ch. 163.16The state of affairs became clearer to the senators and
consuls. They were, however, apprehensive lest behind these
openly declared aims there should be some design of the
Veientines or Sabines, and whilst there was this large
hostile force within the City the Etruscan and Sabine legions
should appear, and then the Volscians and Aequi, their
standing foes, should come, not into their territory to
ravage, but into the City itself, already partly captured.
Many and various were their fears. What they most dreaded
was a rising of the slaves, when every man would have an
enemy in his own house, whom it would be alike unsafe to
trust and not to trust, since by withdrawing confidence he
might be made a more determined enemy. Such threatening and
overwhelming dangers could only be surmounted by unity and
concord, and no fears were felt as to the tribunes or the
plebs. That evil was mitigated, for as it only broke out when
there was a respite from other evils, it was believed to have
subsided now in the dread of foreign aggression. Yet it, more
than almost anything else, helped to further depress the
fortunes of the sinking State. For such madness seized the
tribunes that they maintained that it was not war but an
empty phantom of war which had settled in the Capitol, in
order to divert the thoughts of the people from the Law.
Those friends, they said, and clients of the patricians would
depart more silently than they had come if they found their
noisy
demonstration frustrated by the passing of the Law. They then summoned
the people to lay aside their arms and form an Assembly for
the purpose of carrying the Law. Meantime the consuls, more
alarmed at the action of the tribunes than at the nocturnal
enemy, convened a meeting of the senate.
