14.4
For we do not know who was the first man to bribe her people or her courts of law; whereas at Athens, Anytus, the son of Anthemion, is said to have been the first man to give money to jurors, when he was on trial for the treacherous failure to relieve Pylos,A stronghold on the western coast of Messenia, in Peloponnesus. It was occupied and successfully defended by the Athenians in 425 B.C. (Thuc. iv. 2-41). In 410, the Lacedaemonians laid siege to its Messenian garrison, which surrendered after an Athenian fleet had failed to relieve it (Diodorus, xiii. 64, 5f.). toward the close of the Peloponnesian war; a time when the pure race of the golden age still possessed the Roman forum.
15.1
So when Marcius disclosed his many scars from many contests, wherein he had been a foremost soldier for seventeen years together, the people were put out of countenance by his valour, and agreed with one another to elect him. But when the day for casting their votes came, and Marcius made a pompous entry into the forum escorted by the senate, and all the patricians about him were clearly more bent on success than ever before,
15.2
the multitude fell away again from their good will towards him, and drifted into feelings of resentment and envy. These feelings were reinforced by their fear that if an aristocrat, who had such weight with the patricians, should become supreme in the government, he might altogether deprive the people of their liberties.
15.3
So, being in such a state of mind, they rejected Marcius and others were proclaimed elected. The senators were indignant, thinking the insult directed rather at them than at Marcius, and he himself could not treat the occurrence with restraint or forbearance. He had indulged the passionate and contentious side of his nature, with the idea that there was something great and exalted in this, and had not been imbued, under the influence of reason and discipline, with that gravity and mildness which are the chief virtues of a statesman.
