that time in the camp, among the young nobles, Gnaeus Marcius, a youth distinguished both for intelligence and courage, who was afterward surnamed Coriolanus.  While the Roman army was besieging Corioli, devoting all its attention to the townspeople, who were kept, shut up within the walls, and there was no apprehension of attack threatening from without, the Volscian legions, setting out from Antium, suddenly attacked them, and the enemy sallied forth at the same time from the town.  Marcius at that time happened to be on guard.  He, with a chosen body of men, not only beat back the attack of those who had sallied forth, but boldly rushed in through the open gate, and, having cut down all who were in the part of the city nearest to it, and hastily seized some blazing torches, threw them into the houses adjoining the wall.  Upon this, the shouts of the townsmen, mingled with the wailings of the women and children occasioned at first by fright, as is usually the case, both increased the courage of the Romans, and naturally dispirited the Volscians who had come to bring help, seeing that the city was taken.  Thus the Volscians of Antium were defeated, and the town of Corioli was taken.  And so much did Marcius by his valour eclipse the reputation of the consul, that, had not the treaty concluded with the Latins by Spurius Cassius alone, in consequence of the absence of his colleagues, and which was engraved on a brazen column, served as a memorial of it, it would have been forgotten that Postumus Cominius had conducted the war with the Volscians.  In the same year died Agrippa Menenius, a man all his life equally a favourite with senators and commons, endeared still more to the commons after the secession.  This man, the mediator and impartial promoter of harmony among his countrymen, the ambassador of the senators to the commons, the man who brought back the commons to the city, did not leave enough to bury him publicly.  The people buried him by the contribution of a sextans [40] per man.

Titus Geganius and Publius Minucius were next elected consuls.  In this year, when abroad there was complete rest from war, and at home dissensions were healed, another far more serious evil fell upon the state:  first, dearness of provisions, a consequence of the lands lying untilled owing to the secession of the commons; then a famine, such as attacks those who are besieged.  And matters would certainly have ended in the destruction of the slaves and commons, had not the consuls adopted precautionary measures, by sending persons in every direction to buy up corn, not only into Etruria on the coast to the right of Ostia, and through the territory of the Volscians along the coast on the left as far as Cumae, but into Sicily also, in quest of it.  To such an extent had the hatred of their neighbours obliged them to stand in need of assistance from distant countries.  When corn had been bought up at Cumae, the ships were detained as security for the property of the Tarquinians by