1After the capture of Antium, Titus Aemilius and Quintus Fabius became consuls. 1This was the Fabius who alone had survived when his clan was wiped out at the Cremera. 2Already in his former consulship Aemilius had been the advocate of giving land to the plebs; 2and so in his second consulship too the supporters of land reform had raised themselves to the hope of a law, and the tribunes, thinking that a measure often attempted against the consuls could certainly be carried with a consul as its helper, took it up, and the consul held to his opinion. 3The landholders and a great part of the senators, complaining that the leading man of the state was flaunting himself in tribunician proceedings and making himself popular by giving away what belonged to others, had turned the odium of the whole affair from the tribunes onto the consul.
3A fierce struggle was at hand, had not Fabius settled the matter with a plan bitter to neither party: 4a fair amount of land, he said, had been taken from the Volscians the previous year under the leadership and auspices of Titus Quinctius; 4a colony could be sent out to Antium, a nearby, well-placed city on the sea; 5in this way the plebs would go onto the land without complaints from the landholders, and the state would be in harmony. 5This proposal was accepted. 6He appointed Titus Quinctius, Aulus Verginius and Publius Furius as a board of three for allotting the land. 7Those who wished to receive land were told to give in their names.
7At once, as happens, plenty bred disdain, and so few gave their names that Volscian colonists were added to make up the number; 7the rest of the multitude preferred to demand land at Rome rather than receive it elsewhere. 8The Aequi asked Quintus Fabius for peace — he had come there with an army — and themselves made it void by a sudden raid into Latin territory.