of 649 exceeded in extent and peril that of
645. The sure instinctive feeling of the public, that there was no
resource against the oligarchy except the -tyrannis-, was once more
apparent in their readily entering into every attempt by officers
of note to force the hand of the government and, under one form
or another, to overturn the oligarchic rule by a dictatorship.

It was against Quintus Caepio that their attacks were first
directed; and justly, in so far as he had primarily occasioned the
defeat of Arausio by his insubordination, even apart from the probably
well-founded but not proved charge of embezzling the Tolosan booty;
but the fury which the opposition displayed against him was essentially
augmented by the fact, that he had as consul ventured on an attempt
to wrest the posts of jurymen from the capitalists.(22) On his account
the old venerable principle, that the sacredness of the magistracy
should be respected even in the person of its worst occupant, was
violated; and, while the censure due to the author of the calamitous
day of Cannae had been silently repressed within the breast, the author
of the defeat of Arausio was by decree of the people unconstitutionally
deprived of his proconsulship, and--what had not occurred since
the crisis in which the monarchy had perished--his property was
confiscated to the state-chest (649?). Not long afterwards he was
by a second decree of the burgesses expelled from the senate (650).
But this was not enough; more victims were desired, and above all
Caepio's blood. A number of tribunes of the people favourable to the
opposition, with Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Gaius Norbanus at their
head, proposed in 651 to appoint an extraordinary judicial commission in
reference to the embezzlement and treason perpetrated in Gaul; in spite
of the de facto abolition of arrest during investigation and of the
punishment of death for political offences, Caepio was arrested and
the intention of pronouncing and executing in his case sentence of
death was openly expressed. The government party attempted to get
rid of the proposal by tribunician intervention; but the interceding
tribunes were violently driven from the assembly, and in the furious
tumult the first men of the senate were assailed with stones.
The investigation could not be prevented, and the warfare of
prosecutions pursued its course in 651 as it had done six years
before; Caepio himself, his colleague in the supreme