How deeply the multitude felt the blank that was left after the disappearance of those two illustrious youths who had opened the gates to revolution, and how childishly in fact it grasped at any shadow of a substitute, was shown by the case of the pretended son of Tiberius Gracchus, who, although the very sister of the two Gracchi charged him with fraud in the open Forum, was yet chosen by the people in 655 as tribune solely on account of his usurped name. In the same spirit the multitude exulted in the presence of Gaius Marius; how should it not? He, if any one, seemed the right man--he was at any rate the first general and the most popular name of his time, confessedly brave and upright, and recommended as regenerator of the state by his very position aloof from the proceedings of party--how should not the people, how should not he himself, have held that he was so! Public opinion as decidedly as possible favoured the opposition. It was a significant indication of this, that the proposal to have the vacant stalls in the chief priestly colleges filled up by the burgesses instead of the colleges themselves--which the government had frustrated in the comitia in 609 by the suggestion of religious scruples--was carried in 650 by Gnaeus Domitius without the senate having been able even to venture a serious resistance. On the whole it seemed as if nothing was wanted but a chief, who should give to the opposition a firm rallying point and a practical aim; and this was now found in Marius.
For the execution of his task two methods of operation offered themselves; Marius might attempt to overthrow the oligarchy either as -imperator- at the head of the army, or in the mode prescribed by the constitution for constitutional changes: his own past career pointed to the former course, the precedent of Gracchus to the latter. It is easy to understand why he did not adopt the former plan, perhaps did not even think of the possibility of adopting it The senate was or seemed so powerless and helpless, so hated and despised, that Marius conceived himself scarcely to need any other support in opposing it than his immense popularity, but hoped in case of necessity to find such a support, notwithstanding the dissolution of the army, in the soldiers discharged and waiting for their rewards. It is probable that Marius, looking to Gracchus' easy and apparently almost complete victory and to his own resources far surpassing those of Gracchus, deemed the overthrow of a constitution four hundred years old, and intimately bound up with the manifold habits and interests of the body-politic arranged in a complicated hierarchy, a far easier task than it was. But any one, who looked more deeply into the difficulties of the enterprise than Marius probably did, might reflect that the army, although in the course of transition from a militia to a body of mercenaries, was still during this state of transition by no means adapted for the blind instrument of a coup d'etat, and that an attempt to set aside the resisting elements by military means would have probably augmented the power of resistance in his antagonists. To mix up the organized armed force in the struggle could not but appear at the first glance superfluous and at the second hazardous; they were just at the beginning of the crisis, and the antagonistic elements were still far from having reached their last, shortest, and simplest expression.
The Popular Party
Marius therefore discharged the army after his triumph in accordance with the existing regulation, and entered on the course traced out by Gaius Gracchus for procuring to himself supremacy in the state by undertaking its constitutional magistracies. In this enterprise he found himself dependent for support on what was called the popular party, and sought his allies in its leaders for the time being all the more, that the victorious general by no means possessed the gifts and experiences requisite for the command of the streets. Thus the democratic party after long insignificance suddenly regained political importance. It had, in the long interval from Gaius Gracchus to Marius, materially deteriorated. Perhaps the dissatisfaction with the senatorial government was not now less than it was then; but several of the hopes, which had brought to the Gracchi their most faithful adherents, had in the meanwhile been recognized as illusory, and there had sprung up in many minds a misgiving that this Gracchan agitation tended towards an issue whither a very large portion of the discontented were by no means willing to follow it. In fact, amidst the chase and turmoil of twenty years there had been rubbed off and worn away very much of the fresh enthusiasm, the steadfast faith, the moral purity of effort, which mark the early stages of revolutions. But, if the democratic party was no longer what it had been under Gaius Gracchus, the leaders of the intervening period were now as far beneath their party as Gaius Gracchus had been exalted above it. This was implied in the nature of the case. Until there should emerge a man having the boldness like Gaius Gracchus to grasp at the supremacy of the state, the leaders could only be stopgaps: either political novices, who gave furious vent to their youthful love of opposition and then, when duly accredited as fiery declaimers and favourite speakers, effected with more or less dexterity their retreat to the camp of the government party; or people who had nothing to lose in respect of property and influence, and usually not even anything to gain in respect of honour, and who made it their business to obstruct and annoy the government from personal exasperation or even from the mere pleasure of creating a noise. To the former sort belonged, for instance, Gaius Memmius(5) and the well-known orator Lucius Crassus, who turned the oratorical laurels which they had won in the ranks of the opposition to account in the sequel as zealous partisans of the government.
Glaucia Saturninus
But the most notable leaders of the popular party about this time were men of the second sort.