1But we are told that they came to the senate house more obediently than they gave their opinions submissively. 2It is recorded that Lucius Valerius Potitus, after Appius Claudius had put the question and before opinions were asked in order, stirred up an uproar by demanding leave to speak on the state of the nation and, when the decemvirs threateningly forbade it, by declaring that he would go out to the plebs. 3Nor less fiercely, it is said, did Marcus Horatius Barbatus enter the fray, calling them ten Tarquins and reminding them that it was under the leadership of the Valerii and the Horatii that the kings had been driven out.
4Nor had men then grown sick of the name, seeing that it was right for Jupiter to be called by it, and Romulus, founder of the city, and the kings after him, and that it had even been retained in religious rites as a solemn title; 5it was the pride and violence of the king that they had loathed then. 5And if these were not to be endured then in that same king or a king's son, who would endure them in so many private citizens? 6Let them take care that by forbidding men to speak freely in the senate house they did not make them raise their voices outside it as well.
6Nor could he see why he, a private citizen, should have less right to call the people to an assembly than they had to convene the senate. 7Let them try, whenever they liked, how much stronger resentment was in claiming its own liberty than greed in an unjust domination. 8They were raising the matter of the Sabine war, as if the Roman people had any greater war than with those who, elected to make laws, had left no law in the state; who had abolished elections, annual magistracies and the rotation of command, the one thing that made liberty equal; who, though private citizens, held the fasces and kingly power.
9After the kings were expelled there had been patrician magistrates, and later, after the secession of the plebs, plebeian ones had been created: to which party, he kept asking, did they belong? 9The people's? 9Why, what had they ever done through the people? 9The nobles'? 9Men who for almost a year now had not held a senate, and now held one in such a way as to forbid speaking about the state? 10Let them not place too much hope in the fear of others; 10what men were suffering now seemed to them worse than what they feared.