Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 3
Benjamin Oliver Foster, Ph.D., Ed.

16. The situation became clearer to the senators and the consuls. Still, besides the dangers with which they were publicly threatened, they were afraid that this might be a ruse of the Veientes or the Sabines, and that while there were so many enemies within the City, Sabine and Etruscan levies might presently combine for an invasion;¹ [2] or again that their perpetual foes, the Volsci and Aequi, might come, not as before to lay waste their fields, but to the City, which they would regard as already partly captured. [3] Men's fears were many and various; above all the rest stood out their dread of the slaves. Everybody suspected that he had an enemy in his own household, whom it was safe neither to trust, nor, from want of confidence, to refuse to trust, lest his hostility should be intensified; and it seemed hardly possible that even co-operation between the classes should arrest the danger. [4] So greatly did other evils overtop and threaten to engulf them that no one feared the tribunes or the plebeians; that seemed a milder mischief, and springing up, as it always did, when other troubles were quieted, appeared now to have been lulled to sleep by the foreign peril. [5] But in fact it bore down almost [p. 57]more heavily than anything else upon their sinking² fortunes. For so frenzied were the tribunes that they asserted it was no war which had taken possession of the Capitol, but an idle mimicry of war, got up to divert the minds of the plebeians from thinking about the law; the patricians' friends and retainers would depart, when the passing of the law showed them how useless had been their insurrection, even more silently than they had come. [6] They then convened an assembly to carry the measure through, having called the people away from their service as soldiers. Meantime the consuls were holding a meeting of the senate, where more fear of the tribunes was manifested than the night-attack of the enemy had caused.