Ab urbe condita

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?