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But the sword, of which the Consuls spoke, when they were envoys to the Sacred Hill, pleased the Plebeians better than the shield then recommended to

their use. Appius Claudius was first brought to trial; and at the command of Virginius, now armed as Tribune against the simple citizen, the guilty Decemvir was committed to prison, where he died.o1 One of his colleagues met the same fate; others escaped with confiscation and banishment; while the client who had claimed the hapless maiden for his slave fled, as if too mean for punishment. "The soul of Virginia," says the heathen historian, "happier in death than in life, found rest, at last, when the vengeance it required was fully paid."" Duilius, the leader in the secession, and now, as has been mentioned, among the Tribunes, was the first to declare himself against the work of persecution and revenge.23 He had already carried a law to secure the election of Tribunes, without interruption, from year to year; ;24 and he may well have thought that the Plebeians, by pushing their advantages too far, would endanger those they had already acquired. It was not much, indeed, that they could have insisted upon, after what they had received from the Patricians. who supported their resolution.

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Nevertheless, men were still restless and things still unsettled. The Tribes 25 took greater authority upon themselves, and granted the Consuls a triumph, refused them for party reasons in the Senate; yet the law does not seem to have been broken by being stretched, so much as by being loosened. Many of the Tribunes, perceiving, probably, an approaching time of trial, made bold to seek their reelection; but Duilius, who had been in office when some of his present colleagues were but boys, dissuaded or prevented them from receiving the votes of the assembly, over which he happened, possibly on account of his age, to preside. The stanch old Plebeian, however, was unable to subdue the wrangling which the election, for some reason or other, perhaps because the Patricians and their clients were taking part in it for the first time, excited on all sides. Five Tribunes only were chosen by the people; and when it was proposed to add the whole ten in office to their number, Duilius dismissed the assembly, saying it was the duty of the five elected, not of the Tribes or the former Tribunes, to complete their number.26 Amongst the five then chosen, as it were supplementarily, were two Patricians, who had both been Consuls; the only memorial, like a single fragment of a scroll, of the efforts of the higher estate, at this time, to regain their supremacy, that had certainly suffered in the few preceding years, but par

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ticularly in the last. For the moment, however, the lower estate was determined to hold its own; and one of its eight Tribunes, as the Plebeians in office would be regarded, carried a law, forthwith, that the tribunitian elections ever afterward should be kept open until the full number of ten magistrates were chosen by the Tribes.28

Some years of difficulty succeeded, in which it is not very evident whether the upper or the popular faction were in authority. The next figure to be seen, however, is that of Caius Canuleius, a Tribune 29 and an ardent supporter of the Plebeians. It was partly through superstition, perhaps, as well as policy, that the Plebeians had been prohibited in the Twelve Tables from marriage with the Patricians, whose nuptials, on account of the auspices they alone possessed, were considered to be hallowed above those of any other class in Rome. If it were so, it was equally through superstition as through policy that the Plebeians desired to be relieved from the prohibition that condemned them to an inferior condition as husbands and as wives, at the same time that it precluded them from alliance with those whom they now considered their fellow-citizens. Canuleius, accordingly, proposed in his tribuneship a bill to repeal the restriction upon intermarriage between Patricians and Plebeians.30 The retort of the Consuls against the Tribune, as he was afterwards urging his cause, that the Plebeians had nothing to

28 Called, from its proposer, the Trebonian Law. Liv., III. 65.

29 A. C. 445.

30 Cic., Rep., II. 37. Liv., IV. 1.

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do with the auspices, which would be polluted by any connection with them or their mongrel offspring, seems to prove that Canuleius introduced the question of intermarriage because it led most directly to that of the auspices he rather wished to claim. The second demand he made touched the point more boldly. Eight of his nine colleagues joined him in preferring a second bill before the Tribes, that the Consuls should be chosen indiscriminately from both estates of the Commonwealth.33 The Plebeians could not, of course, be Consuls without obtaining the auspices; but it was rather to daunt the Patricians into the acceptance of his first proposal, that Canuleius dared to ask for his order a place in the consulship, which would give them a greater share in the auspices than he had sought through intermarriage.

Resistance was to be expected; and it soon appeared. But when wars and enlistments began to be rumored, in order, says the historian, to silence the Tribunes, Canuleius, standing without the open door of the temple in which the Senate were assembled, swore, that, so long as he lived, there should be neither enlistment nor war, until the Tribes had been allowed to decide upon the bills proposed by himself and his colleagues. The menace being unheeded, and some severe action on the part of the Senate or the

31 Liv., IV. 1. 6. "Plebes maxime indignatione exarsit, quod auspicari, tanquam invisi diis immortalibus, negarentur posse."

32 Dion. Hal., XI. 53.
33 Liv., IV. 1.
53 et seq.

Dion. Hal., XI.

Patricians perhaps ensuing, an insurrection of the lower order broke out under the instigation, or, at all events, the direction, of Canuleius. Of the sad and furious scenes that followed, but one remains reported, in which we see the Janiculan hill beyond the Tiber in the possession of an armed and angry multitude.34 The bill, however, concerning the marriage of the Plebeians under auspices, as it ought to be styled, was passed in the midst of these unknown tumults; and it was very probably at the same time, or immediately afterwards, that the Tribunes were invested with the right of taking the auspices before the Tribes.36 The moment of such gains was that from which the Plebeians might most accurately date their social and their political liberty.

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It still remained, however, to settle the second project of the Tribunes concerning the consulship, upon which the Plebeians would be less intent after having won the privilege more directly calculated to affect them all. The Patricians, however, were on their guard. In a secret meeting, from which Valerius and Horatius are mentioned as having purposely absented themselves, it was first proposed, in plain language, to murder the Tribunes, but finally determined, that, if the Plebeians, who had strangely increased of late, in power as well as in pretension,

34 Florus, I. 25.

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35 It is in this connection that Duni's ingenious theories are to be most clearly accepted: Il dritto del connubio veniva ad essere, come un fondamento de' dritti civili "

(Cap. VI.); because, as he says, "l'originaria di lui [il cittadino Romano, era] fondata sulla ragione degli Auspicj. ." Cittadino, etc., di Roma, Cap. IV.

36 Zonaras, VII. 19.

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