1Having tried both courses well enough, the consuls then at last said: 'So that you may not say you were not warned, conscript fathers, a great sedition is upon us. 1We demand that those who most loudly denounce our cowardice should stand by us as we hold the levy. 1Since that is your wish, we shall act at the discretion of the fiercest among you.' 1They return to the tribunal; 2they deliberately order one of those in full view to be called by name. 2When he stood silent, and a knot of men had gathered round him to prevent his being harmed, the consuls send a lictor to him. 3When the lictor was driven off, then indeed those of the senators who were attending the consuls, crying out that it was an outrage, rush down from the tribunal to help the lictor.
4But when the attack had turned from the lictor, who had been prevented only from making the arrest, upon the senators, the brawl was settled by the consuls' intervention; in it, however, without stone or weapon, there had been more shouting and anger than injury. 5The senate, summoned in tumult, is consulted in still greater tumult, those who had been struck demanding an inquiry and all the fiercest voting not so much by speeches as by shouting and din. 6At length, when tempers had subsided and the consuls had reproached them that there was no more sanity in the senate-house than in the forum, the debate began to proceed in order.
7There were three proposals. 7Publius Verginius did not extend the matter to all; 7he proposed that action should be taken only about those who, trusting the pledge of the consul Publius Servilius, had served in the Volscian, Auruncan and Sabine wars. 7Titus Larcius said it was not the time for merely repaying services; 8the whole plebs was sunk in debt, and the trouble could not be checked unless all were provided for; 8indeed, if some were in one condition and others in another, discord would be inflamed rather than calmed. 9Appius Claudius, harsh by nature and made savage besides by the plebs' hatred on the one side and the senators' praises on the other, said that such turmoil had been stirred up not by misery but by licence, and that the plebs were running riot rather than raging.
10This evil had sprung precisely from the right of appeal; 10for consuls had threats, not authority, when it was permitted to appeal to those who had shared in the offence. 11'Come,' he said, 'let us appoint a dictator, from whom there is no appeal; this frenzy with which everything is now ablaze will at once fall silent. 12Let me see anyone strike a lictor then, when he knows that the right over his back and his life lies with that one man whose majesty he has violated.'