Book 22
25
As the line which the Dictator was taking was in the highest degree unpopular, he kept away from the Assembly. Even in the senate he produced an unfavourable impression when he spoke in laudatory terms of the enemy and put down the disasters of the past two years to rashness and lack of generalship on the part of the commanders. The Master of the Horse, he said, must be called to account for having fought against his orders. If, he went on to say, the supreme command and direction of the war remained in his hands, he would soon let men know that in the case of a good general Fortune plays a small part, intelligence and military skill are the main factors. To have preserved the army in circumstances of extreme danger without any humiliating defeat was in his opinion a more glorious thing than the slaughter of many thousands of the enemy. But he failed to convince his audience, and after appointing M. Atilius Regulus as consul, he set off by night to rejoin his army. He was anxious to avoid a personal altercation on the question of his authority, and left Rome the day before the proposal was voted upon. At daybreak a meeting of the plebs was held to consider the proposal. Though the general feeling was one of hostility to the Dictator and goodwill towards the Master of the Horse, few were found bold enough to give this feeling utterance and recommend a proposal which after all was acceptable to the plebs as a body, and so, notwithstanding the fact that the great majority were in favour of it, it lacked the support of men of weight and influence. One man was found who came forward to advocate the proposal, C. Terentius Varro, who had been praetor the year before, a man of humble and even mean origin. The tradition is that his father was a butcher who hawked his meat about and employed his son in the menial drudgery of his trade.
