Book VII

I. This year will stand out as the one in which a b.c. 366–365“new man” held the consulship, and also for the establishment of two new magistracies, the praetor-ship and the curule aedileship. These dignities the patricians had devised for themselves, to compensate them for the second consulship, which they had granted to the commons. The plebs bestowed their consulship on Lucius Sextius, by whose law it had been won. The patricians, through their influence in the Campus Martius,¹ obtained the praetorship for Spurius Furius Camillus, the son of Marcus, and the aedileship for Gnaeus Quinctius Capitolinus and Publius Cornelius Scipio, who belonged to their own houses. Lucius Aemilius Mamercus was chosen from the patricians as colleague of Lucius Sextius. Early in the year there was some talk about the Gauls—who having at first scattered through Apulia were now rumoured to be gathering—and about a defection on the part of the Hernici. The patricians purposely deferred all action, in order that the plebeian consul might have no hand in anything; it seemed from the general hush and lack of bustle as though a cessation of the courts had been proclaimed; save that the tribunes would not suffer it to pass in silence that the nobles, in return for one plebeian consul, had got three patrician magistrates for themselves, who wore the purple-bordered toga and sat, like consuls,