gn.

The senate recommended the people to elect, as one of their consuls,
Caius Claudius Nero, a patrician of one of the families of the great
Claudian house. Nero had served during the preceding years of the war
both against Hannibal in Italy and against Hasdrubal in Spain; but it is
remarkable that the histories which we possess record no successes as
having been achieved by him either before or after his great campaign of
the Metaurus. It proves much for the sagacity of the leading men of the
senate that they recognized in Nero the energy and spirit which were
required at this crisis, and it is equally creditable to the patriotism
of the people that they followed the advice of the senate by electing a
general who had no showy exploits to recommend him to their choice.

It was a matter of greater difficulty to find a second consul; the laws
required that one consul should be a plebeian; and the plebeian nobility
had been fearfully thinned by the events of the war. While the senators
anxiously deliberated among themselves what fit colleague for Nero could
be nominated at the coming comitia, and sorrowfully recalled the names
of Marcellus, Gracchus, and other plebeian generals who were no more,
one taciturn and moody old man sat in sullen apathy among the conscript
fathers. This was Marcus Livius, who had been consul in the year before
the beginning of this war, and had then gained a victory over the
Illyrians. After his consulship he had been impeached before the people
on a charge of peculation and unfair division of the spoils among his
soldiers; the verdict was unjustly given against him, and the sense of
this wrong, and of the indignity thus put upon him, had rankled
unceasingly in the bosom of Livius, so that for eight years after his
trial he had lived in seclusion in his country seat, taking no part in
any affairs of State. Latterly the censors had compelled him to come to
Rome and resume his place in the senate, where he used to sit gloomily
apart, giving only a silent vote. At last an unjust accusation against
one of his near kinsmen made him break silence, and he harangued the
house in words of weight and sense, which drew attention to him and
taught the senators that a strong spirit dwelt beneath that unimposing
exterior.

Now, while they were debating on what noble of a plebeian house was fit
to assume the perilous honors of the consulate, some of the elder of
them looked on Marcus Livius, and remembered