The populace did not know what to male of the deed and were becoming excited. The Dictator ordered them to be summoned to an Assembly. He declared that Maelius had been lawfully even. if he were guiltless of treason, because he had refused to come to the Dictator when summoned by the Master of the Horse. :He, Cincinnatus, had sat to investigate the case, after it had been investigated Maelius would have been treated in accordance with the result.He was not to be dealt with like an ordinary citizen. For, though born amongst a free people under laws and settled rights, in a City from which he knew that royalty had been expelled, and in the very same year, the sons of the king's sister, children of the consul who liberated his country, had, on the discovery of a conspiracy for restoring rovaltv, been beheaded by their own father一一a City from which Collatinus Tarquin the consul had been ordered to lay down his office and go into exile, because the very name of Tarquin was detested-a City in. which same years later Spurius Cassius had been punished for entertaining designs of sovereignty一 a City in which recently the decemvirs had been punishedy confiscation, exile, and death because of a tyranny as despotic as that of kings--in that City Maelius had conceived hopes of sovereignty!And who was this man?Although no nobility of birth, no honours, no services to the State paved the way for any man to sovereign power, still 1t was their consuisnlps; their decemvirates, the .honours achieved_by them叩a多n弓11 ancestors and the splendour of their families that raised the ambitions of the Claudii and the Cassll to an impious nexgnt But Spurius Maelius, to whom the tribuneship ot the plebs Nxra,. a thing to be wished for rather than hoped for, a wealthy cornfactor, hoped to buy the liberty of his fellow-citizens for a coupl( of pounds of spelt, and ima乡ned that by throwing a little corn to them, he could_ reduce to slavery the men who卜电conquerec all the neighbouring States，and that he whom the State coulc possessing the power and insle-nia ofRomulus，who had sprunz 毛-，r占v from. the carried back to the gods!His act must be rded_ as a portent quite as much as a crime;for., that portent his blood was not sutticzent expiation, those walls within which such madness had been conceived must be levelled to the ground, and his property, contaminated by the price of treason, confiscated to the State.