“Rome, secure by her potent and victorious arms from all external causes of commotion, was either beholden for her peace at home to her enemies abroad, or could never rest her head. My lords, you that are parents of a commonwealth, and so freer agents than such as are merely natural, have a care. For, as no man shall show me a commonwealth born straight that ever became crooked, so no man shall show me a commonwealth born crooked that ever became straight. Rome was crooked in her birth, or rather prodigious. Her twins, the patrician and plebeian orders, came, as was shown by the foregoing story, into the world, one body but two heads, or rather two bellies; for, notwithstanding the fable out of AEsop, whereby Menenius Agrippa, the orator that was sent from the Senate to the people at Mount Aventin, showed the fathers to be the belly, and the people to be the arms and the legs (which except that, how slothful soever it might seem, they were nourished, not these only, but the whole body must languish and be dissolved), it is plain that the fathers were a distinct belly, such a one as took the meat indeed out of the people’s mouths, but abhorring the agrarian, returned it not in the due and necessary nutrition of a commonwealth. Nevertheless, as the people that live about the cataracts of Nilus are said not to hear the noise, so neither the Roman writers, nor Machiavel the most conversant with them, seem among so many of the tribunitian storms to hear their natural voice; for though they could not miss of it so far as to attribute them to the strife of the people for participation in magistracy, or, in which Machiavel more particularly joins, to that about the agrarian, this was to take the business short, and the remedy for the disease.