Ab urbe condita

This is the family, Quirites, by whose violence and lawlessness you were driven out of your City and compelled to occupy the Sacred Mount;

the family against which you won the protection of your tribunes; the family on whose account you took up your position, in two armies, on the Aventine.

It is this family which has always opposed the laws against usury and the agrarian laws; which interfered with the right of intermarriage between patricians and plebeians; which blocked the path of the plebs to curule offices.

This name is much more deadly to your liberties than the name of the Tarquins. Is it really the case, Appius Claudius, that though it is a hundred years since Mamercus Aemilius was Dictator, and there have been all those censors since, men of the highest rank and strength of character, not one of them ever read the Twelve Tables, not one of them knew that the last order of the people is the law for the time being?

Of course they all knew it, and because they knew it they preferred to obey the Aemilian Law rather than that older one by which the censors were originally appointed, simply because the former was

the last passed by order of the people and also because when two laws contradict each other the later one repeals the earlier.