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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
From the time that the number and personal importance of plebeians in the senate had become great and went on increasing, and as in like manner the number of nobleminded patricians was ever extending, who were heartily tired of the vexatious conduct of their unmanageable brother-patricians, and along with the leaders of the plebeians strove joyfully onward,—there must have arisen an important and mischievous discord between the majority of the patres conscripti and the common council of the patres, the curies. It was sure to be the case, that the majority in the latter, possessing no experience gained by the management of public affairs, without any responsibility for their success, and lamenting the times, when the senate represented their claims to their ancient privileges, raised protestations on all occasions, and gave themselves up to great exasperation, especially against the sensible members of their own order, and decried them as apostates. It was necessary that such a state of things should be done away with, in which a faction, that was daily sinking in relative power and importance, disturbed the senate in its vocation as the government.
That this was not the party feeling of one order against the other, but the rational feeling of the good citizens and the friends of their country towards the contemptible disturbers of the peace, is plain even from the fact, that it was a patrician of one of the very first houses, the consul Tiberius Æmilius, who, when the conclusion of the campaign of 411 (416) afforded leisure, invested his collegue Q. Publilius Philo with the power of the dictatorship, in order to remove the evil by laws, which, if proposed by tribunes, would have taken a far more stormy course.
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