Ab urbe condita

All preparations were deferred with the sole purpose of preventing any action from being taken by the plebeian consul; everything was quiet and silent in the City, as though a suspension of all business had been proclaimed, with the one exception of the tribunes of the plebs.

They did not silently submit to the procedure of the nobility in appropriating to themselves three patrician magistrates, sitting in curule chairs and clothed in the praetexta like consuls, as a set-off against one plebeian consul —

the praetor even administering justice, as though he were a colleague of the consuls and elected under the same auspices.

The senate felt somewhat ashamed of their resolution by which they had limited the curule aediles to their own order; it had been agreed that they should be elected in alternate years from the plebs; afterwards it was left open. The[*](Pestilence in Rome —Death of Camillus.) consuls for the following year were L. Genucius and Q.

Servilius. Matters were quiet as regarded domestic troubles or foreign wars, but, lest there should be too great a feeling of security, a pestilence broke aediles, and three tribunes of the plebs fell victims, and in the population generally there was a corresponding proportion of deaths. The most illustrious victim was M. F. Camillus, whose death, though occurring in ripe old age, was bitterly

lamented. He was, it may be truly said, an exceptional man in every change of fortune; before he went into exile foremost in peace and war, rendered still more illustrious when actually in exile by the regret which the State felt for his loss, and the eagerness with which after its capture it implored his assistance, and quite as much so by the success with which, after being restored to his country, he restored his country's fortunes together with his

own. For five-and-twenty years after this he lived fully up to his reputation, and was counted worthy to be named next to Romulus, as the second founder of the City.

[*](Scenic Representations first introduced.)[*](On the subject of Scenic Representations in earlier ages of the Reublic sonsult Mommsen, I. pp. 224 and 452.) —The pestilence lasted into the following year. The new consuls were C. Sulpicius Peticus and C. Licinius

Stolo. Nothing worth mentioning took place, except that in order to secure the peace of the gods a lectisternium was instituted, the third since the foundation of the