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Updated: June 7, 2025
When Canuleius was now in high repute by his victory over the patricians and by the favour of the commons, the other tribunes being excited to contend for their bill, set to work with all their might, and, the accounts regarding the war augmenting daily, obstruct the levy.
Caesar, imagining that the war would be protracted to too great a length, and despairing of his convoys from Italy, because all the coasts were guarded with great diligence by Pompey's adherents; and because his own fleets, which he had built during the winter, in Sicily, Gaul, and Italy, were detained; sent Lucius Canuleius into Epirus to procure corn; and because these countries were too remote, he fixed granaries in certain places, and regulated the carriage of the corn for the neighbouring states.
Just when these matters were going on in the senate, Canuleius thus declaimed in favour of his laws and against the consuls: "Frequently even before now I think I have observed how much the patricians despised you, Romans, how unworthy they deemed you to dwell in the one city and within the same walls with them; but on the present occasion most clearly, in their having risen up so determinedly in opposition to those propositions of ours: in which what else do we do, but remind them that we are their fellow citizens, and that though we possess not the same power, we inhabit the same city?
There now arose a tribune of the people who possessed force and persistence, Caius Canuleius by name, and he urged the repeal of this law. For the third time the plebeians seceded, this time going over the Tiber to the Janiculum Hill, where it would have been possible for them to begin a new city, if they had not been propitiated.
Then Caius Canuleius declared aloud in brief terms in the senate, that "the consuls wished in vain to divert the commons from attention to the new laws; that they never should hold a levee while he lived, before the commons had first ratified the laws proposed by him and his colleagues;" and he instantly summoned them to an assembly.
Livy makes the Roman tribunes to speak in the same style with the consuls, which could not be, and therefore for aught in him to the contrary, Volero and Canuleius might have spoken in no better style than Argus. However, they were not created the first year of the commonwealth; and the tribunes of Oceana are since become better orators than were needful.
What courage would that expression afford, not to the Roman commons, but to the Volscians, Æquans, and the Veientians! would they not hope that, under the generalship of Canuleius, they should be able to scale the Capitol and citadel, if with the deprivation of privilege and majesty, the tribunes should rob the patricians of their courage also?
C. ii. 22; takes Oricum, iii. 8; marches to Dyrrhachium to cut off Pompey's communication with that place, 41; sends Canuleius into Epirus for corn, 42; besieges Pompey in his camp, his reasons for it, 43; encloses Pompey's works within his fortifications: a skirmish between them, 45; his army reduced to great straits for want of provisions, 47; offers Pompey battle, which he declines, 56; sends Clodius to Scipio, to treat about a peace, whose endeavours prove ineffectual, 57; joins Domitius, storms and takes the town of Gomphis in Thessaly, in four hours' time, 80; gains a complete victory over Pompey in the battle of Pharsalia, 93; summons Ptolemy and Cleopatra to attend him, 107; burns the Alexandrian fleet, 111
Canuleius argued with vigor against the consuls who stood up for the law, and at last he succeeded. In the year 445 the restriction was removed, and plebeian girls were at liberty to become the wives of patrician men, with the assurance that their children should enjoy the rank of their fathers.
For at the commencement of the year Caius Canuleius, tribune of the people, proposed a law concerning the intermarriage of the patricians and commons; by which the patricians considered that their blood would be contaminated, and the privileges of birth would be confounded; and a hint at first lightly suggested by the tribunes, that it should be lawful that one of the consuls should be elected from the commons, afterwards proceeded so far, that the nine tribunes proposed a bill, "that the people should have the power of electing the consuls, whether they wished, from the commons or the patricians.
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