l nullity by his exceptional
proceedings. Yet we should greatly err, if we should discern in
this restoration nothing further than a relapse of the state-machine
into the old track which had been trodden and worn for centuries.
Restoration is always revolution; but in this case it was not so
much the old government as the old governor that was restored.
The oligarchy made its appearance newly equipped in the armour of
the -tyrannis- which had been overthrown. As the senate had beaten
Gracchus from the field with his own weapons, so it continued in the
most essential points to govern with the constitution of the Gracchi;
though certainly with the ulterior idea, if not of setting it aside
entirely, at any rate of thoroughly purging it in due time from the
elements really hostile to the ruling aristocracy.

Prosecutions of the Democrats

At first the reaction was mainly directed against persons. Publius
Popillius was recalled from banishment after the enactments relating
to him had been cancelled (633), and a warfare of prosecution was
waged against the adherents of Gracchus; whereas the attempt of
the popular party to have Lucius Opimius after his resignation of
office condemned for high treason was frustrated by the partisans
of the government (634). The character of this government of
the restoration is significantly indicated by the progress of the
aristocracy in soundness of sentiment. Gaius Carbo, once the ally
of the Gracchi, had for long been a convert,(1) and had but recently
shown his zeal and his usefulness as defender of Opimius. But he
remained the renegade; when the same accusation was raised against him
by the democrats as against Opimius, the government were not unwilling
to let him fall, and Carbo, seeing himself lost between the two
parties, died by his own hand. Thus the men of the reaction showed
themselves in personal questions pure aristocrats. But the reaction
did not immediately attack the distributions of grain, the taxation
of the province of Asia, or the Gracchan arrangement as to the jurymen
and courts; on the contrary, it not only spared the mercantile
class and the proletariate of the capital, but continued to render
homage, as it had already done in the introduction of the Livian
laws, to these powers and especially to the proletariate far more
decidedly than had been done by the Gracchi. This course was not
adopted merely because the Gracchan revolution still thrilled for
long th