1Then Marcus Valerius and Spurius Verginius were made consuls. 1There was peace at home and abroad; 1the corn supply suffered because of unseasonable rains. 1A law was passed for making the Aventine public land. 1The same tribunes of the plebs were re-elected. 2In the following year, when Titus Romilius and Gaius Veturius were consuls, they kept urging the law at all their meetings: they were ashamed, they said, of their number, increased to no purpose, if the matter lay idle through their two years just as it had lain through the whole previous five-year period. 2Just when they were busiest with this, frightened messengers come from Tusculum saying that the Aequi were in Tusculan territory.
3That people's recent service made them ashamed to delay help. 3Both consuls were sent with an army and find the enemy in his usual position, on Algidus. 4There a battle was fought. 4Over seven thousand of the enemy were slain, the rest put to flight, and enormous plunder was won. 4The consuls sold it because the treasury was empty. 4Yet the affair caused resentment in the army, and it also gave the tribunes material for accusing the consuls before the plebs. 5And so, as soon as they left office, in the consulship of Spurius Tarpeius and Aulus Aternius, a day was named for their trial, for Romilius by Gaius Calvius Cicero, tribune of the plebs, for Veturius by Lucius Alienus, aedile of the plebs.
6Both were condemned, to the great indignation of the senators, Romilius to a fine of ten thousand asses, Veturius to one of fifteen thousand. 6Nor had this misfortune of the former consuls made the new consuls any more sluggish; 6they said that they too could be condemned, but that the plebs and the tribunes could not carry the law. 7Then the tribunes, abandoning the law, which had grown old since it was first proposed, dealt more gently with the senators: let them at last put an end to the struggles. 7If laws from the plebs displeased them, let them at least allow lawgivers to be appointed in common, both from the plebs and from the senators, who would propose what was useful to both and what would serve to make liberty equal.
8The senators did not reject the idea; 8but they said that no one should propose laws unless he was one of the senators. 8Since they agreed about the laws and differed only about who should propose them, envoys were sent to Athens, Spurius Postumius Albus, Aulus Manlius and Publius Sulpicius Camerinus, with orders to copy out the famous laws of Solon and to learn the institutions, customs and laws of the other states of Greece.