1Then Spurius Cassius and Proculus Verginius were made consuls. 1A treaty was struck with the Hernici; 1two-thirds of their land were taken from them. 1The consul Cassius intended to divide this, half to the Latins, half to the plebs. 2To this gift he was adding a good deal of land which, he charged, was public but held by private persons. 2This alarmed many of the senators, the holders themselves, with danger to their property; 2but the senators also felt a public anxiety, that the consul was building up through his largess a power dangerous to liberty. 3Then for the first time an agrarian law was proposed, which has never since, down to our own memory, been debated without the greatest upheavals.
4The other consul resisted the largess, with the backing of the senators and with not all the plebs against him, which had at first begun to disdain a gift made common: it had passed from citizens to allies; 5then too it often heard the consul Verginius in assemblies, prophesying as it were, saying that his colleague's gift was pestilent, that those lands would bring slavery to those who received them, that the way was being paved to kingship. 5For why else were the allies and the Latin name being brought in? 6What was the point of giving back a third of the captured land to the Hernici, enemies a little while ago, unless it was so that those nations might have Cassius as their leader in place of Coriolanus?
6The man who spoke against the agrarian law and vetoed it had now begun to be popular. 7Then both consuls vied with each other in indulging the plebs. 7Verginius said he would allow lands to be assigned, provided they were assigned to no one but a Roman citizen; 8Cassius, because in the agrarian largess he had courted the allies and so stood lower with the citizens, in order to win back the citizens' hearts by another gift, ordered that the money received for the Sicilian grain should be paid back to the people. 9This in truth the plebs spurned, just as if it were a down-payment for kingship; 9so deeply, through the suspicion of kingship rooted in men's minds, were his gifts rejected, as though they had more than enough of everything.
10It is agreed that as soon as he left office he was condemned and put to death. 10There are those who say that his father was responsible for that punishment: that having tried the case at home, he scourged him and put him to death, and dedicated his son's private property to Ceres; 10that a statue was made from it and inscribed, 'Given from the Cassian family.' 11I find in some writers, and this is closer to belief, that a day was named for him by the quaestors Caeso Fabius and Lucius Valerius on a charge of treason, and that, after he was condemned by the judgement of the people, his house was pulled down by public order.
11That is the open space in front of the temple of Tellus. 11However, whether that trial was domestic or public, he is condemned in the consulship of Servius Cornelius and Quintus Fabius.