1While Horatius was shouting this, and the decemvirs could find no limit either to their anger or to forgiveness, nor see how the affair would turn out, Gaius Claudius, who was the uncle of the decemvir Appius, made a speech more like an entreaty than a reproach, begging him by the shades of his own brother, Appius' father, to remember rather the civil fellowship into which he had been born than the pact wickedly struck with his colleagues. 3He begged this, he said, much more for Appius' sake than for the state's; 4for the state would claim its rights from them unwilling, if it could not from them willing; 4but from a great struggle great passions were usually aroused; 4it was their outcome that he dreaded.
5Although the decemvirs forbade anyone to speak on anything other than what they had put before the house, they felt shame at interrupting Claudius. 5So he completed his motion, that he was in favour of no decree of the senate being passed. 6And everyone took it to mean that Claudius had judged them to be private citizens; 6and many of the former consuls assented in a word. 7Another motion, harsher in appearance, had considerably less force: the one which bade the patricians meet to appoint an interrex. 7For by proposing any decision at all they were judging those who were holding the senate to be magistrates, whereas the man who proposed that no decree of the senate be passed had made them private citizens.
8So, with the decemvirs' cause already slipping, Lucius Cornelius Maluginensis, brother of the decemvir Marcus Cornelius, having been deliberately kept back to speak last of the former consuls, defended his brother and his colleagues by pretending concern for the war, saying repeatedly that he wondered by what fate it had come about that the decemvirs were being attacked either solely or chiefly by those who had themselves sought the decemvirate; 10or why it was that, when for so many months, with the state at leisure, nobody had disputed whether lawful magistrates were at the head of affairs, they should only now, when the enemy were almost at the gates, sow civil discord, unless it was because they thought that in confusion what they were doing would be less clear.
11For the rest — since it was not right that a judgment on so great a matter should be prejudged while minds were occupied with a greater care — his view was that the charge Valerius and Horatius were bringing, that the decemvirs had gone out of office by the Ides of May, should be dealt with in a senate debate once the wars that threatened were finished and the state restored to calm; and that Appius Claudius should even now prepare himself in the knowledge that he must render account of the elections which he himself, as decemvir, had held for electing decemvirs, as to whether they had been elected for one year or until the laws that were lacking had been carried.
13For the present, he proposed that everything except the war should be set aside; 13and if they thought the report of it had been spread falsely, and that not only the messengers but even the envoys of the Tusculans had brought empty tales, he proposed that scouts be sent to bring back more reliable information; 14but if credit were given to both messengers and envoys, the levy should be held at the earliest opportunity, the decemvirs should lead the armies wherever each of them thought fit, and no other business should take precedence.