of the enemy.”  Speeches of this kind having been made without effect, and Marcus Atilius Regulus created consul, that he might not be present to dispute respecting the right of command, he withdrew to the army on the night preceding the day on which the proposition was to be decided.  When there was an assembly of the people at break of day, a secret displeasure towards the dictator, and favour towards the master of the horse, rather possessed their minds, than that men had not sufficient resolution to advise a measure which was agreeable to the public; and though favour carried it, influence was wanting to the bill.  One man indeed was found who recommended the law, Caius Terentius Varro, who had been praetor in the former year, sprung not only from humble but mean parentage.  They report that his father was a butcher, the retailer of his own meat, and that he employed this very son in the servile offices of that trade.

26.  This young man, when a fortune left him by his father, acquired in such a traffic, had inspired him with the hope of a higher condition, and the gown and forum were the objects of his choice, by declaiming vehemently in behalf of men and causes of the lowest kind, in opposition to the interest and character of the good, first came to the notice of the people, and then to offices of honour.  Having passed through the offices of quaestor, plebeian, and curule aedile, and, lastly, that of praetor; when now he raised his mind to the hope of the consulship, he courted the gale of popular favour by maligning the dictator, and received alone the credit of the decree of the people.  All men, both at Rome and in the army, both friends and foes, except the dictator himself, considered this measure to have been passed as an insult to him; but the dictator himself bore the wrong which the infuriated people had put upon him, with the same gravity with which he endured the charges against him which his enemies laid before the multitude; and receiving the letter containing a decree of the senate respecting the equalization of the command while on his journey, satisfied that an equal share of military skill was not imparted together with the equal share of command, he returned to the army with a mind unsubdued alike by his fellow-citizens and by the enemy.

27.  But Minucius, who, in consequence of his success and the favour of the populace, was scarcely endurable before now especially, unrestrained by shame or moderation, boasted not more in having conquered Hannibal than Quintus Fabius.  “That he, who had been sought out in their distress as the only general, and as a match for Hannibal; that he, an event which no record of history contains, was by the order of the people placed upon an equal footing with himself,—­a superior with an inferior officer, a dictator with a master of the horse,—­in that very city wherein the masters of the horse are wont to crouch and tremble at the rods and axes of the dictator.  With such splendour had his valour