1Then the plebeians began to look round at the faces of the patricians and to catch at a breath of liberty from the very quarter from which, in their fear of slavery, they had brought the state into its present condition. 2The leading senators hated the decemvirs and hated the plebs; 2they did not approve of what was being done, yet believed that it was happening to those who had deserved it; 2they were unwilling to help men who, rushing greedily towards liberty, had slipped into slavery; they even wanted the wrongs heaped up, so that through weariness of the present the two consuls and the former state of affairs might at last come to be longed for.
4By now the greater part of the year had gone by, and two tablets of laws had been added to the ten tablets of the year before, and nothing was left, once these laws too had been carried in the centuriate assembly, to explain why the state should need that magistracy. 5Men were waiting to see how soon elections would be proclaimed for the choice of consuls. 5The plebs was considering only this, by what means they might restore the tribunes' power, the bulwark of liberty, a thing now in abeyance, while meanwhile no mention of elections was made. 6And the decemvirs, who at first had shown themselves to the plebs surrounded by former tribunes, because that was thought popular, had now fenced their flanks with young patricians.
6Gangs of these had besieged the tribunals. 7These men plundered the plebs and the plebs' goods, since fortune favoured the more powerful in whatever had been coveted. 8And by now not even backs were spared: some were beaten with rods, others put under the axe, and, so that the cruelty should not go unrewarded, the gift of the owner's goods followed his punishment. 8Corrupted by this payment, the young nobles not only failed to oppose wrongdoing, but openly preferred their own licence to the liberty of all.