Seeing that conviction was certain, the proud patrician avoided
humiliation by suicide.

Nevertheless the border wars still continued, and the plebeians suffered
much. To the evils of debt and want were added about this time the
horrors of pestilential disease, which visited the Roman territory
several times at that period. In one year (B.C. 464) the two consuls,
two of the four augurs, and the curio Maximus, who was the head of all
the patricians, were swept off--a fact which implies the death of a vast
number of less distinguished persons. The government was administered by
the plebeian aediles, under the control of senatorial interreges. The
Volscians and Aequians ravaged the country up to the walls of Rome; and
the safety of the city must be attributed to the Latins and Hernici, not
to the men of Rome.

Meantime the tribunes had in vain demanded a full execution of the
Agrarian law. But in the year B.C. 462, one of the Sacred College, by
name C. Terentilius Harsa, came forward with a bill, the object of which
was to give the plebeians a surer footing in the state. This man
perceived that as long as the consuls retained their almost despotic
power, and were elected by the influence of the patricians, this order
had it in its power to thwart all measures, even after they were passed,
which tended to advance the interests of the plebeians. He therefore no
longer demanded the execution of the Agrarian law, but proposed that a
commission of ten men (_decemviri_) should be appointed to draw up
constitutional laws for regulating the future relations of the
patricians and plebeians.

The Reform Bill of Terentilius was, as might be supposed, vehemently
resisted by the patrician burgesses. But the plebeians supported their