While Appius urged such frivolous arguments as these, which carried no conviction whatever, the other said, "Behold, Romans, the offspring of that Appius, who being created decemvir for one year, created himself for a second; and who, during a third, without being created even by himself or by any other, held on the fasces and the government though a private individual; nor ceased to continue in office, until the government itself, ill acquired, ill administered, and ill retained, overwhelmed him in ruin.

This is the same family, Romans, by whose violence and injustice ye were compelled to banish yourselves from your native city, and seize on the Sacred mount; the same, against which ye provided for yourselves the protection of tribunes; the same, on account of which two armies of you took post on the Aventine; the same, which violently opposed the laws against usury, and always the agrarian laws; the same, which broke through the right of intermarriage between the patricians and the commons; the same, which shut up the road to curule offices against the commons: this is a name, more hostile to your liberty by far, than that of the Tarquins.

I pray you, Appius Claudius, though this is now the hundredth year since the dictatorship of Mamercus Aemilius, though there have been so many men of the highest characters and abilities censors, did none of these ever read the twelve tables?
none of them know, that, whatever was the last order of the people, that was law?
Nay, certainly they all knew it; and they therefore obeyed the Aemilian law, rather than the old one, under which the censors had been at first created; because it was the last order; and because, when two laws are contradictory, the new always repeals the old.

Do you mean to say, Appius, that the people are not bound by the Aemilian law?
Or, that the people are bound, and you alone exempted?
The Aemilian law bound those violent censors, Caius Furius and Marcus Geganius, who showed what mischief that office might do in the state; when, out of resentment for the limitation of their power, they disfranchised Mamercus Aemilius, the first man of the age, either in war or peace.

It bound all the censors thenceforward, during the space of a hundred years.