was very severe, and many
unfortunate debtors were carried away to bondage. Under these
circumstances, M. Manlius, the preserver of the Capitol, came forward as
the patron of the poor. This distinguished man had been bitterly
disappointed in his claims to honor and gratitude. While Camillus, his
personal enemy, who had shared in none of the dangers of the siege, was
repeatedly raised to the highest honors of the state, he, who had saved
the Capitol, was left to languish in a private station. Neglected by his
own order, Manlius turned to the Plebeians. One day he recognized in the
forum a soldier who had served with him in the field, and whom a
creditor was carrying away in fetters. Manlius paid his debt upon the
spot, and swore that, as long as he had a single pound, he would not
allow any Roman to be imprisoned for debt. He sold a large part of his
property, and applied the proceeds to the liberation of his
fellow-citizens from bondage. Supported now by the Plebeians, he came
forward as the accuser of his own order, and charged them with
appropriating to their own use the gold which had been raised to ransom
the city from the Gauls. The Patricians in return accused him, as they
had accused Sp. Cassius, of aspiring to the tyranny. When he was brought
to trial before the Comitia of the Centuries in the Campus Martius, he
proudly showed the spoils of thirty warriors whom he had slain, the
forty military distinctions which he had won in battle, and the
innumerable scars upon his breast, and then turning toward the Capitol
he prayed the immortal gods to remember the man who had saved their
temples from destruction. After such an appeal, his condemnation was
impossible, and his enemies therefore contrived to break up the
assembly. Shortly afterward he was arraigned on the same charges before
the Comitia of the Curies in the Peteline Grove. Here he was at once
condemned, and was hurled from the Tarpeian Rock. His house, which was
on the Capitol, was razed to the ground (B.C. 384).

The death of Manlius, however, was only a temporary check to the
Plebeian cause. A few years afterward the contest came to a crisis. In
B.C. 376 C. Licinius Stolo and his kinsman L. Sextius, being Tribunes of
the Plebs, determined to give the Plebeians an equal share in the
political power, to deprive the Patricians of the exclusive use of the
public land, and to remove the present distress of the Plebeians. For
this purpose they brought forward t