3.16
The state of affairs
became clearer to the senators and consuls. They
were, however, apprehensive lest behind these openly
declared aims there should be some design of the
Veientines or Sabines, and whilst there was this
large hostile force within the City the Etruscan and
Sabine legions should appear, and then the Volscians
and Aequi, their standing foes, should come, not
into their territory to ravage, but into the City
itself, already partly captured. Many and various
were their fears. What they most dreaded was a
rising of the slaves, when every man would have an
enemy in his own house, whom it would be alike
unsafe to trust and not to trust, since by
withdrawing confidence he might be made a more
determined enemy. Such threatening and overwhelming
dangers could only be surmounted by unity and
concord, and no fears were felt as to the tribunes
or the plebs. That evil was mitigated, for as it
only broke out when there was a respite from other
evils, it was believed to have subsided now in the
dread of foreign aggression. Yet it, more than
almost anything else, helped to further depress the
fortunes of the sinking State. For such madness
seized the tribunes that they maintained that it was
not war but an empty phantom of war which had
settled in the Capitol, in order to divert the
thoughts of the people from the Law. Those friends,
they said, and clients of the patricians would
depart more silently than they had come if they
found their noisy demonstration frustrated by the
passing of the Law. They then summoned the people to
lay aside their arms and form an Assembly for the
purpose of carrying the Law. Meantime the consuls,
more alarmed at the action of the tribunes than at
the nocturnal enemy, convened a meeting of the
senate.