Rome was now suffering from domestic wounds, when, fortunately, a little counter-irritation was got up, by an attack of the Veliternians on Tusculum. There is no better cure for a family quarrel, than the sudden incursion of a neighbour; and when relatives are breaking each other's heads at Number One, a stone thrown from the garden of Number Two will frequently, by the establishment of a single new wound, be the cause of healing half a-dozen. The threatened aggression from without had caused the ten Tribunes to agree to the measures of their colleagues, Licinius and Sextius; but the patricians still held out, and appointed the veteran Furius Camillus to the dictatorship. The tribes were in the act of voting, when Furius ordered them away, with violent menaces; but the fury of Furius was impotent from age, and the Tribunes coolly threatened him with a fine of five hundred thousand asses. They had come to the correct conclusion that he could not get together so many asses without selling himself up; he thought it better to abdicate, and P. Manlius was chosen to stop the fermentation that the sour old man had created.
The bills were now all passed; and L. Sextius had been appointed plebeian consul, when the patricians, refusing to sanction what they could not prevent, declined to ratify the election. As the avalanche does not wait for the consent of the object it is about to sweep away, so the will of the public overcame the feeble opposition of the patricians. The latter, however, succeeded in taking a large portion of power from the consuls, and giving it to a new magistrate, called a Prætor, who was invested with authority that some historians have described as almost preternatural. He was chosen from the patricians, and was, in fact, a sort of third consul, whose duty it was _Jus in urbe dicere_,[26] to lay down the law--a privilege that, if improperly exercised, might include the prostration of justice--in the city. The patricians thus kept to themselves the power of interpreting the law; and as ambiguity seems inherent in the very nature of law, almost any latitude was left to those who were at liberty to declare its meaning. The power of the patricians was further augmented by the appointment of two curule or aristocratic Ædiles, in addition to the two chosen from the plebeians; and though their duties related chiefly to the mending of the roads, they had opportunities of paving the way for many encroachments on the part of their own order.