4. ¶The populace, as soon as Valerius the dictator became a private citizen, began a most bitter contest, going so far even as to overturn the government.  The well-to-do classes insisted, in the case of debts, upon the very letter of the agreement, refusing to abate one iota of it, and so they both failed to secure its fulfillment and came to be deprived of many other advantages; they had failed to recognize the fact that an extreme of poverty is the heaviest of curses and that the desperation which results from it is, especially if shared by a large number of persons, very difficult to combat.  This is why not a few politicians voluntarily choose the course which is expedient in preference to that which is absolutely just.  Justice is often worsted in an encounter with human nature and sometimes suffers total extinction, whereas expediency, by parting with a mere fragment of justice, preserves the greater portion of it intact.

Now the cause of most of the troubles that the Romans had lay in the unyielding attitude adopted by the more powerful class toward its inferiors.  Many remedies were afforded them against delays in payment of debts, one of which was that in case it happened that several persons had been lending to anybody, they had authority to divide his body piecemeal according to the proportionate amounts that he was owing.  Yet, however much this principle had been declared legal, still it had surely never been put into practice.  For how could a nation have proceeded to such lengths of cruelty when it frequently granted to those convicted of some crime a refuge for their preservation and allowed such as were thrust from the cliffs of the Capitoline to live in case they should survive the experience? (Mai, p.143.  Cp.  Zonaras. 7, 14.)

5. ¶Those who were owing debts took possession of a certain hill and having placed one Gaius at their head proceeded to secure their food from the country as from hostile territory, thereby demonstrating that the laws were weaker than arms, and justice than their desperation.  The senators being in terror both that this party might become more estranged and that the neighboring tribes in view of the crisis might join in an attack upon them proposed terms to the rebels offering everything that they hoped might please them.  The seceders at first were for brazening it out, but were brought to reason in a remarkable way.  When they kept up a series of disorderly shouts, Agrippa, one of the envoys, begged them to hearken to a fable and having obtained their consent spoke as follows.  Once all the Members of Man began a contention against the Belly, saying that they worked and toiled without food or drink, being at the beck and call of the Belly in everything, whereas it endured no labor and alone got its fill of nourishment.  And finally they voted that the Hands should no longer convey aught to the Mouth nor the latter receive anything, to the end that the Belly might so far as possible come to lack both food and drink and so perish.  Now when this measure was determined and put into execution, at first the entire body began to wither away and next it collapsed and gave out.  Accordingly, the members through their own evil state grew conscious that the Belly was the salvation of them and restored to it its nourishment.