Life
He was a censor in 312 BC although he had not previously been consul. He sought support from the lower classes, allowing sons of freedmen to serve in the Senate, and extending voting privileges to men in the rural tribes who did not own land. During the Second Samnite War, he advocated the founding of Roman colonies (colonia) throughout Latium and Campania to serve as fortifications against the Samnites and Etruscans.
During his term as censor, he built the Appian Way (Latin: Via Appia), an important and famous road between Rome and Capua, as well as the first aqueduct in Rome, the Aqua Appia. He also published for the first time a list of legal procedures and the legal calendar, knowledge of which, until that time, had been reserved for the pontifices, the priests. He was also concerned with literature and rhetoric, and instituted reforms in Latin orthography.
He later served as consul twice, in 307 BC and 296 BC, and in 292 BC and 285 BC he was appointed Dictator. In 280 BC, after he had gone blind (because of a curse, according to Livy), he gave a famous speech against Cineas, an envoy of Pyrrhus of Epirus, declaring that Rome would never surrender. This is the earliest known manuscript of a political speech in Latin, and is the source of the saying "every man is the architect of his own fortune" (Latin: quisque faber suae fortunae).
According to Martianus Capella, Appius disliked the sound of the letter Z.
Read more about this topic: Appius Claudius Caecus
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That you shall find lies in the cellar, charred
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The life is not yet all gone out of it.
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—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel,
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And in their show of life more dead they live
Than those that to the earth with many tears they give.”
—Jones Very (1831–1880)
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)