1But a Volscian war was threatening, and the state, at odds with itself, was ablaze with internal hatred between senators and plebs, chiefly on account of those bound over for debt. 1They complained loudly that while they fought abroad for liberty and empire, at home they were captured and oppressed by their fellow citizens, and that the liberty of the plebs was safer in war than in peace, and among enemies than among citizens; 2and this resentment, growing of its own accord, was inflamed by the striking misfortune of one man. 3A man of great age, bearing the marks of all his sufferings, flung himself into the forum. 4His clothing was covered in filth, and the state of his body was still more hideous, wasted with pallor and leanness; 4besides this, his long beard and hair had given his face a savage look.
4Yet he was recognised in spite of such great disfigurement, and people said that he had commanded a company, and in their pity openly recounted his other military distinctions; 4he himself displayed scars on the front of his chest, witnesses to honourable fighting in several places. 5When they asked why he was in that condition and why so disfigured, while the crowd had gathered round him almost like an assembly, he said that while he was serving in the Sabine war, since he had not only lost his crops through the plundering of his land but his farmhouse had been burned, everything looted, his cattle driven off, and a tax imposed at a time unfair to him, he had run into debt.
6This debt, swollen by interest, had first stripped him of his father's and grandfather's land, then of his other possessions, and finally, like a wasting disease, had reached his person; 6he had been taken off by his creditor not into slavery but into a prison-workhouse and a torture-chamber. 7Then he displayed his back, disfigured by fresh marks of the lash. 7At this sight and story a great outcry arises. 7The uproar no longer keeps within the forum, but spreads everywhere through the whole city. 8The debt-bondsmen, in chains and out of them, rush into the streets from every side and implore the protection of the Quirites. 8Nowhere is a willing companion for sedition lacking; 8in many crowds everywhere, through all the streets, people run shouting into the forum.
9Those of the senators who happened to be in the forum fell in with this mob at great danger to themselves; 10and they would not have kept their hands off them, had not the consuls, Publius Servilius and Appius Claudius, quickly intervened to put down the sedition. 10But the crowd turned on them and displayed their chains and their other disfigurements. 11This, they said, was what they had earned, each reproachfully recalling his own service, one in one place, another in another; 11they demanded, much more threateningly than suppliantly, that the consuls summon the senate, and they surround the senate-house themselves, meaning to be the arbiters and directors of public policy.
12Only a very few of the senators, whom chance had brought there, were gathered by the consuls; 12the rest were kept away by fear not only from the senate-house but even from the forum, and nothing could be done because the senate was so thinly attended. 13Then indeed the crowd thought that they were being mocked and put off, that those of the senators who were absent were absent not by chance, not from fear, but to obstruct the business, that the consuls themselves were evading the issue, and that their sufferings were plainly being made a mockery. 14It had almost come to the point where not even the majesty of the consuls would restrain men's anger, when the absent senators, uncertain whether they would incur more danger by delaying or by coming, at last come into the senate; 14and though the house was full, there was no real agreement, not only among the senators but not even between the consuls themselves.
15Appius, a man of violent temperament, thought the matter should be handled by consular authority: once one or two were arrested, the rest would be quiet; 15Servilius, more inclined to gentle remedies, thought that it was both safer and easier for inflamed spirits to be bent than broken.