The Roman historian Livy provides a dramatic account of the first secession of the plebs. When the plebeians had withdrawn and thus threatened the military stability of Rome, fear gripped the patricians. A man named Menenius Agrippa, himself a plebeian, was sent to address the crowd. He used a famous parable to convince the seceding plebeians that it was best to negotiate an agreement for the good of Rome as a whole:

There was a time when everything in the human body did not, as they do now, work together, but each part had its own ideas for itself and its own way of expressing them. The other parts resented that their own stress, efforts, and service should go to providing everything for the stomach, while the stomach sat in the middle of all this, with nothing to do...