the centuries to entrust to him the consulate in the year 263, he is
reported to have proposed, according to one version, the suspension of
the sales of corn from the state-stores, till the hungry people should
give up the tribunate; according to another version, the direct
abolition of the tribunate itself. Impeached by the tribunes so that
his life was in peril, it is said that he left the city, but only to
return at the head of a Volscian army; that when he was on the point
of conquering the city of his fathers for the public foe, the earnest
appeal of his mother touched his conscience; and that thus he expiated
his first treason by a second, and both by death. How much of this
is true cannot be determined; but the story, over which the naive
misrepresentations of the Roman annalists have shed a patriotic glory,
affords a glimpse of the deep moral and political disgrace of these
conflicts between the orders. Of a similar stamp was the surprise
of the Capitol by a band of political refugees, led by a Sabine chief,
Appius Herdonius, in the year 294; they summoned the slaves to arms,
and it was only after a violent conflict, and by the aid of the
Tusculans who hastened to render help, that the Roman burgess-force
overcame the Catilinarian band. The same character of fanatical
exasperation marks other events of this epoch, the historical
significance of which can no longer be apprehended in the lying
family narratives; such as the predominance of the Fabian clan which
furnished one of the two consuls from 269 to 275, and the reaction
against it, the emigration of the Fabii from Rome, and their
annihilation by the Etruscans on the Cremera (277). Still more odious
was the murder of the tribune of the people, Gnaeus Genucius, who had
ventured to call two consulars to account, and who on the morning of
the day fixed for the impeachment was found dead in bed (281). The
immediate effect of this misdeed was the Publilian law (283), one of
the most momentous in its consequences with which Roman history has to