they could be arrested, the crowd came to their aid, and Claudius fled for his life. The Senate gave the military command to Valerius and Horatius, who were duly elected consuls after the decemvirs were forced to resign. Once the threat from the Sabines and Aequi was dealt with, the decemvirs were brought to trial. Gaius Claudius again pleaded on behalf of his nephew, but Verginius demanded that Appius face justice; according to Dionysius, Appius was said to have hanged himself in prison before he could be tried, but the popular suspicion was that he was put to death at the orders of the plebeian tribunes. Livy reports that Appius killed himself before his trial. The other decemvirs went into exile, except for Spurius Oppius, who was tried, condemned, and put to death on the same day, for the crime of cruelly beating an old soldier. Historicity The entire account in Livy and Dionysius of Claudius's consulship in 471 BC is rejected by Friedrich Münzer, and modern scholarship dismisses his supposed excesses as decemvir as well. These portrayals are part of a later tradition that painted the Claudii as arrogant aristocrats and enemies of the plebs. Theodor Mommsen and T. P. Wiseman argued that the tale of Verginia and other myths about the Claudii were fabricated in the late Republic by the historian Valerius Antias. Cultural depictions The Physician's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer Appius and Virginia by John Webster See also Claudia gens Terentilius Footnotes References Bibliography Primary sources Livy, Ab Urbe Condita (History of Rome). Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars, or The Twelve Caesars). Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Romaike Archaiologia. Secondary sources Barthold Georg Niebuhr, The History of Rome, Julius Charles Hare and Connop Thirlwall, trans., John Smith, Cambridge (1828). "Appius Claudius Crassus (or Crassinus) Regillensis Sabinus" (no. 4) in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, ed., Little, Brown and Company, Boston (1849). T. Robert S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, American Philological Association (1952). John C. Traupman, The New College Latin & English Dictionary, Bantam Books, New York (1995). 5th-century BC Roman consuls Ancient Roman decemvirs Appius, Inregillensis Sabinus Year of birth unknown