日本語訳を!!(4)
お願いします
(1) It was 493 BCE, and Rome's wealthy landowners were in a panic. They had held the reins of government of the new Republic while the workers (also called plebeians─or plebs, for short) farmed the land. The workers claimed that the rich were useless─that they did nothing except wait for the hardworking poor to feed and serve them. The landowners ignored these complaints at first.
(2) But the plebeians began to abandon their plows and move into the city. There they became craftsmen, traders, and hired workers. As city folk, they no longer had to depend completely upon the landowners for survival. Now they were free to complain and demand greater equality between rich and poor. Justice, they believed, should be the same for everyone. And so they took action. They left the city in huge number and went to the Sacred Mount, a hilltop several Miles northeast of Rome. This got the landowners' attention!
(3) Suddenly, the fear of war loomed large. What if an enemy attacked Rome? The landowners, also called patricians, could provide the generals to lead an army. But what good is a general with no men to command, no soldiers to fight? What’s more: with the workers gone, who would make sandals, weave cloth, tend chickens, and sell fish? Who would run the roadside inns, bake bread, drive mules, load wagons, and dye cloth for beautiful clothes? Rome couldn't survive without the work of ordinary citizens, and the aristocrats knew it.
(4) The historian Livy tells how Rome's leaders solved the crisis of the workers' walkout. They sent Agrippa Menenius, a smooth talker who was popular with the people, to the Sacred Mount to talk to the rebels. Menenius told them a story about an imaginary time when each body part had its own ideas and could talk to one another. But the body parts didn't always agree and sometimes refused to work together. For example, the hands of this strange body sometimes argued with the feet, and the mouth sometimes disagreed with the teeth.
