and ill retained, overwhelmed him in ruin. This is the same family,
Romans, by whose violence and injustice ye were compelled to banish
yourselves from your native city, and seize on the Sacred mount; the
same, against which ye provided for yourselves the protection of
tribunes; the same, on account of which two armies of you took post on
the Aventine; the same, which violently opposed the laws against
usury, and always the agrarian laws; the same, which broke through the
right of intermarriage between the patricians and the commons; the
same, which shut up the road to curule offices against the commons:
this is a name, more hostile to your liberty by far, than that of the
Tarquins. I pray you, Appius Claudius, though this is now the
hundredth year since the dictatorship of Mamercus Aemilius, though
there have been so many men of the highest characters and abilities
censors, did none of these ever read the twelve tables? none of them
know, that, whatever was the last order of the people, that was law?
Nay, certainly they all knew it; and they therefore obeyed the
Aemilian law, rather than the old one, under which the censors had
been at first created; because it was the last order; and because,
when two laws are contradictory, the new always repeals the old. Do
you mean to say, Appius, that the people are not bound by the Aemilian
law? Or, that the people are bound, and you alone exempted? The
Aemilian law bound those violent censors, Caius Furius and Marcus
Geganius, who showed what mischief that office might do in the state;
when, out of resentment for the limitation of their power, they
disfranchised Mamercus Aemilius, the first man of the age, either in
war or peace. It bound all the censors thenceforward, during the space
of a hundred years. It binds Caius Plautius your colleague, created
under the same auspices, with the same privileges. Did not the people
create him with the fullest privileges with which any censor ever was
created? Or is yours an excepted case, in which this peculiarity and