1Next Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius were consuls. 1Manlius drew the Veientes as his province. 1Yet there was no war; 1at their request a truce for forty years was granted, with grain and pay for the troops demanded of them. 2Peace abroad is at once followed by discord at home. 2The plebs were raging under the tribunes' goading over the agrarian law. 2The consuls, deterred not at all by the condemnation of Menenius, not at all by the danger of Servilius, resist with all their might. 2As they left office, Gnaeus Genucius, tribune of the plebs, seized upon them. 2Lucius Aemilius and Opiter Verginius enter upon the consulship; 3in some annals I find Vopiscus Julius as consul instead of Verginius.
3This year — whatever consuls it had — Furius and Manlius, as defendants before the people, go about in mourning dress, appealing not so much to the plebs as to the younger patricians. 3They urge and warn them to keep away from offices and the administration of the state; 4they should regard the consular fasces, the purple-bordered toga and the curule chair as nothing else than the pomp of a funeral; 5decked with these brilliant insignia as with the fillets of sacrificial victims, men were marked out for death. 5But if the consulship held such charm, let them now make up their minds that the consulship had been captured and crushed by the tribunician power; 6the consul, like a tribune's attendant, had to do everything at the tribune's nod and command; 6if he stirred, if he paid regard to the senators, if he believed there was anything in the state besides the plebs, let him set before his eyes the exile of Gnaeus Marcius and the condemnation and death of Menenius.
7Fired by these words, the senators thereafter held their deliberations not in public but in private, withdrawn from the knowledge of the many. 7There, since only this was agreed, that the defendants must be rescued, by right or by wrong, the most savage proposal was the one most approved, and there was no lack of a sponsor for a deed however audacious. 8So on the day of the trial, when the plebs stood in the Forum in eager expectation, they at first wondered why the tribune did not come down; 8then, as the delay was now becoming more suspicious, they believed he had been frightened off by the leading men and complained that the public cause had been deserted and betrayed; 9at last, those who had been waiting at the tribune's vestibule report that he has been found dead at home.
9When rumour carried this to the whole assembly, just as a battle line is routed when its leader is slain, so they slipped away in every direction, one here, one there. 9Especial panic had seized the tribunes, warned by their colleague's death how little help the sacred laws gave. 9Nor did the senators bear their joy with enough restraint; 10and so far was anyone from repenting of the crime, that even the innocent wished to be thought to have done it, and it was openly said that the tribunician power must be tamed by violence.