e
the enemy sallied forth from the town, Marcius happened to be on guard.
He with a chosen body of men not only repelled the attack of those who
had sallied out, but boldly rushed in through the open gate, and having
cut down all in the part of the city nearest him, and having hastily
seized some fire, threw it in the houses adjoining to the wall. Upon
this the shouts of the townsmen mingling with the wailings of the women
and children, occasioned by the first fright,[88] as is usual, both
increased the courage of the Romans, and dispirited the Volscians,
seeing the city captured to the relief of which they had come. Thus the
Volsci of Antium were defeated, the town of Corioli was taken. And so
much did Marcius by his valour eclipse the reputation of the consul,
that had not the treaty concluded with the Latins by Sp. Cassius alone,
because his colleague was absent, served as a memorial of it, it would
have been forgotten that Postumus Cominius had conducted the war with
the Volscians. The same year dies Agrippa Menenius, a man during all his
life equally a favourite with the senators and commons, still more
endeared to the commons after the secession. To this man, the mediator
and umpire in restoring concord among his countrymen, the ambassador of
the senators to the commons, the person who brought back the commons to
the city, were wanting the expenses of his funeral. The people buried
him by the contribution of a sextans from each person.

[Footnote 88: I have here adopted the reading of Stacker and others,
scil. _ad terrorem, ut solet, primum ortus_.]

34. T. Geganius and P. Minutius were next elected consuls. In this year,
when every thing was quiet from war abroad, and the dissensions were
healed at home, another much more serious evil fell upon the state;
first a scarcity of provisions, in consequence of the lands lying
untilled during the secession of the commons; then a famine such as
befals those who are besieged. And it would have ended in the
destruction of the slaves at least, and indeed some of the commons also,
had not the consuls adopted precautionary measures, by sending persons
in every direction to buy up corn, not only into Etruria on the coast to
the right of Ostia, and through the Volscians along the coast on the
left as far as Cumas, but into Sicily also, in quest of it. So far had
the hatred of their neighbours obliged them to stand in need of aid from
distant countries. When corn had been bough