d face to face as if drawn up for battle, each under its leaders.
Restriction of the consular and extension of the tribunician power
were the objects contended for on the one side; the annihilation of
the tribunate was sought on the other. Legal impunity secured for
insubordination, refusal to enter the ranks for the defence of the
land, impeachments involving fines and penalties directed specially
against magistrates who had violated the rights of the commons or
who had simply provoked their displeasure, were the weapons of the
plebeians; and to these the patricians opposed violence, concert with
the public foes, and occasionally also the dagger of the assassin.
Hand-to-hand conflicts took place in the streets, and on both sides
the sacredness of the magistrate's person was violated. Many families
of burgesses are said to have migrated, and to have sought more
peaceful abodes in neighbouring communities; and we may well believe
it. The strong patriotism of the people is obvious from the fact,
not that they adopted this constitution, but that they endured it,
and that the community, notwithstanding the most vehement convulsions,
still held together.

Coriolanus

The best-known incident in these conflicts of the orders is the
history of Gnaeus Marcius, a brave aristocrat, who derived his
surname from the storming of Corioli. Indignant at the refusal of
the centuries to entrust to him the consulate in the year 263, he is
reported to have proposed, according to one version, the suspension of
the sales of corn from the state-stores, till the hungry people should
give up the tribunate; according to another version, the direct
abolition of the tribunate itself. Impeached by the tribunes so that
his life was in peril, it is said that he left the city, but only to
return at the head of a Volscian army; that when he was on the point
of conquering the city of his fathers for the public foe, the earnest
appeal of his mother touched his conscience; and that thus he expiated
his first treason by a second, and both by death. How much of this
is true cannot be determined; but the story, over which the naive
misrepresentations of the Roman annalists have shed a patriotic glory,
affords a glimpse of the deep moral and political disgrace of these
conflicts between the orders. Of a similar stamp was the surprise
of the Capitol by a band of political refugees, led by a Sabine chief,
Appius Herdonius, in the year 294; they summoned