[2] His uncle, Lucius, was consul in 430, after serving as magister equitum the previous year,[3] and his brother, Gaius, was consular tribune in 408 and 405.
[5][6][i] They continued the siege of Veii which had begun two years earlier (when Lucius' brother, Gaius Julius Iulus, was one of the consular tribunes), and began building earthworks around the city, topped by wooden mantlets, with the intention of maintaining the siege through the winter months.
[7] The tribunes of the plebs objected to this hitherto unprecedented manner of conducting warfare, as an unjust and unnecessary burden on the people, and accused the patricians of using the siege as an excuse to keep large numbers of commoners out from Rome, so that they could not serve as a check on the patricians' power.
But Claudius, the consular tribune, argued vociferously that the plebeian tribunes' claims of hardship for the soldiers were false, that recalling them would waste all of the work and expense of the siege without achieving anything or recouping Rome's losses, subject Rome to future attack from Veii, that the tribunes were simply telling the people what they wanted to hear, to their own advantage rather than the people's, and that their exhortations were a betrayal of the soldiers who instead deserved their support.
But when news of this reached Rome, those who had been wavering between the plebeian tribunes and Appius Claudius were seized with a patriotic fervor, and quickly volunteered to go and serve the army in order to rebuild the siege works and maintain the garrison that Julius and his colleagues oversaw.