ctator, "in having saved the republic."

15. He then ordered the multitude, who were much agitated, not knowing
what judgment to form of the deed, to be called to an assembly: and he
openly declared, "that Maelius had been justly put to death, even though
he may have been innocent of the charge of aiming at regal power, who,
when summoned to attend the dictator by the master of the horse, had not
come. That he himself had taken his seat to examine into the case; that,
after it had been investigated, Maelius should have met a result
corresponding to his deserts; that when employing force, in order that
he might not commit himself to a trial, he had been checked by force.
Nor should they proceed with him as with a citizen, who, born in a free
state amid laws and rights, in a city from which he knew that kings had
been expelled, and on the same year the sons of the king's sister and
the children of the consul, the liberator of his country, had been put
to death by their father, on a plot for readmitting the royal family
into the city having been discovered, from which Collatinus Tarquinius
the consul, through a hatred of his name, was ordered to resign his
office and go into exile; in which capital punishment was inflicted on
Spurius Cassius several years after for forming designs to assume the
sovereignty; in which the decemvirs were recently punished with
confiscation, exile, and death, in consequence of regal tyranny in that
city, Spurius Maelius conceived a hope of attaining regal power. And who
was this man? Although no nobility, no honours, no deserts should open
to any man the road to domination, yet still the Claudii and Cassii, by
reason of the consulates, the decemvirates, the honours of their own and
those of their ancestors, and from the splendour of their families, had
raised their aspiring minds to heights to which it was impious to raise
them: that Spurius Maelius, to whom a tribuneship of the commons should
rather be an object of wishes than of hope, a wealthy corn-merchant, had
conceived the hope to purchase the liberty of his countrymen for two
pounds of corn; had supposed that a people victorious over all their
neighbours could be cajoled into servitude by throwing them a morsel of
food; so that a person whom the state could scarcely digest as a
senator, it should tolerate as king, possessing the ensigns and
authority of Romulus their founder, who had descended from and had
returned to the gods. This was