ught not to wait for the election, but that a dictator should
be appointed to hold it, and that the consul should immediately return
to his province. A difference of opinion delayed this, for the consul
declared that he should nominate as dictator Marcus Valerius Messala,
who then commanded the fleet in Sicily; but the fathers denied that a
person could be appointed dictator who was not in the Roman territory,
and this was limited by Italy. Marcus Lucretius, a plebeian tribune,
having taken the sense of the senate upon the question, it was
decreed, "that the consul before he quitted the city, should put
the question to the people, as to whom they wished to be appointed
dictator, and that he should nominate whomsoever they directed. If the
consul were unwilling that the praetor should put the question, and
if even he were unwilling to do it, that then the tribunes should make
the proposition to the commons." The consul refusing to submit to the
people what lay in his own power, and forbidding the praetor to do so,
the plebeian tribunes put the question, and the commons ordered that
Quintus Fulvius, who was then at Capua, should be nominated dictator.
But on the night preceding the day on which the assembly of the people
was to be held for that purpose, the consul went off privately into
Sicily; and the fathers, thus deserted, decreed that a letter should
be sent to Marcus Claudius, in order that he might come to the support
of the state, which had been abandoned by his colleague, and appoint
him dictator whom the commons had ordered. Thus Quintus Fulvius was
appointed dictator by Marcus Claudius, the consul, and in conformity
with the same order of the people, Publius Licinius Crassus, chief
pontiff, was appointed master of the horse by Quintus Fulvius, the
dictator.

6. After the dictator had arrived at Rome, he sent Cneius Sempronius
Blaesus, who had acted under him as lieutenant general at Capua, into
the province of Etruria, to take the command of the army there, in the
room of the praetor, Caius Calpurnius, whom he had summoned by letter
to take the command of Capua and his own army. He fixed the first date
he could for the election: which, however, could not be brought to
a conclusion, in consequence of a dispute which arose between the
tribunes and the dictator. The junior century of the Galerian tribe,
to whose lot it fell to give the votes first, had named Quintus
Fulvius and Quintus Fabius as consuls; and the o