consistently with the
practice of antiquity, no other than a consul, or commander-in-chief,
could dedicate a temple. This occasioned a law to be proposed to the
people, by direction of the senate, that no person should dedicate a
temple, or an altar, without an order from the senate, or from a
majority of the plebeian tribunes. The incident which I am about to
mention would be trivial in itself, were it not an instance of the
freedom assumed by plebeians in opposition to the pride of the nobles.
When Flavius had come to make a visit to his colleague, who was sick,
and when, by an arrangement between some young nobles who were sitting
there, they did not rise on his entrance, he ordered his curule chair
to be brought thither, and from his honourable seat of office enjoyed
the sight of his enemies tortured with envy. However, a low faction,
which had gathered strength during the censorship of Appius Claudius,
had made Flavius an aedile; for he was the first who degraded the
senate, by electing into it the immediate descendants of freed men;
and when no one allowed that election as valid, and when he had not
acquired in the senate-house that influence in the city which he had
been aiming at, by distributing men of the meanest order among all the
several tribes, he thus corrupted the assemblies both of the forum and
of the field of Mars; and so much indignation did the election of
Flavius excite, that most of the nobles laid aside their gold rings
and bracelets in consequence of it. From that time the state was split
into two parties. The uncorrupted part of the people, who favoured and
supported the good, held one side; the faction of the rabble, the
other; until Quintus Fabius and Publius Decius were made censors; and
Fabius, both for the sake of concord, and at the same time to prevent
the elections remaining in the hands of the lowest of the people,
purged the rest of the tribes of all the rabble of the forum, and
threw it into four, and called them city tribes. And this procedure,
we are told, gave such universal satisfaction, that, by this
regulation in the orders of the state, he obtained the surname of
Maximus, which he had not obtained by his many victories. The annual
review of the knights, on the ides of July, is also said to have been
instituted by him.

BOOK X.

_Submission of the Marcians accepted. The college of Augurs
augmented from four to nine. The law of appeal to the people carried
by Valeriu