As the price of his deliverance and that of the army, he and his colleague and the other commanders swore, in the name of the Republic, to a humiliating peace. Upon returning to Rome, the consuls, because of their disgrace, laid down their office and their senatorship, and proposed that all persons who had sworn to the peace (that is, themselves) should be stripped and bound and handed over to the Samnites by the Fetiales. The historian Livy quotes extensively from Postumius' speech in the Roman Senate on this matter. The proposal was accepted, and Postumius and the other prisoners were brought to the Samnites, but Gaius Pontius refused to accept their surrender, on the grounds that it was being used as an excuse to annul the treaty (unfavorable to Rome) that had concluded the Battle of the Caudine Forks.