The senate displeased by this ambitious conduct, and refusing a triumph unless Pedum was either taken or should surrender, AEmilius, alienated from the senate in consequence of this act, administered the remainder of the consulship like to a seditious tribuneship.

For, as long as he was consul, he neither ceased to criminate the patricians to the people, his colleague by no means interfering, because he himself also was a plebeian; (the scanty distribution of the land among the commons in the Latin and Falernian territory afforded the groundwork of the criminations;) and when the senate, wishing to put an end to the administration of the consuls, ordered a dictator to be nominated against the Latins, who were again in arms, AEmilius, to whom the fasces then belonged, nominated his colleague dictator; by him Junius Brutus was constituted master of the horse.

The dictatorship was popular, both in consequence of his discourses containing invectives against the patricians, and because he passed three laws, most advantageous to the commons, and injurious to the nobility; one, that the orders of the commons should be binding on all the Romans; another, that the patricians should, before the suffrages commenced, declare their approbation of the laws which should be passed in the assemblies of the centuries; the third, that one at least of the censors should be elected from the commons, as they had already gone so far as that it was lawful that both the consuls should be plebeians.

The patricians considered that more of detriment had been sustained on that year from the consuls and dictator than was counterbalanced by their success and achievements abroad.
13.

On the following year, Lucius Furius Camillus and Caius Maenius were consuls, in order that the neglect of his duty by AEmilius, the consul of the preceding year, might be rendered more markedly reproachful, the senate loudly urge that Pedum should be assailed with arms, men, and every kind of force, and be demolished; and the new consuls, being forced to give that matter the precedence of all others, set out on that expedition.