s so broken, that they solicited a truce,
first from the consuls, then through their permission from the senate.
They obtained a truce for forty years. Thus the concern regarding the
two wars which were hanging over them being laid aside, whilst there was
some repose from arms, it was determined that a census should be
instituted, because the payment of the debt had changed the owners of
much property. But when the assembly was proclaimed for the appointment
of censors, Caius Marcius Rutilus, who had been the first plebeian
dictator, having declared himself a candidate for the censorship,
disturbed the harmony of the different orders. This step he seemed to
have taken at an unseasonable time; because both the consuls then
happened to be patricians, who declared that they would take no account
of him. But he both succeeded in his undertaking by his own
perseverance, and the tribunes aided him by recovering a right lost in
the election of the consuls; and both the worth of the man brought him
to the level of the highest honour, and also the commons were anxious
that the censorship also should be brought within their participation
through the medium of the same person who had opened a way to the
dictatorship. Nor was any dissent [from this feeling] evinced at the
election, so that Marcius was elected censor along with Cneius Manlius.
This year also had Marcus Fabius as dictator, not by reason of any
terror of war, but in order that the Licinian law should not be observed
at the consular elections. Quintus Servilius was attached to the
dictator as master of the horse. Nor yet did the dictatorship render
that combination of the senators more effectual at the consular
elections, than it had proved at that of the censors.

23. Marcus Popillius Laenas was chosen consul on the part of the commons,
Lucius Cornelius Scipio on that of the patricians. Fortune even rendered
the plebeian consul more distinguished; for when news was brought that a
vast army of the Gauls had pitched their camp in the Latin territory,
Scipio being attacked with a serious fit of illness, the Gallic war was
intrusted out of course to Popillius. He having raised an army with
great energy, after he had ordered the younger citizens to assemble in
arms outside the Capuan gate, and the quaestors to carry the standards
from the treasury to the same place, having completed four legions, he
gave the surplus of the men to the praetor Publius Valerius Publicola,
rec