1A victory honourably won over the enemy was disfigured at home by a shameful judgment of the people about the boundaries of allies. 2The people of Aricia and Ardea, having often contended in war over disputed land, and worn out by many disasters on both sides, took the Roman people as arbiter. 3When they had come to plead their case, and an assembly of the people had been granted by the magistrates, it was argued with great vehemence. 3And when the witnesses had been produced and the tribes should have been called and the people should have proceeded to vote, Publius Scaptius, a plebeian of great age, rose and said: 'Consuls, if I may speak about the commonwealth, I will not allow the people to go wrong in this case.' 4When the consuls said he should not be heard, as an idle talker, and ordered him to be removed as he shouted that the public cause was being betrayed, he appealed to the tribunes.
5The tribunes, as they are almost always ruled by the multitude rather than ruling it, yielded to the plebs, eager to hear, and let Scaptius say what he wished. 6Then he began: he was in his eighty-third year and had served as a soldier in the very land in question, not as a young man, for he was already serving his twentieth campaign, when the war was fought at Corioli. 6So he brought forward a matter forgotten through lapse of time but fixed in his own memory: the land in dispute had belonged to the territory of Corioli, and when Corioli was captured it had become by right of war the public property of the Roman people.
7He wondered with what face the people of Ardea and Aricia, who had never claimed rights over the land while Corioli still stood, hoped to snatch it from the Roman people, whom they had made judge instead of owner. 8He had little time of life left; 8yet he had not been able to bring himself not to claim, now as an old man, with his voice, the only means he could, the land which as a soldier he had helped to capture with his hand, doing his part. 8He strongly urged the people not to condemn its own cause through a useless sense of shame.