new:  thoughts about carrying the law, or submitting to it, engrossed the attention of the state.  The more the younger patricians strove to insinuate themselves into favour with the plebeians, the more strenuously