he night sheltered the
Etrurians, who were resolutely determined on death; so that the
victors, not the vanquished, were the first who desisted from
fighting. After sunset the signal for retreat was given, and both
parties retired in the night to their camps. During the remainder of
the year, nothing memorable was effected at Sutrium; for, of the
enemy's army, the whole first line had been cut off in one battle, the
reserves only being left, who were scarce sufficient to guard the
camp; and, among the Romans, so numerous were the wounds, that more
wounded men died after the battle than had fallen in the field.

33. Quintus Fabius, consul for the ensuing year, succeeded to the
command of the army at Sutrium; the colleague given to him was Caius
Marcius Rutilus. On the one side, Fabius brought with him a
reinforcement from Rome, and on the other, a new army had been sent
for, and came from home, to the Etrurians. Many years had now passed
without any disputes between the patrician magistrates and plebeian
tribunes, when a contest took its rise from that family, which seemed
raised by fate as antagonists to the tribunes and commons of those
times; Appius Claudius, being censor, when the eighteen months had
expired, which was the time limited by the Aemilian law for the
duration of the censorship, although his colleague Caius Plautius had
already resigned his office, could not be prevailed on, by any means,
to give up his. There was a tribune of the commons, Publius
Sempronius; he undertook to enforce a legal process for terminating
the censorship within the lawful time, which was not more popular than
just, nor more pleasing to the people generally than to every man of
character in the city. After he frequently appealed to the Aemilian
law, and bestowed commendations on Mamercus Aemilius, who, in his
dictatorship, had been the author of it, for having contracted, within
the space of a year and six months, the censorship, which formerly had
lasted five years, and was a power which, in consequence of its long
continuance, often became tyrannical, he proceeded thus: "Tell me,
Appius Claudius, in what manner you would have acted, had you been
censor, at the time when Caius Furius and Marcus Geganius were
censors?" Appius insisted, that "the tribune's question was irrelevant
to his case. For, although the Aemilian law might bind those censors,
during whose magistracy it was passed,--because the people made that
law after they